By Team Zeteo & Mehdi Hasan
Photos: Zeteo\Wikimedia Commons
Like most years, New York City spent much of 2024 at the epicenter of the most pressing stories in the United States, from college campus protests for Palestine to the trial of Donald J. Trump, to the indictment of their own Democratic mayor, Eric Adams.
“One of the few things [on] the ever-growing list of things in common between Eric Adams and Donald Trump is a sense of impunity and a belief that accountability does not apply to them,” New York Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani says to Mehdi.
In an exclusive Zeteo interview, the 33-year-old Mamdani – who will be running against Adams in the 2025 New York City Democratic primaries – talks to Mehdi about calls for Adams to resign over his recent corruption charges, and whether or not the indicted mayor is trying to cozy up to Trump for a potential pardon.
“What we’ve seen with Eric Adams is a continued insistence that he is not going to step down. In his own words, he is going to step up. He’s not going to resign, he’s going to reign,” Mamdani tells Mehdi. “I think he understands that his future is tied up with the sentiments of Donald Trump towards him.”
Mamdani – a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – responds to the critics who say that it was progressives like him that not only cost Democrats this year’s presidential election, but also shrank their margin of victory in traditionally Democratic strongholds like the Big Apple itself.
“I would ask them who was running the Kamala Harris campaign, what were the policies that were being run on? Who are the surrogates?” Mamdani tells Mehdi. “You are not going to see me in any one of these five boroughs, with Liz Cheney or Mark Cuban backing away from taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers.”
Watch Mehdi’s full interview with Mamdani to hear more on why Mamdani is running for mayor, how he would have responded to the pro-Palestine student protests, and how he would uphold the ICC arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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