The mayor of New York attracts criticism from the Catholic press, defends himself for the moment with the New York police and will have to twist his arms in Albany.
Friends for now: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch at a press conference in January.
(Spencer Platt/Getty Images) According to Winston Churchill The storm that rises, French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval approached Joseph Stalin suggesting that making life easier for Catholics in the Soviet Union would be a good way to ingratiate himself with the Vatican. “The Pope? Stalin replied“How many divisions does it have got?”
The quote came up quite naturally last Friday, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani chaired his administration’s first interfaith breakfast. New York Public Library President Anthony Marx, whose building hosted the rally, concluded his welcoming speech by referring to the violent sieges imposed by the Trump administration on American cities: “The ice is going to melt.”
Mamdani reminded the audience that, for him, interfaith dialogue was more than just a slogan: “I grew up in New York as a Muslim child with a Hindu mother. I celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha with my family, with jazz at Riverside Park for Diwali. But the Minneapolis murders were also very much on the mayor’s mind. Move from Deuteronomy 10, which commands us to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”, in the more apocalyptic language of Book of RevelationMamdani convicted ICE in biblical terms: “They come as on a pale horse, and they leave a path of rubble in their wake. People ripped from their cars. Guns drawn on the unarmed. Families torn apart… If these aren’t attacks on the stranger among us, what are they?”
The room responded warmly to the mayor’s reaffirmation of New York’s sanctuary city status, but anyone who was under the impression that Gotham was about to adopt “Kumbaya” as its official anthem need only look up that day’s anthem. title on the website of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights: “Mamdani stiffens Catholics for the third time.” Citing the absence of a Catholic priest at the mayor’s inauguration as well as the breakfast program, the league issued the third strike against the Mamdani administration: the mayor did not attend the installation of Archbishop Ronald Hicks that same day, although the ceremony took place “just steps down Fifth Avenue” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Whatever other claims about the mayor’s timeline, this looks a lot like an unforced error by the new administration. New York is home to some 2.5 million Catholics. This makes Catholicism the city largest single denominationand its supporters constitute one of its largest electoral blocs.
Catholics also play a dominant role in New York’s uniformed services culture. One of the reasons the invasion of 2,000 ICE agents was so devastating to Minneapolis is that the city has only 600 uniformed police officers. Even after recently doubled in size to 22,000 agents, ICE is still vastly outnumbered by the 33,000 uniformed NYPD officers. Which means that if border czar Tom Homan asked “How many divisions does the mayor of New York have?” ”, the answer would be “More than you order”.
Current number
But this of course assumes that the police respect the authority of the mayor over his department, which, in New York, is far from a foregone conclusion. I still remember the riot— including an attempt by drunken police officers to rush City Hall — after David Dinkins proposed a civilian review board to investigate police misconduct in 1992. Bill de Blasio’s subsequent efforts to reform police also sparked a dramatic, if less obviously mutinous, wave of police sick leave and slowdowns, which culminated in thousands of police officers publicly turning their backs on the mayor when he delivered the eulogy funeral of two police officers killed in 2015 – a gesture of contempt. from which de Blasio’s political fortunes never fully recovered.
So when I heard Commissioner Jessica Tisch, during her State of the NYPD address Tuesday, announce that she was nominating recently retired Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who describe murdered far-right activist Charlie Kirk as a “modern-day St. Paul” – as one of the department’s two new chief chaplains, I couldn’t help but think that the writer Ross Barkan may have been right when he said, in a recent column for new Yorkthat “the Mamdani-Tisch relationship is not built to last”.
Tisch is far too intelligent and too politically agile to do anything overtly insubordinate. Indeed, she declared herself “grateful to have found a partner in Mayor Mamdani”. But if the text of his remarks was largely unexceptional – proposing changes to the structure of Bronx patrols, modernizing the city’s 311 dispatch system, and efforts to address the growing threat posed by drones – the subtext was a series of reminders that, as the billionaire girl from one of the townspeople richest familiesshe doesn’t need this job.
His remarks were sponsored and forwarded to the New York City Police Foundation, a private group of well-connected New Yorkers, primarily in real estate and banking, who have long increased the department’s already exorbitant budget. (The commissioner’s uncle, Andrew Tisch, is president of the foundation’s board of directors.) Tisch delivered his speech at Cipriani, the restaurant and event space now occupying the marble-vaulted expanse of what was once the Bowery Savings Bank on 42nd Street — a venue that, like a newspaper account in other words, “flaunts the power of New York money.” If you had decided to deliberately bring together the group of New Yorkers least supportive of Zohran Mamdani’s vision of democratic socialism, you might well have found the audience in this room. A hostile observer might have been tempted to characterize them as members of “the Epstein class.”
Given the tribulations from the commissioner’s great-uncle, Steve, that would be a low blow. But as I watched from the pen as platoons of white-jacketed lackeys passed shiny trays among the guests, I remembered that before Theodore Roosevelt made his debut on the national stage, he, too, had presided over the New York Police Department.
Not that the mayor is without resources, nor without his own loyal legions. On Wednesday, he traveled to Albany to Tin Cup Dayan hours-long hearing before state lawmakers regarding its budget and priorities. Since many of Mamdani’s inquisitors were his former colleagues in the Assembly, not all interrogations were terribly thorough. And the few openly hostile questions – emanating from suburban Republicans – hardly disrupted the mayor’s presentation, the most striking point of which was the disclosure of 5 billion dollars in savings and unprecedented windfalls, reducing the total deficit to be filled in the city’s next budget from $12 billion to $7 billion.
Such miracles are commonplace in the fiscal dance between Albany and City Hall — and will likely have little impact on the mayor’s chances of persuading the governor to let him raise taxes on New York’s wealthiest residents. (Both houses of the legislature increases already passed on personal and business income last year, but failed to win the governor’s assent.)
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However, in two weeks, on February 25, Our Time NYC and New York City DSA called for a “Albany Takeover” to support the mayor’s efforts to provide a secure revenue stream for his agenda by raising taxes on the wealthy. The event will be notable for many reasons, including as a test of whether the energy and enthusiasm that sent 100,000 volunteers to every neighborhood in the city to knock on doors to elect Mamdani can be sustained outside of an election season.
Divya Sundaram, deputy director of Our Time, told me, “Some of these power struggles with people who simply aren’t aligned with our agenda — or in some cases might get in the way of our agenda — become less difficult if we actually build the power to address them. »
“For us,” she explained, “the project is how we continue to organize this thing around…the agenda that has really inspired so many of us. How do we do that without the urgency of an election campaign? And how do we translate this huge election operation into a much deeper and more nuanced issue organizing campaign?”
These are all important questions, not just for Mamdani or New York City, but for anyone who actually wants to deliver on the promise of a radical agenda. Because ultimately, Mamdani and his allies will have to show observers in Albany and beyond how divided they are.
DD Guttenplan DD Guttenplan is special correspondent for The nation and the former host of The nation’s podcast. He was editor of the magazine from 2019 to 2025 and, before that, editor and London correspondent. His books include American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone, The Nation: a biography, And The next Republic: the rise of a new radical majority.
