From behind George Washington’s desk inside New York City Hall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked the nation’s 250th anniversary with an address that sought to redefine “American exceptionalism” against a tide of anti-immigrant and anti-democratic forces under President Donald Trump and his allies.
The mayor, surrounded by a group of recently naturalized American citizens holding American flags, did not explicitly name the president in his remarks, but Friday’s 14-minute address amounted to a rebuke of the administration’s anti-immigration agenda and the “forces of division” that undermine the nation’s founding principles.
“For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best,” he said in his remarks. “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.”
He condemned the “small,” “weak” and “unoriginal” ideologies that have sought to define America within “the arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.”
“America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit,” he said.
open image in gallery“Throughout the nation’s history, those who led with “exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another,” Mamdani said.
“Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest,” he continued. “But time and again — including 250 years ago — those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”
Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the city’s first-ever Muslim chief executive, is also a naturalized citizen. The 34-year-old mayor moved from Uganda to the U.S. at seven years old and became a citizen in 2018.
He drew on New York City’s legacy as a beacon for immigrants to pursue “the promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals.”
The work of “fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence … endures, and it belongs to us all,” he said.
open image in galleryAs the country enters its 250th anniversary, New York is “a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” he said.
The wealthiest country in the world is one “where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more” and where “masked agents” are “terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans,” Mamdani said.
“We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors — without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have — as ICE invades our neighborhoods,” he continued.
“There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: ‘Love it or leave it,’ they say,” Mamdani said. “But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?”
The ideals on which the country was built “are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them,” he said.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly used citizenship and immigration law as a cudgel in the president’s government-wide deportation project, with administration officials and Republican members of Congress routinely threatening to strip citizenship from their political opponents.
Mamdani’s victory in last year’s mayoral election fueled a wave of attacks against the mayor from Republican officials. After Mamdani’s endorsed candidates for Congress saw primary victories this year, Trump demanded his allies to “stop this horrible threat of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.”
Mamdani, who has forged an unlikely alliance with the president to boost federal support for New York projects, has repeatedly refuted the label while courting support for a democratic socialist slate.
“Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived. A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America — the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection,” Mamdani said in Friday’s address.
“What a privilege each of us has, to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape,” he continued. “What a responsibility each of us possesses, to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever-closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores — the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America. Thank you. God Bless America, God Bless New York City, and happy Fourth of July.”