WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Jamie Raskin released the following statement endorsing Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City:
“Even though I’m a Marylander and have never been a New Yorker, I am a strong true-blue Democrat who stands up for Democrats under MAGA attack. That’s why I’m proudly endorsing New York City Mayoral Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani and asking fellow Democrats to rally behind him in the final weeks of his exciting campaign.
President Trump has been trying to bring Mamdani’s opponents into a coalition against him by enticing all but one to drop out of the race. They’ve even floated federal jobs as part of this scheme, including naming the incumbent Mayor Eric Adams as the new Ambassador to the theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. Trump’s machine-style insider influence games are of dubious legality and reflect a mentality completely at odds with healthy one-person-one-vote democracy.
But now Trump is also vilifying Mamdani as a ‘Communist,’ which is not only ridiculously false but hilarious given that the rulers Donald Trump most admires in the world are actual Communist dictators.
By his own account, Trump ‘fell in love’ with Kim Jong Un, the Communist tyrant of North Korea who presides over a one-party state, a government workforce which lives in fear of the dictator, and a cowed and docile population. This is the kind of political repression Democrats like Mamdani are organizing to stop from coming to America. But Trump proudly sends the Communist dictator of North Korea love letters and gets love letters back. He knows Kim Jong Un is a Communist, but he doesn’t care because Kim Jong Un rules as a tyrant without dissent and, as Trump says admiringly, his people ‘sit up at attention’ when he speaks. That is what most impresses Trump.
Trump has also repeatedly lavished praise on President Xi, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, whom Trump calls a ‘smart’ and ‘brilliant’ leader who rules with ‘an iron fist.’
Of course, Trump’s most enduring role model and obvious political idol is Vladimir Putin, a Communist-bureaucrat turned gangster-capitalist and war-criminal who called the collapse of the USSR ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.’ Like Putin, Trump wants a centralized command economy where he can personally control the broadcast press, personally control the Federal Reserve, personally control the universities and personally anoint all the winners and losers in his top-down corporate state. Trump not only accepts huge foreign government payments for his personal family businesses but even takes huge government shares in private corporations like Intel.
Like the Communist kleptocrats he admires, Trump wants a small group of loyal billionaire oligarchs and commissars in charge of our economy. Call them state socialists or state capitalists, it makes no difference—they all depend on giant government contracts, huge public subsidies, and billionaire tax breaks, and they get to make all significant economic decisions for the vast majority of the people.
Zohran Mamdani, on the other hand, is what Trump hates: an FDR-style champion of creative public action to reduce poverty, empower the majority and spread real opportunity. Although I consider myself an FDR-style Democratic pragmatist and a Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-buster rather than a socialist, I am not afraid of Mamdani’s ‘democratic socialism,’ which is a far cry from Trump’s Communist-style gangster state capitalism. Mamdani’s platform seems to me nothing more than a series of creative ideas for dramatically reduced inequality and greatly increased access, mobility and fairness for all. It’s ideas like kids riding free public transport, and the city opening up public grocery stores in places where fresh food is scarce. Some of these ideas may work, and some of them may not; that’s how democratic experimentation and innovation function. What Trump the corporate-statist hates is that these ideas are not imposed from above by the oligarchs; they come from the bottom up through the infinite creativity and wit of a free democratic city and its leaders.
This is why crony capitalists and failed businessmen like Donald Trump have always denounced the programmatic achievements of democracy, like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare as ‘socialism.’ These programs threaten the rule of the few over the many.
Zohran definitely opposes Trump-style crony capitalism, but he seems to believe in actual free markets far more than Trump does: an economy where we are all real players, where we don’t have to put up with price-gouging, corporate wage theft, union-busting and the militarization of our communities to persecute immigrants. Zohran seems to favor an economy where small businesses can survive and thrive without being crushed by Walmart, where Uber drivers can make a decent living, where halal street vendors and kosher hot dog salesmen can make the streets of New York the place you want to go to at lunchtime, a place where bartenders like AOC can become political leaders in a free America and where unions have a right to organize and freely bargain for decent wages and work conditions.
So, of course, I’m with the Democratic nominee who inhabits a space of political integrity and creativity that is miles above this degraded and demoralizing spectacle of Trump trying to orchestrate his defeat.
Like another great New York politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Zohran Mamdani seeks to uplift millions of people in the working and middle classes: the pushcart street vendors, the restaurant servers, the public school teachers, the construction workers, the painters and plumbers, the firefighters and police officers, small business people, actors and comedians, everyone living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Democrats need to bring back to our politics that FDR spirit of commitment to the success of all our people. Mamdani embodies that spirit and lives it every day.
I listen closely to young people. I’ve spent every summer since I entered Congress working to educate and organize thousands of college and high school students across America in the Democracy Summer Project.
A lot of young people see in Mamdani someone focused on making life—housing, groceries and transportation—more affordable and more accessible for younger generations, even in the most expensive city in the country.
Mamdani’s dynamic grassroots campaign—both face-to-face intimate and adept at using social media tools in a creative way—has promoted joyful coalition politics, interracial and interreligious solidarity and a commitment at the local level to greater equality and the common good.
This splash of positive, pro-working class, pro-middle class politics has been utterly refreshing for young people who ordinarily live with polarizing attack politics, depressing economic inequality, out-of-control climate change, obscene levels of gun violence and an extremely high cost of living.
With democracy under siege at home and all over the world, a high burden of hope rests with the Democratic Party today. All the plutocrats, kleptocrats and theocrats—not to mention most of the pundits—are rooting for us to fail. But ‘the Democracy,’ as FDR called our party, cannot and will not fail in the task of uniting our country to defend freedom and strong democracy. That means when we come through contested party primaries, we must rally together behind the winner and not splinter apart with sour-grapes and sectarian politics.
When more moderate Democrats beat progressives, the progressives should rally behind the moderate nominee; and when more progressive Democrats beat moderates in the primary, the moderates should rally behind the progressive nominee. This is what it means to be a political party. And this is the only path to party unity, cohesion and victory.
If we want to win back Congress in 2026, we must stick together in 2025.
I am grateful to my friend and colleague Jerry Nadler, the dean of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, who, with his powerful political vision and mental toughness, led the way for New York leaders in endorsing Mamdani immediately upon his victory as the Democratic nominee.
This moment speaks to a future in which progressive, optimistic and resilient Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and humanists can together say no to billionaire oligarchs and yes to strong democracy, freedom and opportunity for all.
Come on, New York! If strong democracy can beat the propaganda of the MAGA oligarchs there, we can do it anywhere. It’s up to you, New York, New York. Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of the Big Apple!”
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