Zohran Mamdani isn’t rattled. Not by Trump, and not by a Truth Social post calling him a city-wrecker.
The mayor stood in Crown Heights on Friday and defended a proposed surcharge on luxury second homes, brushing off a broadside from President Donald Trump that arrived the night before and leaning into a rare fiscal alignment with Gov. Kathy Hochul that could push at least $500 million a year into city coffers.
Hochul this week said she wants state lawmakers to let the city impose a surcharge on non-primary residences valued at more than $5 million, a move her administration pitched as a direct answer to a $5.4 billion budget gap that City Hall is trying to close without gutting core services. The tax would hit second homes and investor-owned apartments, not primary residences or units with full-time tenants.
For Mamdani, it’s an early Albany win of real weight. He pressed all spring for new revenue from the city’s wealthiest residents, and Hochul’s move hands him a major piece of that argument. It doesn’t go as far as he’s wanted. He has pushed for broader income and corporate tax hikes, and those aren’t on the table yet. But the pied-à-terre-style tax moves the needle, and the mayor made sure everyone watching on Friday knew it.
“93% approve of the pied-à-terre tax,” Mamdani said at the Crown Heights press conference, citing polling he said showed wide public support. He argued the measure would fund “essential city services like free childcare, cleaner streets and safer neighborhoods.”
City Council Speaker Julie Menin backed the proposal too, calling it a sensible way to raise revenue without piling more pressure on working New Yorkers.
The Hochul alignment echoes an earlier moment. In January, the governor came on board with Mamdani’s universal childcare plan, pledging $1.2 billion to build out the program. That was the first sign the two could work together across the policy divide between City Hall and the state. This week’s announcement on the luxury home tax extends that pattern, even as Mamdani continues to push Albany for more.
Then came Trump.
Thursday evening, the president posted on Truth Social that Mamdani was “DESTROYING New York,” attacked what he called “TAX, TAX, TAX Policies,” and claimed “People are fleeing.” Asked by the Judge Street Journal whether the two men had had a falling out, Trump said, “No, not at all. He’s going to ruin the city, however. His policies are no good.”
Mamdani didn’t flinch. He framed the dispute as ideological, not personal, and said Trump’s opposition looked like a policy disagreement rather than some newly broken friendship. “The President and I both want the city to succeed,” Mamdani said. “This is how you do it.”
AMNY’s coverage of Friday’s press conference captured the mayor’s full exchange on the Trump relationship, including his blunt language on immigration enforcement. Mamdani said he and Trump have “many deep policy differences,” pointing specifically to ICE, which he called “a cruel and inhumane agency.”
Still, he didn’t slam the door on the relationship entirely. “The thing that we have in common is that we are both New Yorkers,” Mamdani said, adding that he tries to steer those conversations back to what will help the city.
He’s not backing down. Not on this.
Asked whether he planned to keep pushing Albany for higher income and corporate taxes during a trip to the capital later Friday, Mamdani was unequivocal. “I will always be myself,” he said.
That posture captures where he is right now. Mamdani entered City Hall in January with a policy wish list that skeptics, including plenty of real estate-aligned Albany insiders, said was too ambitious and too expensive to survive contact with the state legislature. Five months in, he has Hochul on childcare, Hochul on the pied-à-terre tax, and a City Council speaker calling the revenue plan sensible. The $5.4 billion gap hasn’t closed, and the harder fights over income and corporate taxes haven’t started in earnest yet, but the political pieces are falling into place faster than his critics expected.
Trump’s Truth Social post won’t change the math on any of that. The mayor’s trip to Albany on Friday, and what he can get out of state lawmakers before the budget calendar runs out, will matter considerably more.