Former New York Governor and current New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo called out President Donald Trump’s “weaponization” of the U.S. justice system during a Monday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” remarking that things have gotten “out of control.”
Cuomo was asked Monday if he would be able to stand up to Trump the same way fellow mayo hopeful Zohran Mamdani said he would in a direct address to the president on Fox News last week. “I think not only could I push back, but I can push back effectively,” Cuomo responded. “Donald Trump is smart. He picks the fights that he knows he can win. You fight with me, you fight with New York, that’s going to be ugly. He’ll probably win because he’s the president, but he’s going to know that he was in a fight.”
“The weaponization of the justice system is just out of control,” he added. “We don’t put people in jail because of politics. Putin does that. That’s now almost a weekly occurrence, and people don’t even raise an eyebrow anymore.”
Cuomo said he would not be concerned about Trump sending the National Guard to New York if he was mayor the same way the president has in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. “Sending in the National Guard is political theater, which the president likes to do. It’s his way of saying the Democrats can’t manage anything,” the politician explained. “When I was governor, he sent the National Guard to 20 cities. You know what city he didn’t send the National Guard to? New York, because he couldn’t say New York was out of control.”
In the second half of his MSNBC appearance Monday, Cuomo addressed Mamdani’s popularity among young New York City voters and directly called out his opponent’s campaign tactics.
“Young people are right. Affordability is an issue. And by the way, affordability is not a new issue,” Cuomo said. “The rent is too darn high. But he [Mamdani] has no real solution. These are gimmicks. These are slogans, and ‘freeze the rent’ is his answer. There’s no such thing. You have to build affordable housing. It’s supply and demand. We have a 1% vacancy [rate], and if you don’t build housing, the rents are going to go up.”
Mamdani is the Democratic Party’s official mayoral candidate in New York City this year, and Cuomo said he believes that is the result of a disconnect between the party and the voters who used to be its core base. “They have become disconnected from mainstream working families who were our base — my father’s base, Bill Clinton’s base, President Obama’s base — we’re not at that kitchen table, No. 1,” Cuomo noted. ” No. 2, we don’t produce. We don’t deliver.”
“Senator Ted Kennedy, God rest his soul, told me as a young fellow before I ever ran for anything, ‘When people walk into the voting booth, they have to know one thing you did that changed their lives,’” he recalled. “You can’t name something that the Democratic Party did that changed [current voters’] lives, right? That they know inherently the Democratic Party has produced.”
