New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is rolling out his senior staff picks, and it looks like City Hall is about to become ground zero for a hard-left experiment that makes Bill de Blasio's administration look moderate by comparison. The New York Post Editorial Board laid out exactly what Mamdani’s appointments tell us about the next four years for the Big Apple, and it’s not good.
Mamdani is stacking his team with de Blasio retreads and far left figures who seem determined to push New York further left than it's ever been.
As PJ Media previously reported, Mamdani is eyeing Ramzi Kassem for top legal adviser, a position with significant influence over litigation and legal strategy. Kassem's résumé includes defending an al-Qaeda terrorist and representing anti-Israel Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalid. The alternative candidate, Steven Banks, calls himself a "social justice attorney" and served as de Blasio's homeless czar. Under Banks, spending on homelessness doubled while the homeless population soared. That’s who Mamdani wants advising him on legal matters.
But Kassem is just the tip of the iceberg.
Take Jahmila Edwards, now leading the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Relations. She spent a decade at District Council 37, the massive municipal workers’ union, which means that city union interests will drive every conversation with state and local officials.
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Then there's the Catherine Almonte Da Costa debacle. Mamdani tapped her as director of appointments, a critical role controlling staffing across city agencies. But old social media posts surfaced showing her antisemitic and anti-police rhetoric, and she was forced out before she even started. But that’s who he wanted.
The real alarm bells ring with Julie Su, named deputy mayor for economic justice. This brand-new position will let her rewrite the city's economic and labor policies through a progressive lens. Su ran California's unemployment system when billions in fraudulent claims got paid out, and she couldn't even get confirmed as Biden's Labor secretary because some of the more “moderate” Democrats (and I use the term “moderate” loosely here) thought she was too radical. Now she's helping run New York City.
What could go wrong?
Meanwhile, competent holdovers are getting the boot. Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, credited with driving Eric Adams' key achievements over the past year, has been told he won't be staying. Then there’s Dan Garodnick, an Adams aide known for city-planning expertise, who clearly isn’t going to be retained either. The pattern is clear: anyone not committed to the hard-left agenda is out.
The lone exception is Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, whom Mamdani convinced to stay—for now. “The only sign of hope for sanity so far is that Mamdani has convinced Jessica Tisch to continue as police commissioner,” the editorial board writes, “yet he hasn’t remotely disavowed his longtime anti-cop and anti-policing agenda; most betting is that she’ll either get fired or feel obliged to quit before 2026 is out.”
That's the real story here. Mamdani's braintrust is further left than de Blasio's crew, which was already the most radical administration in modern New York history. As the Post Editorial Board puts it, "At the very least, it's plain that the City Hall braintrust will be far to the left of the crew that ran Gotham under de Blasio, until now New York's most left-wing mayor ever." And Tisch? "With the whole rest of the administration looking to build a socialist utopia (or break the city in trying), it's hard to see how a practical centrist like Tisch can last."
We told you this was coming. New Yorkers are about to find out just how bad a mistake they made.
