Zohran Mamdani on NYC as a blueprint for Democrats | NPR's Newsmakers

Hi. It's Leila Faulded with a special episode of Up First, a conversation from our sister show NPR's Newsmakers, where we interview some of the most influential people of our time. Our guest today is the mayor of New York City, Zoran Mamdani. When you were campaigning, President Trump called you a communist lunatic, you called him a fascist. Now that you've met with him, that you've spoken with him multiple times, do you still think he's a fascist? Yes. And do you tell him that? Yes. Is your party ready for the midterms? I think not only will we push back against the bigotry and cruelty that we've seen in so much of these last few years, but also push for a dignity that too often it seems like we have to look for in the history books of the Democratic Party and not in the present day. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani was swept into office on a promise of affordability that resonated with so many voters. It's been just over a hundred days that he's been in office, so I came to city hall to ask him about his accomplishments, the economy, the war in Iran, and his relationship with president Trump. We're in a different place. We're in city hall from the last time that we spoke. It's been over a hundred days. You've made inroads on some of your campaign promises. On others, you have not. What would you give yourself as a grade? Yeah. I will always leave it to New Yorkers to provide the grades. What I will say is that I'm very proud of what the team was able to accomplish over those first hundred days. This was a time when, just on day eight, we delivered $1,200,000,000 to make universal child care a reality across our city. This is a time where we secured more than $30,000,000 in settlements with bad landlords, repaired more than 6,069 apartments, a time where we were able to secure nearly a $100,000 a day for workers and small businesses that had been exploited by mega corporations and delivery apps. And we showed that government can do all of these big transformative things while also doing little things, while also filling in a 102,000 potholes in that same length of time. You know, there are things that have been maybe more difficult to start get started, police reform being one. Another critics will say that, you know, you promised to expand a rental voucher program, but now you're trying to limit it. Are you finding that it is harder to implement campaign promises now that you're actually in the office? I think this job comes with an immense amount of difficulty, but that's also because it has an immense amount possibility within it. And when I ran for mayor, you know, we built our campaign around three central promises. We talked about the importance of delivering universal child care, the importance of making buses fast …