So much for comrade-erie.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his former close ally Antonio Reynoso exchanged not-so-friendly fire over the mayor’s visits to President Trump’s White House — the latest salvos in a civil war between socialists and progressives for control over the Democratic Party.
Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president who’s running to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez, dinged Mamdani during a debate Wednesday with fellow 7th congressional district hopefuls,state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez and City Councilwoman Julie Won.
“I don’t think we should be visiting the White House and talking to Trump,” Reynoso said during the NY1 debate.
“This guy is terrorizing our neighbors. He’s committing crimes, war crimes. He’s, somebody that we should be getting ready to impeach, somebody that we should to hold accountable for the laws that he’s breaking right here in this county.”
The backhand drew a chilly response from Mamdani on Wednesday. He argued his strange bedfellows bromance with Trump yields results, noting a face-to-face meeting with the president led to the release of Columbia University student Elaina Aghayeva from ICE custody.
“I’ll leave it to the borough president to explain why he would prefer a New Yorker continue to be unjustly detained by ICE, than I meet with the president in the Oval Office to secure their release,” Mamdani told reporters at an unrelated event.
The tit-for-tat spat reflected the growing rift between not only Mamdani and Reynoso, but also their respective wings of the Democratic Party.
Reynoso, a progressive long aligned with the Working Families Party, had been an early endorser of Mamdani — a Democratic Socialists of America diehard — during last year’s mayoral race.
But Mamdani didn’t return the favor when Reynoso threw his hat into the ring to replace Velázquez and represent the waterfront Brooklyn and Queens district covering much of the ultra-liberal so-called “Commie Corridor.”
The freshly minted Hizzoner instead opted to back his fellow DSA member Valdez.
Mamdani similarly endorsed foot-in-mouth insurgent Darializa Avila Chevalier over Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-New York) — who had also backed his mayoral run — an Upper Manhattan and Bronx congressional race because of her DSA affiliation.
The endorsements showed Mamdani’s willingness to effectively stab his liberal allies in the back in favor of his DSA comrades.
They also exposed the battle between the far-left WFP and far-far-left DSA for control of the Democratic Party.
The split struck one Democratic operative as unproductive, to say the least.
“It’s definitely a choice to turn NY-07 into a turf war when the candidates are 95% the same,” the operative said.
“When you mix the narcissism of minor differences with the narcissism of politicians, what you get is a whole lot of stupid.”
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