Mamdani faces wave of hate from right after surprise victory in primary

June 27, 2025 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani takes the stage at his primary election party, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in New York. Photo: Heather Khalifa/AP

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CITYWIDE – AFTER ZOHRAN Mamdani’s surprise upset victory in Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, Republican politicians took to social media in anger over the results.

President Donald Trump on Truth Social called Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic,” in an angry post declaring that Democrats in New York City had “crossed a line,” while conservative influencers shared posts attacking Mamdani’s Muslim faith, including images of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa, reports the Guardian. City Councilmember Vickie Paladino called him a “known jihadist terrorist,” as upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik sent out fundraising emails referring to Mamdani as a “Hamas terrorist sympathizer.”

While some of the criticism was in apparent reference to a pre-election debate over the meaning of the phrase “globalize the intifada” – which Mamdani characterized as a call for peaceful resistance in the face of oppression, but which many Jews, including ally Brad Lander, interpret as a reference to the violence of the Second Intifada in Israel – the online attacks quickly ballooned out of scale of that incident.

Most ominously, the New York Young Republican Club on X called for Mamdani’s citizenship to be revoked and for him to be deported under a contested anti-communism law from the Cold War era, tagging White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, one of the Trump administration’s most anti-immigration members. Miller, while not responding to the group directly, wrote that the results were the “clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.”

The nominee offered a calm response to the vitriol, saying in an interview that he would be happy to work with the president on cost-of-living issues, but would strongly oppose his social policies, particularly those related to immigration and the LGBTQ+ community. He noted that he is no stranger to Islamophobia, having received multiple threats related to his identity over the course of a campaign season marred by dissension over candidates’ stances on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Mamdani also said his security team had been beefed up in the weeks prior to the election after receiving the threats.

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