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In an eventful first five days on the job, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has already managed to confound his critics in ways even they never have imagined. He signed a series of executive orders his first full day on the job that negated the last year of work by outgoing mayor Eric Adams, including one that redefined anti-Semitism in New York. He appointed housing advocate Cee Weaver to his newly-minted Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, signaling his distaste for the concept of public property. Perhaps most surprisingly, he even phoned President Trump to voice his opposition to the capture and removal of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
Rick Lowry is the editor-in-chief of The National Review. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to dissect the eventful first week on the job for the neophyte mayor of New York.
Lowry highlighted the Trump phone call for host Larry Mendte as an example of the best case-worst case headlines Mamdani is capable of creating: “What does he think Trump’s going to do, say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, Zohran Mamdani doesn’t like this? Maybe we can send Maduro back.’ It’s complete virtue signaling. This is the upside, actually. The optimistic scenario for New York is that this is all you get. You get idiotic appointments, you get stupid statements, you get rolling back definitions of anti-Semitism, but the streets stay safe and the city isn’t ruined economically; that would be the upside. But the downside is, you get all this idiotic stuff and then he actually kneecaps the city as well.”
However, Lowry invoked the famous Howard Cosell phrase, “The Bronx is burning!” to express stunned disbelief at what Mamdani’s cadre of minions could unleash on the five boroughs: “Private property isn’t an individual right? No, it’s a core individual right! It’s at the basis of our system of government and our economy, and this is just sheer Communism, and to the extent they try to act on it and do hard core rent control, they are going to destroy the city, if they manage to do that.”
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