What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened New York City voters.

 

Election Day in New York City is tomorrow, featuring a three-way race for mayor between Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, and disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo running as an independent after losing in a huge upset to Mamdani in the Democratic primary. Mamdani is generally regarded as the favorite, but both he and Cuomo are campaigning hard in the closing days, and the result is far from certain.

 

Trump has tried several times to interject himself into the race, mostly by calling Mamdani a "communist" (which is a lie) and with threats to blockade New York City from government services if the Democratic nominee won. He's also threatened to arrest Mamdani and strip him of his citizenship. He repeated those charges again today, in the form of an endorsement of Cuomo.

 

There are two aspects that bear mention here: one legal, and one political.

Legally, this is an empty threat from Trump—as long as Trump bothers to obey the law. Relatively little in the way of federal funds earmarked for NYC or the surrounding region are discretionary. Of course, Trump could—and has—illegally impounded funds for much of his second term, but even then it's not clear how he could really do more to hurt New Yorkers for voting in a mayor he doesn't like than he already is. Just recently, he declared that he was ending a massive $16 billion tunnel project linking the city with New Jersey, something he has no legal authority to do, and apparently for no real reason other than that NY Sen. Chuck Schumer had backed it. (For that matter, it's not even clear within the Trump White House that it even has been shut down: there are already conflicting reports.) 

Politically, Trump endorsing Cuomo is bizarre at best: they loathe one another. Trump was furious when Cuomo rejected his offer of a corrupt quid pro quo where New York would drop its various criminal investigations into Trump and his businesses in exchange for Trump targeting bureaucratic punishments against New York specifically. Even though Cuomo didn't have much direct authority over what state and local prosecutors do, Trump blamed him for the successful prosecution of the Trump Organization for tax fraud and the successful seizure and shutdown of Trump's phony charity. Cuomo was one of several state governors Trump tried to extort praise from in exchange for emergency aid in the early weeks of the COVID-19 shutdown.

The two men do have one thing in common: an extremely long list of credible allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Until recently Trump, a convicted felon, could have put his vote where his mouth is: New York allows felons to vote after they've served any prison sentence, and Trump couldn't be sentenced to incarceration at all because of his re-election. But his official residency for voting purposes, and the place where he spends nearly as much time as the White House proper, is at his resort in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Why does this matter?

• Donald Trump doesn't get to tell people how to vote in any election.