After a dream campaign, Mamdani faces the nightmare of running New York City

The mayor-elect now has the challenge of running a complex bureaucracy while balancing a budget crunch, Trump's ire and his supporters' expectations

- Joshua Chaffin & James Fanelli

Zohran Mamdani speaking to reporters in Flushing Meadows Corona Park on Wednesday.

(AFP)

The capacious Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, had been swelling for hours with chanting-and drinking-young socialists. At 9:36 p.m. it erupted.

"Mamdani is my mayor! Mamdani is my mayor!" a young woman shouted again and again, as if confirming to herself that the improbable had become reality: A littleknown, Uganda-born, Muslim state assemblyman and avowed socialist was elected New York City mayor.

By daylight, the harsh reality confronting Zohran Mamdani after his fantastical rise was apparent. The 34-year-old, with scant managerial experience, will have to manage a famously ungovernable city in all of its vast complexity.

He will be doing so shadowed by the lofty expectations of his progressive supporters , who have been promised free buses and child care and an affordable city where the working class-not the financial elite-come first.

And then there is President Trump, who has made no secret of his desire to brutalize Mamdani's New York for its leftist leanings and use it as a foil ahead of next year's midterm elections.

"If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home," he posted on Truth Social on election eve.

That may be just the start. City elders fear a worst-case scenario in which stepped-up raids in New York City by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents instigate unruly protests which Trump, in turn, responds to by deploying the National Guard, as he has in Chicago and Los Angeles. Imagine Fifth Avenue, one noted, patrolled by military vehicles.