In a tearful speech outside a Bronx mosque on October 24, 2025, New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani invoked the memory of his aunt, who he claimed “stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab.” The moment, meant to underscore post-9/11 Islamophobia and rally Muslim voters just days before early voting began, struck many as profoundly strange given Mamdani’s own timeline. Born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991, Mamdani immigrated to the U.S. with his family at age seven in 1998—three years after the attacks that reshaped New York and the world. At just 10 years old during the event, he was a child navigating a new life in Morningside Heights, far removed from the adult traumas of subway commutes or veiled fears in a hijab. Yet here was the 34-year-old Democratic Socialist nominee, channeling a secondhand family story as if it were his lived nightmare, blurring the lines between personal witness and inherited narrative in a way that felt contrived amid the raw grief still echoing from Ground Zero.

The oddity deepened as House Republicans, sensing vulnerability, ramped up calls to denaturalize Mamdani and deport him just weeks before the November 4 election. Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles led the charge in June, penning a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi citing potential “willful misrepresentation” in Mamdani’s 2018 naturalization process, allegedly tied to past affiliations like his college rap lyrics or activism that critics label as support for terrorism. The New York Young Republican Club echoed this, invoking the Cold War-era Communist Control Act to strip his citizenship, branding the Uganda-born candidate a “radical” unfit for Gracie Mansion. With Mamdani’s family fleeing Idi Amin’s expulsions in the 1970s before his birth, and his path to citizenship unmarred by formal charges, these moves smack of political theater—weaponizing immigration status against a naturalized citizen who’s been American longer than some of his accusers have been in office. In a city of immigrants, where nearly 40% share his non-native roots, this federal meddling feels like an absurd inversion, turning a routine application into a deportation dossier to derail a progressive upset.

At the heart of this spectacle lies Andrew Cuomo’s unraveling, a scion haunted by his father Mario’s towering yet divisive shadow, now forced to chase a mayoral crown he once assumed was his birthright. In a normal Democratic machine, the 67-year-old former governor—son of the fiery New Deal rhetorician who thundered about “a tale of two cities” in 1984—would glide into City Hall unchallenged, leveraging dynasty and deal-making prowess. But Mario’s demagogic flair and embrace of expansive Great Society-style policies sowed the seeds of a party schism, breeding the very progressive insurgents like Mamdani who now eclipse the old guard. Cuomo, scarred by his own scandals and compelled to adopt “shitlib” postures on affordability and Palestine to court the left, still couldn’t outflank the 30-something immigrant he paints as an America-hating interloper. Mamdani’s teary platitudes—repurposing Mario’s empathy for the marginalized as cover for his “usurpation”—ensured Cuomo’s primary drubbing in June, a poetic defeat where the sins of the father, amplified by decades of policy bloat, handed the keys to a perceived outsider. In this inverted coronation, New York’s political ghosts whisper that true inheritance isn’t blood, but the unresolved echoes of hyperbole and hubris.