Why It’s a Good Thing Zohran Mamdani Can Never Become President

Zohran Mamdan is now either the 111th or 112th mayor of the great City of New York, depending on how you count.

Either way, it’s great that he’s finally taking over the Big Apple.

And it’s even better than he is doing so as someone who can never, ever be the President of the United States.

Of course, most Americans will never be president: a scant 45 of the hundreds of millions of Americans who have ever lived have held the highest executive office. But this has not kept former mayors of New York from trying. Every mayor since Rudy Giuliani except Eric Adams has launched a White House bid as unsuccessful as a weekend getaway to Four Seasons Total Landscaping. (Adams has only been a former mayor for a single day, so he may yet try, but he was repeatedly touted as White House material from the time he won the 2021 primary with just a few thousand votes.)

Yet even though four governors of New York State have become President (including Martin Van Buren, a former mayor of Buffalo, and Theodore Roosevelt, a former New York City Police Commissioner), no mayor of New York City ever has.

And yet, the mere possibility that “Someday, you may be president!” has a warping effect on so many American politicians which turns them into imperialists. With a force like gravity, the mere possibility of the presidency pulls even the most domestic-focused politicians into an imperial orbit; it shapes the donors, the press coverage, and the political possibilities of even obscure politicians with the slimmest possibilities of a viable shot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Young and old, this force spares almost no one: while they may be somewhat, barely critical of countries like Israel at times, the possibility of the presidency has shaped the politics of Congresswoman Alexandria “Iron Dome” Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie “‘Trump did a better job’ on the border” Sanders alike and helped to form a global sense of imperial socialism in their agendas.

Take away the fiction of “You might be president someday” and a New York City mayor is left with nothing more than the job they were actually elected to do.

There is only one kind of politician who cannot be affected by the allure of distant odds of becoming president: a politician who can’t ever legally be president.

Someone like newly minted Mayor Mamdani. Which is great for the people of  New York, of the United States, and of earth.

It’s not just that Mamdani is ineligible for the presidency now because he is just thirty-four years old and that Article Two, Section one of the United States Constitution says one must be thirty-five. It’s that the same section rules him ineligible for life because, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.” Born in Uganda, Mamdani is ineligible to become president because he is an immigrant and a naturalized citizen, something he proudly owned on the night of his election, when he proclaimed “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”

But this is nothing to mourn.

This opens a world of political possibilities.

Mayor Mamdani is free from the pressures of lobbyists and warmongers who try to cultivate and flip rising stars. His political imagination can run wild.

Paramount, the people of New York (and, more broadly, the American people who have been inspired by Mamdani’s rise) can also be freer in their activism and political imaginations with a mayor free of such warping pressures.

As I write in my forthcoming book The Overseer Class, there is enormous pressure on people from minoritized backgrounds who make it into elected office not to liberate people like them, but to crack the skulls of people like them. To oversee them, crush them, keep them in line, and police their political imaginations. One way to pressure would-be overseers into doing this nasty work is to dangle the possibility of more power and higher office at them. (Think of California Governor Gavin Newsom sweeping a homeless encampment and personally throwing away the treasured belongings of destitute Black people, or of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordering sweeps of encampments of homeless Black people, or of New York Mayor Eric Adams ordering sweeps of encampments of homeless Black people, or of Vice President Kamala Harris denigrating trans rights, or of Congressman Wesley Bell accepting $8.5 million in AIPAC money to unseat Congresswoman Cori Bush, or DC Mayor Muriel Bowers leading a delegation to Israel.)

Unlike Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, Mamdani will never feel the need to use the NYPD to beat up homosexuals, Negros and protesters in the hopes it will impress a precinct captain in Des Moines.

But the pressure simply isn’t there for Mayor Mamdani; he can’t be president. (Hell, despite many tries, no New York City Mayor has reached a higher office since John Hoffman became governor… and that was in 1869!) Take away the fiction of “You might be president someday” and a New York City mayor is left with, well, nothing more than the job they were actually elected to do. There are no aspirations to appeal to 200 million voters. There are no expectations that he has to learn how to play to rooms of K Street Lobbyists, or that his New York municipal policies need to play well at the Iowa Steak Fry. Unlike Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, Mamdani will never feel the need to use the NYPD to beat up homosexuals, Negros and protesters in the hopes it will impress a precinct captain in Des Moines.

The only electorate to which he is beholden is the one which elected him.

How can this allow for a more radical politics in the coming years in New York? For one, despite its own warping gravity as the metropole of global capital, New York is an extremely diverse political bloc—one Mamdani has already expertly engaged.

But let’s consider three issues important to Mamdani and many of his supporters to consider what is possible: Palestine, police reform/abolition, and an issue in New York City that is far more controversial than either of those: ending “gifted and talented” schools.

In a speech at the national Democratic Socialists of America convention in 2023, Mamdani said “I was somebody who began my journey in organizing in politics by co-founding my school’s first Students for Justice in Palestine” group. “The struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be,” he said, explaining that was why he’d authored the “Not on our dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence act” while in the State Assembly.

Just days after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, Assemblyman Mamdani was arrested outside Senator Chuck Schumer’s home with Jewish Voices for Peace, protesting the unfolding genocide. After trouncing Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary in September of this year, when speaking at Brooklyn College with Bernie Sanders, Mamdani offered his support for four fired CUNY professors, saying “I cannot begin my remarks this evening without first acknowledging PSC-CUNY and the fact that no faculty member should be disciplined for supporting Palestinian human rights.” That same month, he said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes if he came to New York.

And just this week, Mamdani appointed Ramzi Kassem as his Chief Counsel. Kassem is the founding director of  CLEAR, a clinic at CUNY’s law school which offers “free legal representation and support to Muslim and all other communities in the New York City area and beyond that are targeted by the government.” CLEAR has been a stalwart supporter of BLM and those who demand a free Palestine. (Indeed, I write CLEAR’s number on my skin whenever I fly into JFK from abroad.)

And in his inauguration speech—which he delivered after taking his oath on the Quoran—Mamdani spoke of “Palestinian New Yorkers in Bay Ridge who will no longer have to contend with a politics that speaks of universalism but makes them the exception.”

And while he’s appointed some noted pro-Palestinian voices to his inauguration and transition committees, including children’s musical educator Ms. Rachel, Mamdani notably did not say anything about Palestine in his speech the night he was elected.

Still, it’s highly unlikely any of this—Assemblyman Mamdani’s anti-settler bill and being arrested over Palestine, candidate Mamdani’s threat to arrest Netanyahu, and mayor-elect Mamdani’s appointees—would have been possible if Mamdani were (consciously or unconsciously) being groomed for higher office. Nor would a coalition of immigrants, renters and activists so devoted to a foreign policy position anathema to the national imperial agenda have been able to coalesce around someone who could, in theory, be president someday. But because he can’t be, a candidate like him was able to take more aggressive political swings early in his career, up to the moment he entered one of the highest profile political jobs in America.

By the time most people ever get to the Oval Office (as occupant or guest) they’ve been vetted and socialized not to say anything blunt, lest they lose their shot at real power someday.

Whether Gaza is still core to his identity and how he’ll govern on Palestine is another matter (though, it’s worth pointing out, being a mayor is not exactly being Secretary of State or any other federal office job). Zohran will certainly be the only mayor in America with his dad regularly going on Democracy Now! to remind him of his duty to Palestine. But more importantly, because he can’t ever be president, he is free of the pressure to use the NYPD, or NY’s HR department, or CUNY, or any other lever of power at his disposal to punish New Yorkers who are pro-Palestine—and that will bear political fruit and give the good people of New York much more room to organize, theorize and dream politically (about Palestine and so much else). That’s why people threatened by ICE and an Imam were participating at his inauguration.

Then, let’s take the issue of the NYPD. In November, then Mayor-elect Mamdani took some heat from the left for re-appointing real estate scion Jessica Tisch to head the NYPD. While I understood the criticism from people I respect, I disagreed with most of it. Mamdani is already pushing the City Council to create a Department of Public Safety, which will drain the NYPD of some of its power, and he’s appointed people to his Community Safety transition committee like Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing. The problem with him becoming mayor was always going to be that Mamdani would inherit the surveillance state of the NYPD.

But while it’s bad enough Mamdani, indirectly, is in charge of the largest police department in the country, it would be worse for him to appoint someone “progressive” to lead it. I am a police abolitionist, but for now, there is an NYPD. And as I also argue in The Overseer Class, the only benefit of him putting a Black, Latino or progressive into the position would be for them to give cover to what it is the NYPD actually does. (Adams’s first choice to lead the NYPD was a Black woman and the second was a Latino man.) Politically, it’s far better for Mamdani to have Eric Adams’s third choice for commissioner (and a rich white woman at that) as the face of the NYPD Mamdani he can fire anytime, then to expend political capital he will only lose putting a seeming-progressive into the job who will, inevitably, be pulled into covering for the regressive institution.

Still, the fact that he can’t be president is the reason Mamdani has been able to do things like push for a Department of Community Safety and bring in people like Vitale. And that he can’t become Commander-in-Chief of the world’s largest military means he doesn’t have to use the NYPD against dissidents—and that he doesn’t need to lie and say New York needs more cops in the hopes of winning over white Iowans afraid of crime. And while Mamdani might not be a police abolitionist, this immigrant-created political space gives actual abolitionists a partner they can work with on some matters (moving welfare checks and psychiatric calls out of the NYPD’s purview, for example) and space to organize independently of him with less interference.

Finally, schools. From 2009 to 2012, I was on the education beat for the Village Voice and I found that there is no issue, not even Israel, which engenders more vitriol amongst white New York liberals than maintaining the segregated “gifted and talented” schools. Candidate Mamdani has vowed to end them and, just this week, his appointment of Kamar Samuels illustrated his commitment to that. Samuels, a Black man, teacher and principal, is also against the so-called “gifted” segregated schools. He’s also an educator’s educator dedicated to students, teachers and parents.

Mamdani is bucking a trend of national Democrats appointing people like Arne Duncan, who became head of the Chicago public schools under Richard Daley and then Secretary of Education under Barack Obama without ever having been a classroom teacher; this is in part because the “charterize everything!” forces aren’t dictating Mamdani’s appointments.

To return to the issue of Palestine, when Mamdani got as close to the Oval Office as he’ll ever get—that would be when he visited President Donald Trump—he cooly said “I’ve spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide, and I’ve spoken about our government funding it.”

No one has ever accused Israel of committing genocide to reporters from inside the Oval Office before—in part, because, by the time most people ever get to the Oval Office (as occupant or guest) they’ve been vetted and socialized not to say anything so blunt, lest they lose their shot at real power someday.

But Mamdani is not looking to the future. He is looking to the power he can do in the job he actually holds, now.

And this gives us all permission to do the same—a great thing for the world, indeed.