President Donald Trump’s hometown of New York City is ground zero for his assault on blue cities and states and their institutions.
The rule of law is being replaced with the whims of the president, and so far there’s no sign that any of the Democrats running to be mayor, including damaged incumbent Eric Adams, are up to the moment of protecting the city from Trump when needed.
Adams is openly compromised. The other candidates have been more interested in talking about that or taking whacks at the front-runner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, than in articulating how they’d stand up to this presidential pressure campaign hitting the city from all sides.
The rule of law is being replaced with the whims of the president.
There’s the $400 million in federal funding being withheld from Columbia University in a legally dubious move, at least until it complies with a sweeping and nebulous series of demands. These include a crackdown on anti-Israel protests and a masking ban at the same time that masked federal agents are picking up campus members and shipping them to Louisiana for deportation proceedings.
Then there’s the executive order, a true bill of attainder, that threatened to destroy Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, one of the city’s most prominent law firms, for employing and working on behalf of the president’s real and perceived enemies. Trump said Thursday he’ll drop the order after the firm’s head went to the White House, which said he apologized for “wrongdoing” and agreed to provide $40 million in legal services to Trump-favored causes over his term. (Trump should update the title of his best-known book to “The Art of the Shakedown.”)
Trump also imposed the legally dubious demand to shut down New York’s already federally approved and implemented congestion pricing plan, along with blackmail about cutting other federal funding unless Gov. Kathy Hochul complies and cuts out what Trump’s transportation secretary whined Thursday is “open disrespect of the federal government” in refusing to accept its made-up ultimatum.
Trump’s Justice Department is also suing the state for refusing to let the feds use its DMV database, including undocumented immigrants with state driver’s licenses, as a de facto deportation list.
And then there are the threats from Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, about how “I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care what the left thinks, we’re coming” and Homan’s open extortion of Mayor Adams — who is desperate to get a dispensation in the criminal corruption case against him — about how “I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying where the hell is the agreement we came to” if the mayor doesn’t deliver much more cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, never mind New York’s sanctuary city laws.
As the hits keep coming with more on the way, Adams has said he won’t publicly criticize Trump or his administration, openly humiliating himself and the city he’s supposed to lead in the process.
New York City didn’t go red in 2024 by any measure, but it got notably less blue as Trump basically matched his 2020 numbers while Kamala Harris fell short of Joe Biden’s 2020 results in every single electoral district.
A message to those Democrat skeptics: You can dislike any or all campus protesters, menacing street theater, white-collar law firms, congestion pricing, blue state governors, the far left or crooked mayors and still recognize that using the power of the federal government to target real or supposed “enemies” this way is deeply disturbing.
Trump should update the title of his best-known book to ‘The Art of the Shakedown.’
And that’s before getting to the wild terror claims being thrown around by the feds without even nominal attribution and the supposed gang members being shipped, without any evidence or hearing in a frontal assault on the judiciary and the rule of law itself, to a hellhole El Salvadoran prison.
If you thought the Biden administration was committing “lawfare” and are applauding Trump’s retribution tour, your complaint was not about having an “enemies list” — just with who was on it.
Trump’s extortion scheme, demanding tribute from cities and elite institutions as if they were conquered territories, is about exacting punishment, of course, but it’s largely about compliance.
Lop off a few heads and other people get nervous about lifting theirs up. That goes for protesters and administrators and mayors and just about everyone else. The beatings will continue until morale improves. Trump’s big idea, if “idea” isn’t too generous a word, is to take hard, wild swings and expect everyone who doesn’t get hit to race to comply before the hammer comes down again — and to get in an as many swings as he can before courts or lawmakers or anyone else can even react. That’s why Manhattan medical giant NYU Langone is scrubbing references to its “diverse students” and the word “marginalized” from its website and policy documents and reconsidering words as harmless as “vulnerable” for fear of incurring Trump’s ire. You don’t need to love all things DEI to recognize that executive orders criminalizing an “ideology” without even defining it are meant to coerce silence and violate what had been the bedrock American principle that the government doesn’t get to pick speech winners and losers. That crude approach appears to be working. It’s not just NYU Langone, which was unlucky enough to have its memo leak first. Nearly every lawyer is advising the institutions they work for to tone down their language, trim their sails and hope the lightning strikes someone else. Columbia’s board is reportedly trying to figure out how to meet Trump’s terms, including placing its Middle Eastern studies department in “academic receivership” despite the damage that would do to the institution’s independence — and despite the fact that Trump hasn’t even said he’ll restore the money if it complies, only that he won’t negotiate at all until it does. New York has talked a big game about progressive values, but those are being tested as never before. Only a handful of other schools have called out the shakedown, reversing the famous Benjamin Franklin quip at the signing of the Declaration of Independence about how “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Most everyone is keeping quiet, hoping someone else gets hung first. New York has talked a big game about progressive values, but those are being tested as never before. The rest of the country is watching to see how America’s biggest city, and Trump’s hometown, will handle the tough years ahead as voters decide whether to put up or shut up. If there’s a mayoral candidate willing to actually lead before voters give them the job by talking about the tough times and hard choices that are coming as the federal government cuts funding to New York City and pressures whoever’s mayor to comply with his diktats, this is the time to find out if New Yorkers are serious or not about wanting a profile in courage.
Harry Siegel
Harry Siegel is a senior editor at the newsroom The City, a columnist for the New York Daily News and the producer and a co-host of the "FAQ NYC" podcast. 
