Hello and welcome to TGIF. My name is Will Rahn, and I’m a senior editor at The Free Press by benefit of my gilded journalistic lineage. Nellie Bowles is on vacation this week. So is her blood boy and TGIF workhorse Sean Fischer. So I have the unenviable task of writing this damn thing after a bunker busting week of a shock mayoral race and more movement in the Mideast than we’ve seen in decades. Thankfully, I have Suzy Weiss and Sascha Seinfeld here to save my bacon. Let’s do the news! 

→ Comrade Mayor: We’ll get to Iran in a moment, but we’re talking about New York City first because I live here and not Tehran. And it appears we New Yorkers are on the brink of electing a socialist in Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state legislator who just became the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor. His signature piece of legislation thus far in politics—there have been exactly three that he’s gotten passed—was an amendment to state liquor license laws that allow visitors to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria to have a drink on the premises. 

Zohran—he has just one name now, like Madonna or Trump or Beyoncé—ran a brilliant campaign on a totally crackpot platform that includes arresting Bibi Netanyahu if he comes to New York. And free buses and rent freezes, which will be made possible because of reasons and plans. But if you put his ideas aside for a moment, you can see the campaign itself was pretty darn Trumpy. 

Remember when Trump went on all those podcasts and got the Joe Rogan crowd to vote for him? Zohran did that at the local level. He was all over Instagram and TikTok, appearing with local microinfluencers. He was funny, smiling, optimistic. And the implicit promise of his campaign was that he’d drop a bunker buster on the political status quo. Remind you of anyone? 

The Trump/Mamdani comparisons are unavoidable. Their charisma. Their genius at branding themselves. Despite their extremely privileged backgrounds—Zohran’s mom is the acclaimed film director Mira Nair and his dad, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor at Columbia—they ran as consummate outsiders against a corrupt and listless establishment. And both pulled off shocking wins: While many observers figured Zohran would win eventually, after days or weeks of vote counting, he instead clinched the nomination on Tuesday night. 

Moderate Democrats in the New York suburbs already are distancing themselves from Zohran, in large part because of his nutty anti-Israel stuff—read his message from October 8 and shudder—but he’s the only member of his party this decade who has shown the fingertip feel for politics we associate with the president. He’s running to Make New York Great Again, to turn back the clock to the pre-Giuliani era when the city was, as LCD Soundsystem once put it, “filthy but fine.” And he manages to downplay his woke past, having learned that calling defunding the police a “feminist issue” is not in keeping with the current vibe. 

Most striking, perhaps, is that Zohran and Trump are both from Queens, the borough of the moment even as the Mets fall apart. Though a product of the Upper West Side by way of Uganda, Zohran represents a Queens district in the state assembly. Trump grew up in Queens, a fact recently noted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who posted on X that she’s “a Bronx girl” who “can eat Queens boys for breakfast.” Which is quite the image. ...