![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/794deb294997caef76f01f7d9803a17df4-2025-145-Zohran-Mamdani-B-0001.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Mark Seliger for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n It was a little more than 24 hours after Zohran Mamdani<\/a> had declared victory<\/a> in a thunderous speech at the Brooklyn Paramount \u2014 one in which he mocked Andrew Cuomo<\/a> and lit into Donald Trump<\/a> and all the forces of reaction that had kept New Yorkers paying too much for too little and in which he declared himself a proud Muslim, a proud immigrant, and a proud democratic socialist; quoted Eugene V. Debs and Jawaharlal Nehru; and spoke untranslated Arabic \u2014 that the newly minted mayor-elect was found wedged into an economy-class window seat on the 10:30 a.m. JetBlue flight from JFK to San Juan. Around him were Elle Bisgaard-Church, his closest aide, and two beefy members of his security detail.<\/p>\n The plane was filled with lobbyists, operatives, members of the City Council, and local political bosses, all clogging the aisle to greet Mamdani. The occasion was Somos<\/a>, a conference that every year kicks off the morning after Election Day<\/a>, bringing in the entire New York Democratic Establishment for five days of imbibing, schmoozing, and back-room deal-making on the beaches of Puerto Rico. Ostensibly designed to deepen the long-standing connections between New York and the island territory, it is the kind of event where aspiring members of Congress can be seen buttonholing politicos at the bar of the Caribe Hilton, hoping to land an endorsement; where high-ranking government officials are spotted stumblingly drunk at the end of an evening at the Fairmont El San Juan; where two lawmakers can be glimpsed grinding on the dance floor.<\/p>\n Now Comes to Hard Part<\/p>\n See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n It was not surprising when, four years ago, Eric Adams arrived in San Juan on a private jet owned by Brock Pierce, the crypto tycoon and Mighty Ducks star. Mamdani\u2019s attendance was a bit surprising, though. Some of his allies on the left have avoided Somos for its air of influence-peddling and insider networking. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has never gone, and the coalition that helped Mamdani win the Democratic primary included almost no one who attends Somos, and Mamdani\u2019s campaign did not announce that he was going until a few days prior.<\/p>\n Then again, it was not his first visit. He attended a year ago, when the mood was drown-your-sorrows-in-a-coquito grim. Kamala Harris had lost to Donald Trump in an election that saw even deep-blue New York City swing right, and Democrats fretted over the possibility that the party had drifted too far left to ever regain power. Mamdani, trying to launch a long-shot mayoral run from the left fringe, was willfully ignored, unable to get into receptions, and forced to plead with advocacy organizations for a meeting. He mostly hung around the stairs in the lobby, grabbing anyone who would talk.<\/p>\n \u201cI was blending into the walls,\u201d Mamdani told me at this year\u2019s Somos. \u201cMy definition of success was getting on a panel.\u201d We were sitting on a fire escape overlooking a dumpster-filled alley and a freeway beyond. It was the only place Mamdani could go to get away from the well-wishers clamoring for selfies, a throng so intense that he had taken to running through the halls just so he was more difficult to stop. A dedicated press corps followed his every move, and loud cheers erupted in every room he entered. He even brought his political-superhero act south with him: On the third day of the conference, he intervened to help secure a contract for workers at the hotel where the event was taking place.<\/p>\n As he soaked up the Establishment\u2019s plaudits<\/a>, though, he sent signals that his administration was going to be different. While in San Juan, Mamdani visited a mosque, where the female reporters had to wait outside and where the imam, with the mayor-elect in the second row, heralded during Friday prayers the change that Mamdani\u2019s election meant for perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. \u201cOnce you start shifting and looking the other way, away from the billionaires and the trillionaires and the people that are controlling the media and the people that are controlling your day-to-day, how you live, you\u2019re an outcast,\u201d the imam said. \u201cI see what\u2019s coming down after 75 years of oppression.\u201d Not standard fare at a gathering of political insiders.<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s star wattage was so bright that Governor Kathy Hochul<\/a> had planned to address a reception for a city-workers union by taking the stage in front of the ocean just as the sun was setting, but because Mamdani was delayed, she moved her speech back several hours into the nighttime. More galling still, Hochul was heckled by chants of \u201cTax the rich! Tax the rich!\u201d She had met with a similar chant when she rallied for Mamdani on the weekend before the election, but these weren\u2019t lefty activists at a get-out-the-vote rally: This was a reception of lobbyists and government staffers \u2014 her people \u2014 adopting the language of the left to harangue the incumbent governor. \u201cI hear you,\u201d Hochul said before warning the crowd to knock it off. \u201cI\u2019m the type of person the more you push me, the less I\u2019m going to do what you want.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, nearly everywhere Mamdani went, he was introduced by Letitia James \u2014 the state attorney general who made his victory her central mission over the past few months \u2014 with a song: \u201cMammmmmdaaaaniiiii,\u201d to the tune of \u201cVolare.\u201d At a private, no-media-allowed reception at Antiguo Casino, a century-old Beaux-Arts mansion in the heart of Old San Juan, James went even further, screaming into the microphone, her voice hoarse, her words echoing off the white marble walls: \u201cWe come here today to celebrate the movement that began with a young man with a bold vision for the City of New York, the mayor-elect who brought us all together, who brought out South Asians like never before, who brought out young people like never before, awakening the sleeping giant in the City of New York, joining the traditional Democratic base for a movement that will shake up New York City \u2014 Zohrannnnnn Mamdanniiiiiii!!\u201d<\/p>\n As much as the political class swarmed Mamdani for photos when he was around, the politicians there (each of whom was singularly convinced that it was rightfully them who should have been mayor \u2014 or at least the shining star of the party) were less fawning in his absence: His early transition team was filled with too many retreads from the Bill de Blasio<\/a> administration. His anti-Israel stance would mean that a large swath of the Democratic Party would never accede to his rise. He was hewing too close to the line of the Democratic Socialists of America, the left-wing group that played a leading role in getting him elected. He was getting high on his own supply, not listening to advice. He was woefully unprepared for what was coming his way.<\/p>\n The sniping certainly contained an element of envy, but it also reflected a deep uncertainty in New York\u2019s governing class about what kind of city we were going to get under the new mayor. Would he surprise everyone, as he had when he was a candidate? Or was this the beginning of a disaster?<\/p>\n Mamdani decided to center his campaign on affordability rather than public safety at a meeting with his political advisers a year and a half ago in his living room. The campaign would focus on three big-ticket items, all of which feature the word free (or some variation of it). Those pledges were now so ingrained in voters\u2019 minds that his supporters closed out his Election Night victory speech by chanting them back to him. Together, they were going to freeze the \u201crent!\u201d They were going to make buses fast and \u201cfree!\u201d And they were going to deliver free universal \u201cchild care!\u201d<\/p>\n Eliminating bus fare is just an intermediate step in Mamdani\u2019s larger agenda. His real goal is that New York become a less expensive place to live in four-to-eight years. It\u2019s an astoundingly ambitious goal, but he is unshakable that it\u2019s his central objective. \u201cIt is guided by that principle of, What can we do to bring down the cost of living?\u201d he told me. \u201cAt the heart of affordability, at the heart of a focus on cost of living, is dignity. How can we ensure that dignity is a fact of life for working-class New Yorkers, right?\u201d<\/p>\n I asked him and some of his advisers if there were cities that had pulled this off that New York could emulate, places that had managed to meaningfully lower the cost of living. None sprang to mind. Talk to policy experts, and they find the prospect laughable; the only cities where this has happened are ones where the quality of life dropped so dramatically that no one wanted to live there anymore.<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s revolution, in this moment before he takes office, has two defining qualities. The first is the well-known movement-building skill of the man. Out of nowhere, he has become the center of the political universe in New York and redefined what is possible in American politics. The second is a certain sense of unreality \u2014 a tension between what he promises he will do and what the normal laws of political physics would seem to allow. It\u2019s true of the big question: Can he really lower the cost of living in New York City? And it\u2019s true of all the thousands of smaller ways in which he will attempt to do that and manage the city in the meantime. In our interviews, the mayor-elect conspicuously avoided acknowledging the kinds of basic trade-offs that are the DNA of the office he is about to assume. Does Mamdani want more affordable housing, or does he want affordable housing that is more expensive to build because it\u2019s built with union labor? Does he want free infant\u2013to\u20135-year-old child care, or does he want those child-care workers to be paid the $30 living wage he has proposed for the city? The answer is he wants both, he wants everything, he wants it all at once.<\/p>\n The two qualities \u2014 the scintillating political skill and the strangeness of a 34-year-old democratic socialist just a few years removed from a music career taking control and pledging enormous changes without meaningful compromise \u2014 exist side by side, and how they resolve will define Mamdani\u2019s mayoralty. Can his combined charisma and talent bend the system in unlikely ways, as it did during the campaign, persuading doubters and opponents and creating win-win political solutions that other New York mayors weren\u2019t ambitious or visionary enough to pursue? Can he harness the pragmatism and toughness he seems to possess and make good, smart policy, accept the necessary trade-offs, weather the political damage from them, and govern well anyway without being knocked off course? Or has he set a framework that is incompatible with the job \u2014 one in which, in trying to do too much while remaining bound by democratic-socialist ideology, he becomes ineffective, in which the policies look chaotic and undercooked and the inspiring, overarching vision goes unrealized in any important way.<\/p>\n The positive outcome would look like cost-of-living initiatives that work and start to draw imitation around the country. It would look like stable or improving quality-of-life and crime metrics. It would look like a major victory for the left in its factional war with the center-left, meaning that the national Democratic Party might tilt more progressive as candidates and elected politicians borrow from Mamdani\u2019s playbook. Success for Mamdani would be a big deal nationally, not just locally.<\/p>\n And the negative outcome? It\u2019s all the worst fears of the anti-Mamdani coalition: an uptick in crime and quality-of-life offenses as disgruntled police walk off the job, all of which convince the business community that investments in New York are too uncertain. Turnstile jumpers given free rein and buses that become roaming homeless shelters. Left-wing activists, figuring they have an ally in City Hall, clogging up intersections with protests. It\u2019s schools regressing as Mamdani ends mayoral control of the educational system and cuts Gifted and Talented programs in the name of equity, causing families to flee to the suburbs. And while studies show higher taxes don\u2019t lead to an exodus of the wealthy, New York has become so reliant on upper-income earners to fund its robust government programs \u2014 and is going to be more so if Mamdani gets his way \u2014 that it would take only a relatively small number of very rich people and companies moving to Miami or Austin to start to create problems in the city\u2019s budget. As in the positive scenario, second-order effects would follow.<\/p>\n On the fire escape in San Juan, I asked Mamdani if he thought about any of this, if any part of him was nervous heading into the job.<\/p>\n He said he was not.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the responsibilities that come with this position are immense and also the responsibility that comes with hope is immense,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are many for whom this was the first vote that they cast, or it was the first vote that they cast after years of associating politics with despair and a diminishing faith. There is a lot of discussion of what it would mean to not meet the expectations. I think often of what meeting them would open up for New Yorkers.\u201d<\/p>\n \n From left: THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN | November 7: Taking a break from the insider-y schmoozing at the Somos conference in Puerto Rico to attend a service and deliver remarks at a local mosque. Photo: Angel Valentin\/Getty ImagesNovember 13: Engaging the pre-voter demographic at a Flatbush child-care center. Photo: Chris Sommerfeldt\/New York Daily News\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n \n From top: THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN | November 7: Taking a break from the insider-y schmoozing at the Somos conference in Puerto Rico to attend a service… more \n From left: November 21: Accepting the president\u2019s invitation to call him a fascist in front of the media in the Oval Office. Photo: Andrew Harnik\/Getty ImagesDecember 4: Handing out hot beverages on a cold day to remind voters of his campaign pledge to freeze rents (at least some of them). Photo: Charly Triballeau\/AFP\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n \n From top: November 21: Accepting the president\u2019s invitation to call him a fascist in front of the media in the Oval Office. Photo: Andrew Harnik\/Getty… more Mamdani hadn\u2019t been back from Puerto Rico for two weeks when he left town again, this time for Washington, D.C. The Mamdani-meets-Trump confab had been so anticipated, and so rightly pegged as crucial to Mamdani\u2019s agenda, that it had taken on a life of its own. Throughout the campaign, Mamdani alternated between taunting Trump and pledging to work together with him to lower costs.<\/p>\n Trump looms large over everything right now but particularly so over Mamdani and his agenda. There is the possibility of federal troops on the streets but also the threat that Trump could withhold billions in federal funding, creating the kind of budgetary crisis that would smother the new mayor\u2019s ambitions. That nightmare scenario amounted \u2014 and still amounts \u2014 to a sort of Trump veto power.<\/p>\n Mamdani told me that part of the goal of his campaign was to \u201cbreak out of the world of New York City politics and into the world of New York City itself.\u201d It was part of the reason he chased virality in the vertical videos on social media and why he walked the length of Manhattan and closed the campaign in nightclub DJ booths. When he went to La Guardia to catch the shuttle to D.C., he was cheered on by airport workers and airline staff. \u201cGood luck in Washington!\u201d they shouted. \u201cBring it home!\u201d<\/p>\n In D.C., he holed up in a hotel with three of his closest aides: Bisgaard-Church; Dora Pekec, his press secretary; and Morris Katz, the top strategist on the campaign. They spent the morning rehearsing for the meeting, running through various possibilities. Would they get the Trump who can be gracious to guests like the old hotelier that he is? The one who would want to pick a fight with the new political star from New York, knowing it would fire up his base? The one who would call him a communist or insult Mamdani for his Muslim faith? Would Trump be one of these things in private and then flip when the cameras arrived? They practiced over and over with the 26-year-old and slightly built Katz playing Trump and Pekec playing the press, coming in when summoned. Their plan was to not take the bait, to just keep returning to the issue of affordability no matter what the president said.<\/p>\n When Mamdani walked into the Oval Office<\/a> an hour later, Trump remarked, \u201cWow, you are even better looking in person than you are on TV.\u201d The tone never changed from there, with Trump seeming legitimately impressed by Mamdani. After the cameras arrived, he saved Mamdani from a potentially awkward moment and insisted, in response to a reporter\u2019s question, that it was fine to call him a fascist. At least for now, one of the biggest threats to Mamdani\u2019s success appeared to be contained by the mayor-elect\u2019s pure star power.<\/p>\n The meeting delighted social media for a day, but it was actually just another beat in a blitz that Mamdani kicked off the day after the election. He went on Adam Friedland\u2019s show and Heather Cox Richardson\u2019s YouTube channel, visited a child-care center to stump for his universal-child-care plan, and passed out cocoa to tenants at a \u201cHot Chocolate, Frozen Rent\u201d event. \u201cI don\u2019t think the campaign can end,\u201d Mamdani told me a month into his transition. \u201cWe\u2019ve often talked about these things as if they were different chapters in the same story. They have to exist alongside each other.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t want people to just go back to their lives,\u201d he continued. \u201cThe same people who got us to this point, we want to keep moving forward with them. I\u2019m not just asking people to contribute to the transition. I\u2019m having to explain to them what transitions are, what they do, how they are funded. These New Yorkers, we want them to be participants, not spectators.\u201d<\/p>\n Mamdani had been speaking with Barack Obama about how he had failed to capitalize on the excitement his own campaign generated, instead funneling the organizing outfit Obama for America into the Democratic National Committee. Determined to not make the same mistake, Mamdani aims to keep some of the 100,000 volunteers who knocked on doors on his behalf engaged. It\u2019s why he did a lot of the easily mockable events during the campaign: the scavenger hunt, the soccer game, the paper-shredding event that doubled as a block party. It was about bringing people into the life of the city, getting them out of their isolation and off their screens. \u201cThere is this belief that you can combat fascism and combat income inequality if you combat loneliness first,\u201d Katz told me. \u201cIt\u2019s about connecting with young people and letting them know we are committed to improving their lives and getting them to get to know each other and see a government that is transparent and that is on their side. There is a real belief that we can alter what politics looks like in this city.\u201d<\/p>\n But there is also a belief among Mamdani\u2019s advisers that where Bill de Blasio went wrong was when he stopped fanning the good feelings his election in 2013 engendered. Voters liked what de Blasio was doing, in other words; they just didn\u2019t like him. So Mamdani has remained on the stump, turning the traditional scutwork of a transition into another story in the unfolding drama of New York. Dean Fuleihan, Mamdani\u2019s first deputy mayor and someone who probably knows how to move a mayoral agenda through Albany roadblocks better than anyone alive, is now being stopped for selfies on the street by teens who have seen him next to Mamdani on TikTok. \u201cHe brought a whole movement to this transition, and part of my job is to communicate with the city and all those supporters what our agenda is. He has me out doing press stuff that I never would have done in my past,\u201d Fuleihan said. \u201cNormally there\u2019s a line drawn: \u2018The election\u2019s over; now you move into government and everybody disappears.\u2019 That\u2019s not gonna happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s comms strategy seems to be working: Witness the 75,000 people who applied for jobs in his administration through an online portal or the fact that Kal Penn knocked on doors for him in the South Asian precincts of Jackson Heights for the primary. During the second week of December, Mamdani\u2019s transition hosted a $1,000-per-person fundraiser at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, an ultrahip synagogue turned art space on the Lower East Side. It was the kind of crowd that would have been unimaginable for any other mayor \u2014 Claire Danes was spotted chatting with Bill T. Jones outside; Lupita Nyong\u2019o waited on line to get in just ahead of Mark Ruffalo. Julianne Moore walked right in, while Kathryn Grody climbed out of a cab with Mandy Patinkin, who fumbled on his phone for the invite. Inside, the mood was festive as Mamdani signed for Chris Stein, the co-founder of Blondie, a copy of the New York Post from the day after the election headlined RED APPLE and Stretch Armstrong DJ\u2019d. Onstage, Mamdani enlisted that crowd in the work of bringing his message to the people, promising a return to the days when the Lower East Side was filled with affordable artist studios \u2014 this time without the squalor.<\/p>\n If you can alter what politics looks like in the city, who is to say you can\u2019t alter what politics can achieve?<\/p>\n The week after Mamdani returned from Washington, D.C., he assembled his various transition committees, with a total of around 400 members, in an auditorium at El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem for a closed-door meeting. It was a scene that would have been unlikely even a few months ago, as members of the governing class of New York City \u2014 those labor leaders, business titans, and real-estate honchos who decide so much of what gets done, year in and year out, regardless of who is in charge at City Hall \u2014 mixed uneasily with figures closer to Mamdani: the heads of the local chapter of the DSA, prison abolitionists, anti-car activists, and others who were making their first foray into local government. \u201cThey just knew absolutely no one in the permanent government,\u201d said Kathy Wylde, the departing CEO of the Partnership for New York City. \u201cThey didn\u2019t know unions, they didn\u2019t know business, they didn\u2019t know Jewish leaders. They didn\u2019t know anybody outside the far left.\u201d<\/p>\n The feeling in the room, though, was mostly excitement. This new mayor, the youngest in a century, the first in 160 years to make the leap from the backbenches of the State Assembly all the way to City Hall, had not only slain Andrew Cuomo \u2014 for whom few in the room had much affection \u2014 but had gone down to D.C. and wrapped the president of the United States around his finger.<\/p>\n If there was a hiccup, it came during the question-and-answer session when someone asked what Dean Fuleihan was doing up there. Fuleihan\u2019s appointment reassured people who were skeptical of Mamdani that it wouldn\u2019t be a bunch of radicals running things. But if you wanted change, it was a little surprising to see Fuleihan, who first started working in government in 1978, more than a decade before Mamdani was even born, and is known as a consummate back-room deal-maker, up there with the young mayor-elect. Mamdani attempted to square that circle: \u201cI\u2019ve been in state government now for five years, and there tends to be a relationship that the longer you spend in politics, the less possible you think things are in politics,\u201d he replied. \u201cAll of the experience, all of the fluency can only be worthwhile if it is committed to change while building on that fluency and that experience. It can be for the protection of that experience.\u201d<\/p>\n There was a lot they didn\u2019t know. When I spoke with Bisgaard-Church at her campaign office a few weeks after the election, she explained how she approached putting a governing team together. She met with agency heads of previous administrations and asked what enabled them to do their best work and what the roadblocks were. Were those roadblocks structural to City Hall, or were they from outside forces? Veterans of the de Blasio administration talked about having a snowstorm on the first day.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a visceral thing to hear about but attached to a broader idea: How do you prepare for known unknowns?\u201d Bisgaard-Church said. \u201cWhat are you doing around emergency management? It was the realism of recognizing that once you are in office, you are responsible for every single thing. We had a conversation with someone from health and human services who said, \u2018A child will die at ACS. Who is your leader at the top of that? How are you going to handle it?\u2019 It all feels very, very, very real. What is Zohran\u2019s first act as mayor? A lot of this is just such stark language. It puts into view the question in front of us \u2014 that every decision we make will have a direct impact on people.\u201d<\/p>\n Then come all the lower-stakes questions. There were other things to consider too that they hadn\u2019t thought about. \u201cWho gets a city-owned car? Who gets a driver? It can be a political decision,\u201d she said. \u201cGracie Mansion; there is a portfolio around Gracie Mansion. You can change up the art. You can have a new interior decorator. Okay, that\u2019s now a new vertical we have to plan for. Just the scale of everything can be overwhelming.\u201d<\/p>\n By mid-December, the city\u2019s insider political class was starting to chatter about precisely why there seemed to be so little activity coming from the Mamdani transition. With only about two weeks to go before the inauguration, Mamdani had named only his chief of staff, his police commissioner (he angered his left flank and reassured those skeptical of him when he tapped Jessica Tisch to continue in the role), and his first deputy mayor. One of those was his closest aide, another was a holdover from the previous administration, and the third was a holdover from the administration before that.<\/p>\n At a breakfast hosted by the Citizens Budget Commission, Fuleihan \u2014 presumably well aware of the whispers \u2014 insisted that the new administration was on schedule and reminded the audience that Adams and de Blasio had made only a handful of appointments by the same point. But the comparison wasn\u2019t necessarily convincing. \u201cAdams and de Blasio are not the baseline that is going to satisfy the skeptics,\u201d said pollster Evan Roth Smith. \u201cSay what you will about them, but they were both experienced public servants with well-developed approaches to governing. No one doubted that they knew the job or had deep networks of people to call to staff an administration.\u201d Other appointments were announced in the third week of the month \u2014 including Catherine Almonte Da Costa, another former de Blasio official, as director of appointments. But the following day, Da Costa tendered her resignation after vicious antisemitic tweets of hers from 2011 and 2012 surfaced. To Mamdani\u2019s opponents, it showed a new administration stumbling before it had even entered office, trying to make up for the delays in staffing announcements by not doing its proper homework, and showed how sensitive it was to charges of antisemitism.<\/p>\n Those who have interviewed for administration jobs have described the experience as something akin to The Gong Show; the meetings were brief, and in some cases, the applicants for senior administration jobs didn\u2019t even know what they were interviewing for. If this was to prevent leaks, it was largely successful. Doing so seemed to be a priority for the Mamdani camp: All members of the 400-person transition committee were made to sign a five-page nondisclosure agreement. (Mamdani\u2019s press secretary said everyone who has gone through an official hiring process was fully aware of it.)<\/p>\n The circle around Mamdani remains small, mostly the same aides and advisers who worked on the campaign and who generally lacked major campaign experience before helping pull off the most audacious victory in New York political history. They are a group that is committed to Mamdani and to the democratic-socialist project, and many are planning to go into the government with him.<\/p>\n Often in New York, senior campaign officials don\u2019t take jobs at City Hall. They stay outside and market their services to the vast array of nonprofits, community organizations, social-service providers, and government contractors seeking access and insight into the new administration. It can be an unseemly business, but it has the advantage of increasing the new mayor\u2019s footprint across the leading and permanent institutions of New York life. Mamdani may have very little of that.<\/p>\n
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\n From top: THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN | November 7: Taking a break from the insider-y schmoozing at the Somos conference in Puerto Rico to attend a service and deliver remarks at a local mosque. Photo: Angel Valentin\/Getty ImagesNovember 13: Engaging the pre-voter demographic at a Flatbush child-care center. Photo: Chris Sommerfeldt\/New York Daily News\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/e62eeac9d1809aeed51f36837cc1c5126f-0126FEA-NewMayor-GettyImages-2247837977-.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n From top: November 21: Accepting the president\u2019s invitation to call him a fascist in front of the media in the Oval Office. Photo: Andrew Harnik\/Getty ImagesDecember 4: Handing out hot beverages on a cold day to remind voters of his campaign pledge to freeze rents (at least some of them). Photo: Charly Triballeau\/AFP\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
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