Sawant Condemns Trump’s Threats on Mamdani and Calls for Mass Working-Class Movements Against the Rich

By Kshama Sawant, independent socialist antiwar pro-worker candidate for Washington state’s ninth Congressional district

Following Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the NYC Mayoral Democratic primary, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and the billionaire class are apoplectic over working people in NYC celebrating the defeat of Andrew Cuomo, the Zionists, and Wall Street in the election.

In response to Mamdani’s campaign raising demands for free transit, rent freeze, and taxes on the rich, Trump has threatened to cut off the over $100 billion in federal aid that the city receives for infrastructure needs and social services.

Mamdani has pledged that, as Mayor, he will not allow ICE arrests, and Trump has said that he will arrest Mamdani if he carries out that pledge. 

Mamdani has also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people facing an ongoing genocide and said that he will act on the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant on Netanyahu if he visits NYC. Trump has lashed out at Mamdani and threatened to strip him of his naturalized citizenship.

I strongly condemn Trump’s attacks on Mamdani and the countless others who have dared to speak out against ICE arrests, deportations, and the genocide. I am running for the U.S. Congress against warmongering corporate Democrat Adam Smith, who has funded the Gaza genocide to the hilt and who also voted to create ICE. My antiwar campaign is calling for an end to the genocide, to all U.S. military funding for the Israeli state, and to the brutal occupation of Palestinian lands. I am also campaigning to stop all deportations and shut down the detention center. ICE OUT!

The only strategy to end the genocide and stop the deportations and arrests is to build powerful mass movements, carry out mass strike action and civil disobedience, and also crucially to EXPOSE the role of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Both are purveyors of war and have the blood of over 400,000 Palestinians on their hands. The genocide started under the Biden-Harris administration. Both Democrats — like my opponent Adam Smith — and Republicans have sent, and are still sending, tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli military. Both parties are bankrolled by war profiteers and Wall Street, including billionaires and multimillionaires who own tech corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM, and Amazon.

Both parties are responsible for the massive inequality and skyrocketing costs of living faced by tens of millions of American working and poor people. 

Mamdani is right in energetically campaigning for working-class demands like a rent freeze and free transit. But he is dead wrong in using that economic agenda in order to get working people to “come home to the Democratic Party.”

The Democratic Party is the graveyard of working-class movements. It is the Democratic Party’s systematic betrayals of working people, and the labor leadership’s refusal to break from the Democrats or even put real pressure on them, that has created the space for right-wing populism and enabled Trump to win two elections. They have been the best builders of Trumpism and right-wing populism. 

Over and over, experiments to push the Democratic Party leftward have spectacularly failed. AOC and especially Bernie Sanders brought up demands like a $15/hour minimum wage, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal. They not only refused to build the working-class movements needed to win these things, they have thoroughly capitulated to the party’s pro-billionaire agenda and given cover for it to fund a genocide.

It is understandable that many working people are excited about Mamdani right now. A Democratic Party candidate campaigning on concrete working-class demands is a welcome rarity. The Democratic Party has increasingly dropped even a pretense of supporting working people’s needs. 

But we have to be sober about what Mamdani’s approach represents. Rather than using his campaign to begin building mass movements of working people to fight the rich and their political servants, Mamdani has persistently declared his desire to have congenial discussions with billionaires and their spokespeople like Democratic Governor of NY state Kathy Hochul. Hochul has been unequivocal that she opposes any taxes on the rich, among other things. 

Morally persuading the Democratic establishment is a failed strategy. They have no morals. The working class cannot afford yet another re-run of trying to reform the Democratic Party. Instead, we need to understand that the Democratic Party, regardless of its differences from Trump and the Republicans, is also a party of billionaires and warmongers. 

We need the fighting strategy that working people, my fellow revolutionary socialists, and I used relentlessly in my decade as a revolutionary socialist on the Seattle City Council. I turned my office into the principal organizing hub of Seattle’s working class, and together we won historic victories like the Amazon Tax and the nation’s highest major-city minimum wage. 

We exposed the Council Democrats as what they are — politicians who try to hide their thoroughly pro-corporate agenda behind empty performative gestures. This exposure, along with bringing the political army of tens of thousands of working people, is what forced change. Because Democratic Party politicians will only concede to our demands when we make them fear for their own political careers. We need a new party for working people.