Zohran Mamdani routinely plays the tough guy — threatening to be President Donald Trump’s “worst nightmare,” snarling at ICE big Tom Homan like a leashed labradoodle — yet for all his bluster he somehow doesn’t have the stones to sit down with The Post.
We invited all the mayoral candidates to sit down with the Editorial Board this year to share their vision for New York City and answer some questions; nearly all accepted, but Mamdani’s campaign blanked us.
We called them; we emailed. After the primary, one flack suggested it might happen . . . but his team never reached out with a clear offer, not even with conditions such as insisting the full transcript be open to the public.
Post-primary, his campaign has occasionally gotten back to Post reporters with answers to specific questions, and even shared his schedule in advance; the candidate sometimes takes a Post question in one of those “scrums” — but the contact’s still been pretty minimal.
Maybe he didn’t want to face uncomfortable questions about his hollow economic program or his bizarre plans to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Or about his association with questionable characters such as Hasan Piker or Siraj Wahhaj.
Perhaps he just didn’t see how a sitdown with the Post Editorial Board could possibly help him — even though facing us down plainly would at least show some mettle; it might also alert him to some holes in his own thinking and/or knowledge, and so help avoid future problems as mayor he’d never otherwise foresee.
This isn’t simply about a relationship with The Post’s staff: Much more important, it’s about our readers, many of whom are among the roughly 50% of New Yorkers voting for some other candidate.
Talking to us, hearing our questions, is the best available way to connect with them.
Does Mamdani mean it when he says he wants to be mayor for all New Yorkers?
If so, he should be able to converse with informed critics — a group of Republicans, Democrats and independents who collectively have decades of experience with city, state, national and world government and politics.
It might not be pleasant — Andrew Cuomo certainly didn’t enjoy our sitdown — but sometimes these dialogues can be a nice-enough surprise, no matter how much we all disagree: Our visits with Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos went perfectly fine; even Brad Lander survived with not a single bruise.
Even if you consider us “the enemy,” the concept of “know thy enemy” should be pretty universal.
With the Daily News circling death’s door and The New York Times increasingly focused on everything but the city, The Post may be the last major media institution doing any serious coverage of what goes on in this town.
Surely it’s worth gaining a face-to-face feel for how and why we think and work?
It’s an oddity of the modern left, and today’s Democratic elites generally, that they’re somehow certain they already know exactly what their critics and opponents “actually” think; a bunch of folks who normally are down on “othering” somehow feel kosher in calling half the country “deplorable” or declaring that the peons desperately “cling to guns or religion.”
Cling to your bubble hard enough, and it’s sure to blow up on you.
This self-satisfied prejudice certainly explains the Democrats’ national woes, even if the left can (for now) win in a few cities and even states — most of them, however, losing population.
Even New York City, with its 6-to-1 edge in Democrat registration, contains multitudes. And even among Mamdani’s own party he faces plenty of opposition.
If he wins, he’ll need to navigate and negotiate competing interests and opinions, to acquire buy-in from disparate constituencies to move his agenda ahead.
And he’s all too likely to face serious crises when the city will need any friend we can get.
If Mamdani is too shy for a low-stakes talk with The Post, how is he to confront the White House, or a city union whose privileges he needs to reduce?
We’ll shed no tears at being spurned, but Zohran Mamdani should face reality: If he thinks he can shut down dissenting voices by slamming his hands over his ears, he won’t get much done in this cacophonous town.