So much for Zohran Mamdani’s ballyhooed anti-President Trump tour.
The Democratic socialist on Tuesday again spent a stop on his weeklong “Five Boroughs Against Trump” tour instead bashing his mayoral election rival Andrew Cuomo — calling the pugilistic ex-gov “petty” amid their escalating spat over Mamdani’s $2,300 rent-stabilized apartment.
Even when Mamdani spoke about Trump, he attempted to tie the president to Cuomo, arguing the two hotheaded Queens natives share many similarities.
“We must remember that Andrew Cuomo has spent more time talking about my apartment than asking why so many New Yorkers are being forced out of theirs,” Mamdani said at his “Brooklyn Against Trump” event.
“He has spent more time criticizing me than he has criticizing the legislation that Donald Trump has passed.”
Cuomo, in the latest salvo in what he has ambitiously dubbed “#Rentgate,” demanded on X Tuesday that Mamdani cough up his lease to prove he didn’t have his highbrow parents — a famed filmmaker and an accomplished academic — co-sign his one-bedroom Astoria apartment.
The nasty feud comes as Cuomo, who’s running as an independent in November after a humiliating loss to Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary, hopes to take the wind out of his rival’s sails.
The bare-knuckle Cuomo clearly hopes a scorched-earth campaign will make up much needed ground, said Andrew Kirtzman, managing director of the consulting firm Actum.
“It seems like (Cuomo) thinks he’s getting traction with these rent-stabilization attacks,” Kirtzman said.
“Maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t. I don’t think that most New Yorkers are going to become as outraged over this as Cuomo wants them to be.”
But Cuomo hitting Mamdani where he lives — and proposing “Zohran’s Law” targeting supposedly privileged New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized homes — has clearly irked the usually sunny socialist.
The speakers at Mamdani’s event — a Who’s Who of progressive Big Apple lawmakers, including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams — attacked Trump for pushing a 40% cut to Big Apple housing assistance.
Mamdani, who pulls $142,000 a year as a state assemblyman and lives in a $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized Astoria apartment, himself focused on Cuomo’s proposed law.
He noted Cuomo is calling to require New Yorkers wanting a rent-stabilized apartment to spend at least 30% of their income, which is the level that experts and US Census Bureau consider households to be rent-burdened.
“This policy is indicative of so much of Andrew Cuomo’s politics, where it works backwards from a petty vindictiveness, and it does not care who it harms in the process,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani’s spokeswoman Dora Pekac declined to comment on the candidate’s lease, but was unapologetic about linking Cuomo and Trump.
“Andrew Cuomo has called the president for political advice, aligned himself closely with him on matters personal and political, and is co-signing his dangerous authoritarian spirals,” she said.
“Put simply: Andrew Cuomo is complicit in the terror Donald Trump is wreaking on working New Yorkers — and we must never allow our city to forget or forgive him for it.”
