Mamdani rips reported Trump moves in New York City mayor race
'Today we learned Andrew Cuomo is directly coordinating with Donald Trump, even as this President sends masked agents to rip our neighbors off the streets and guts the social services so many New Yorkers rely on,' Mamdani said in a Wednesday post on the social platform X.
'It's disqualifying and a betrayal of our city,' he added.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that eight sources said the president talked in private about stepping into the race in an attempt to stop Mamdani from winning the November election.
According to the Times, a Republican congressman and New York businessmen have been recently pressed by the president about which of Mamdani's rivals they believe could win against the Democratic nominee.
Trump and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also a candidate for New York City mayor, discussed the race in a phone call within the last few weeks, the Times also reported. But Cuomo on Thursday pushed back on the report.
'I can't remember the last time I spoke to President Trump,' Cuomo said during a press conference, adding that he has 'never spoken to him about the mayor's race.'
Mamdani's Wednesday post also featured a video clip of himself discussing the Times report, slamming Trump for 'conspiring' with Cuomo.
'It is Donald Trump himself who has been directly conspiring with candidates who have decided to give up the people that they are supposed to protect, in lieu of securing power through the assistance of that same administration in Washington, D.C.,' the New York State Assembly member said.
The Hill has reached out to a spokesperson for Cuomo and the White House for comment.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Los Angeles Times
16 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Disney's settlement with ‘Mandalorian' actor Gina Carano isn't capitulation. Firing her was
Actress Gina Carano, Lucasfilm and its parent company Walt Disney Co. have settled the federal lawsuit filed in which Carano claimed that, in 2021, she was wrongfully terminated from her role in 'The Mandalorian' after she expressed her conservative political views on social media. The settlement details have not been made public, but Lucasfilm released a statement praising Carano's on-set professionalism and expressing the hope of 'identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.' I am here to beg everyone to remain calm and avoid using the four Cs: cancel culture (is this the end of it?) and corporate capitulation (is this another example of it?) No and no. Cancel culture has long been an amorphous and often recklessly applied term, used to describe a litany of events, including but certainly not limited to male predators losing their jobs, students protesting their school's choice of graduation speakers and outrage over J.K. Rowling's stance on transgender women. Recently, however, it has taken a far more concrete shape that looks astonishingly like the White House where President Trump continues to literally cancel all manner of things, including U.S. membership in the World Health Organization, the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency and huge portions of Medicaid. Recently, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the bureau documented weaker than expected numbers for July and downward revisions for the previous two months. Corporate capitulation, too, is alive and well, with law firms, universities and media companies falling like dominoes before Trump's lawsuits and threats of defunding. Last year, Trump sued ABC and its parent company Disney for defamation after anchor George Stephanopoulos wrongly stated on air that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping E. Jean Carroll — Trump had been found civilly liable of sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll. Disney settled for $15 million, paid to Trump's presidential foundation and museum. Even more troubling was Paramount Global's decision to pay a $16-million settlement in what many consider a frivolous lawsuit brought by Trump against '60 Minutes.' After late-night host Stephen Colbert called the move a 'big fat bribe' designed to ensure Paramount's recent acquisition by Skydance, CBS, which is owned by Paramount, announced that 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' was being canceled due to financial considerations. So while it is tempting to see Disney settling with Carano as a piece of a larger and very worrisome whole, particularly when Elon Musk financed her lawsuit, it was in fact simply the right thing to do. Carano is a former mixed martial artist turned actor who has been vocal about her support for conservative causes and President Trump. In 2020, she had caught some flack for posting 'beep/bop/boop' as her pronouns in her Twitter bio, which some took as her way of mocking trans people. She denied this, changed her bio and expressed support for the trans community. There were also posts that criticized masking policies and shutdowns during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as one calling for an investigation into voter fraud after the 2020 election. But it was a repost on Instagram that cost her her job — in February 2021, she reposted a famously horrific image of a half-naked Jewish woman fleeing from a mob with a moronically simplistic message about divisive politics: 'Most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?' Landing just a month after then-President Trump sent an armed mob to attack the Capitol in the hopes of overturning an election he refused to believe he had lost, the post, which appeared to compare MAGA supporters in 2021 America with Jews in Nazi Germany, sparked #FireGinaCarano. And that's exactly what Disney did. Calling her posts 'abhorrent and unacceptable,' Lucasfilm excised her character from 'The Mandalorian' and canceled an upcoming spinoff in which she was to star. Her talent agency, UTA, dropped her and Hasbro canceled a line of toys based on her 'Mandalorian' character. It was an overreaction that smacked of fear and pandering. I do not agree with the sentiments Carano expressed in her posts, but compared with the blithely toxic abuse regularly used on social media, they are relatively benign, based far more on genuine ignorance — most people are in fact aware of the vicious antisemitism leveraged by the Nazis as well as their institutionalized tactics of fear — than anything else. Of course, those who attempt to be politically provocative on social media (and reposting a photo of a victimized Jewish woman in such context is the definition of political provocation) cannot then feign shock and dismay when people are provoked, especially at a time when far-right tweets, including the president's, had led to a violent attack against lawmakers. (Hence the irony of Musk's support — the platform he renamed X was in large part built on its ability to harness all manner of just and unjust hashtag campaigns.) But as my colleague Robin Abcarian noted when Carano filed her lawsuit in 2023, the social media mob's decision that a woman, who was far from a household name, deserved to lose her livelihood, and more important, Lucasfilm's agreement with that decision, was extreme. Bad publicity is never good for an entertainment property and whether it was explicit in her contract or not, Carano did represent, to a certain extent, 'The Mandalorian,' Lucasfilm and Disney. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry's increasing reliance on social media has created a world in which actors and other creative types are expected to amass millions of followers on platforms that tend to reward the outspoken and outrageous over the thoughtful. Encouraged to reveal themselves 'authentically,' stars can find themselves prodded by fans to comment on current events and excoriated when they refuse or respond in a way that certain followers consider insincere or politically incorrect. Telling people to stay off social media is not the answer; neither is regulation by hashtag campaign. While Carano's case is certainly reflective of many perils that face us at the moment, the fact that she reached a settlement, including an apparent promise of more work, is not a sign of further deterioration. The fear that our cultural landscape is being attacked by political forces that would strangle the notion of free speech and competing ideologies is real and justified. But in this case, the capitulation came not when Disney and Lucasfilm decided to settle with Carano, but when they fired her in the first place.


NBC News
17 minutes ago
- NBC News
Leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan shake hands and sign deal at White House peace summit
WASHINGTON — The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan shook hands Friday at a White House peace summit before signing an agreement aimed at ending decades of conflict. President Donald Trump was in the middle as Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan flanked him on either side. As the two extended their arms in front of Trump to shake hands, the U.S. leader reached up and clasped his hands around theirs. The two countries in the South Caucasus signed agreements with each other and the U.S. that will reopen key transportation routes while allowing the U.S. to seize on Russia's declining influence in the region. The deal includes an agreement that will create a major transit corridor to be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, the White House said. Trump said at the White House on Friday that naming the route after him was 'a great honor for me' but 'I didn't ask for this.' A senior administration official, on a call before the event with reporters, said it was the Armenians who suggested the name. Trump has sought to be known as a peacemaker and made no secret of the fact that he covets a Nobel Peace Prize. Friday's signing adds to a series of peace and economic agreements brokered by the U.S. this year. Both leaders said the breakthrough was made possible by Trump and his team. 'We are laying a foundation to write a better story than the one we had in the past,' Pashinyan said, calling the agreement a 'significant milestone.' 'President Trump in six months did a miracle,' Aliyev said. Trump remarked on how long the conflict went on between the two countries. 'Thirty-five years they fought, and now they're friends and they're going to be friends a long time,' he said. That route will connect Azerbaijan and its autonomous Nakhchivan exclave, which are separated by a 32-kilometer-wide (20-mile-wide) patch of Armenian territory. The demand from Azerbaijan had held up peace talks in the past. For Azerbaijan, a major producer of oil and gas, the route also provides a more direct link to Turkey and onward to Europe. Trump indicated he'd like to visit the route, saying, 'We're going to have to get over there.' Asked how he feels about lasting peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Trump said 'very confident.' Aliyev and Pashinyan on Friday joined a growing list of foreign leaders and other officials who have said Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in helping ease long-running conflicts across the globe. The peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda helped end the decades-long conflict in eastern Congo, and the U.S. mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, while Trump intervened in clashes between Cambodia and Thailand by threatening to withhold trade agreements with both countries if their fighting continued. Yet peace deals in Gaza and Ukraine have been elusive. US takes advantage of Russia's waning influence The signing of a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, also strikes a geopolitical blow to their former imperial master, Russia. Throughout the nearly four-decade conflict, Moscow played mediator to expand its clout in the strategic South Caucasus region, but its influence waned quickly after it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Trump-brokered deal would allow the U.S. to deepen its reach in the region as Moscow retreats, senior U.S. administration officials said. The Trump administration began engaging with Armenia and Azerbaijan in earnest earlier this year, when Trump's key diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Aliyev in Baku and started to discuss what a senior administration official called a 'regional reset.' Negotiations over who will develop the Trump Route — which will eventually include a rail line, oil and gas pipelines, and fiber optic lines — will likely begin next week, and at least nine developers have expressed interest already, according to the senior administration official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. Separate from the joint agreement, both Armenia and Azerbaijan signed deals with the United States meant to bolster cooperation in energy, technology and the economy, the White House said. Trump previewed much of Friday's plan in a social media post Thursday evening, in which he said the agreements would 'fully unlock the potential' of the South Caucasus region. 'Many Leaders have tried to end the War, with no success, until now, thanks to 'TRUMP,'' Trump said on his Truth Social site. The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict has lasted for decades The two nations were locked in conflict for nearly four decades as they fought for control of the Karabakh region, known internationally as Nagorno-Karabakh. The area was largely populated by Armenians during the Soviet era but is located within Azerbaijan. The two nations battled for control of the region through multiple violent clashes that left tens of thousands of people dead over the decades, all while international mediation efforts failed. Most recently, Azerbaijan reclaimed all of Karabakh in 2023 and had been in talks with Armenia to normalize ties. Azerbaijan's insistence on a land bridge to Nakhchivan had been a major sticking point, because while Azerbaijan did not trust Armenia to control the so-called Zangezur corridor, Armenia resisted control by a third party because it viewed it as a breach of sovereignty. 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Wall Street Journal
17 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Trump Weighs Reclassifying Marijuana as Less Dangerous Drug
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