President backs Cuomo in election eve Truth Social post as Mamdani hits back at Trump’s ‘threat – it is not the law’
On the eve of New York’s well-watched mayoral election, Donald Trump issued a threat to its voters: stop Zohran Mamdani or pay.
“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “I don’t want to send, as President, good money after bad.”
Trump’s comments echo those broadcast on Sunday during his appearance on CBS’s 60 minutes, in which he said: “It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there.”
There is still a system in place where states contribute their federal taxes before that revenue is used for whatever we have budgeted. A state doesn’t take “their share” first, and states depend on federal funding for a lot of projects and services.
That said, a state with large surpluses can probably write policies to use their state taxes to pay for federal programs that people want to keep, but that’s a snarled-up and anti-american system, the taxes are supposed to be used for the people, not be used like a cudgel to enforce political partisanship. There would be a lot of courts who would challenge this, which still might go in Trump’s favor because of his corruption of the judicial branch, but that’s a LOT of work and expense for something that isn’t going to actually get the administration anything but ire from the citizens of one of the
country’sworld’s largest, most prominent cities.Largely, this is as usual, a massive pile of bullshit meant to fit into a right-wing news site’s headline ticker, because people largely don’t read stories, they just read headlines and don’t question it. This kind of rhetoric has always been about making his most powerful asset, his ludicrously stupid and armed and fanatical base feel like he’s still big strong daddy choking everyone.