New York is quietly bracing for a Donald Trump seizure of the country’s biggest city. Nearly all of the most prominent civic leaders across New York have been meeting behind the scenes for weeks now, in anticipation of the possibility that Donald Trump could send the National Guard or other federal agents into New York City, multiple top elected officials tell me.
Fearing what Trump might do in response to Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor and alarmed by the idea that New York City might suffer under presidential retribution, Gov. Kathy Hochul has moved to set up a virtual war room and hold a series of talks with law enforcement officials, business leaders, and activist groups aimed at blocking or softening any federal intrusions. Yet more gatherings are being pulled together, including with New York’s most prominent clergy members and veterans groups, some of which have meetings around Veterans Day next week.
“The objective is to prevent, and if we can’t prevent, then hopefully we’ll be delaying,” Jackie Bray, the state’s homeland security and emergency services director — she’s Hochul’s point person on preparations — said. “And if something goes wrong, then we have to work through it. The planning behind all three is quite real.”
The level of planning and coalition-building, not previously reported, is intended to remove any excuse for Trump to send the National Guard or active-duty troops into Washington.
New York officials have watched for months as Trump has deployed the National Guard, I.C.E. agents, and uniformed military into other cities, and they braced for similar efforts in the president’s hometown. Hochul has had an on-again, off-again relationship with Trump, who has taken an intense interest in New York, but she’s told people she worries that allowing Mamdani to win would give the president his entrée into effectively federalizing the city.
Last month, the governor called a wide array of activist and labor groups — including the A.C.L.U., the powerhouse local S.E.I.U., and grassroots network Indivisible — to her Manhattan office. She urged them at the meeting to find ways to work constructively with one another and New York officials, so that, whether in violence or vandalism, it would not provide a pretext for Trump to send in federal troops as he had in Los Angeles this summer, according to persons present.
Hochul assured the various groups that any protests they mounted would be shielded by state and city law enforcement, but that they needed to try to keep a lid on things — and not let their supporters provoke the police and thus effectively clear the way for Trump’s arrival.
The groups themselves recognized the value of order, too, and of not handing Trump the sort of made-for-TV street chaos that he fantasizes about, pledging their own contribution to keeping what discipline they can over activists.
The governor also convened a gathering of business leaders late last month and is planning another next week, with a similar purpose in mind: developing a combined front across ideological lines to ensure that no Trump takeover occurs.
Bray has been messaging an array of state officials and staying in touch with the outgoing mayor, Eric Adams’ administration — most notably police commissioner Jessica Tisch, whom she’s close to and whom Mamdani has committed to keeping.
Tisch struck the first notes of what will soon be a public campaign earlier this fall, saying she was “revolted by the idea of the militarization of our streets” and that when it came to the New York Police Department, “we’ve got this.”
Pressed on whether after-the-fact crime statistics might in fact be the generally backward-looking measure of public safety reformers have long said they should be, Hochul and Tisch have taken to updating reporters over New York City’s recently tumbling crime stats as if engaging in a show-don’t-tell experiment to prove the man from D.C. — and not their handling of things — is a solution in need of looking for a problem here.
Subway crime declined in October: It was as low as last October — which, during the Covid year of 2020, was one of the lowest-crime months in the transit system’s history — and the first 10 months of this year also recorded historic lows on the number of citywide shootings.
“By strategically investing in public safety and targeting our interventions, crimes across our subway system have officially hit a historic low,” said Hochul.
But Hochul and her allies know they have to do so even more aggressively now on the PR front after Mamdani was elected.
They’re planning a broader operation in November and December to try to prevent federal agents from entering the city, recruiting clergy members and veterans into their cause.
“The people who I’ve worked with who are in public office and have served just know to the core of their being that this is so fundamentally wrong and unconstitutional to use our military against American citizens,” Rep. Pat Ryan, an upstate New York Democrat and Army veteran who was involved in the planning, told me. “We want to make sure New Yorkers hear from those who have served.
He also pointed to the country’s founding aversion to being made to quarter troops, and called those trying to do so now “un-American,” promising that he would send out a “patriotic call” ahead of next year’s 250th anniversary of the country.
The planners have also started reaching out to faith leaders, and they are going to ramp up that work this month, Hochul aides tell me. Ryan has already reached out to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was keen on a pre-emptive campaign and floated the idea of staging a message event at the Statue of Liberty.
“We are very concerned about what Trump will do after the (Mamdani) inauguration,” Sharpton told me. The veteran civil rights leader said he was already talking to pastors across religious, as well as denominational, lines, and they would present “a moral appeal: don’t let New York become Los Angeles.”
But, like Hochul, Sharpton also knows the city’s business titans and is trying to recruit them to push back that a federal takeover would hurt the financial capital, in much the same way San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie had tech execs nudge Trump not to send troops there.
“Our plan before the first of the year is to show the diversity and the depth of New Yorkers who just don’t think this is a good idea for New York, and that we got this,” Bray said in an interview with me.
She also has emphasized that Hochul is open to using the state guard — noting that last year the governor sent them into the New York City subway system for a time — but that she wants to make her own decision. “If we need to roar out our guard, we’ll roar out our guard,” Bray said.
But instead of having to face that question, New York officials would rather leapfrog Trump and win the public relations war.
That’s “prebunking some stuff,” as Bray described it. “We’re going to expose what has happened in other cities to New Yorkers and talk to New Yorkers about what the Trump administration’s saying and what reality is.”
It’s what happened in other cities this summer, when Trump sent Marines into Los Angeles, that first prompted Hochul to act.
The governor told Bray to reach out to her California counterparts and ask what they wish they had known in the weeks leading up to Trump’s incursion. Then, when ICE increased its detention of suspected illegal migrants in Chicago, Hochul officials intensified their planning efforts. They have established a kind of virtual war room in which aides across state departments in Albany and New York hold daily discussions, according to people familiar with the effort, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, and then started reaching out to non-governmental officials.
Less certain is the character Mamdani will assume — particularly as he gets closer to being sworn in on Jan. 1. Hochul officials have held initial discussions with the mayor-elect’s transition team, but they have generally been coordinating with leaders of the city’s police and emergency services, which are still technically part of the Adams administration.
More Interesting
Unlike New York’s two top congressional Democrats — Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer —Hochul made peace with Mamdani, campaigning alongside him in the general election. The governor didn’t just push Mamdani to promise to keep Tisch as police commissioner, but also privately pushed Mamdani not to get too big for his britches in 2026, when she’s up and a host of New York House races may well decide control of Congress.
Mamdani did pledge to retain Tisch — who’s now more certain than ever to keep his job if the city is plunged into a Trump-made crisis — but a fiery victory speech on Tuesday makes it unclear how much he’ll temper his progressive outlook.
“Donald Trump is not sending the National Guard to protect people; he is doing it to create fear,” said Dora Pekec, a Mamdani spokesperson. “If he really wanted those federal agents to go where there’s the most crime, he’d send them to eight out of ten states run by Republican governors. Zohran Mamdani will be a partner with Governor Hochul and stand as a firewall against Trump’s petty assaults on New Yorkers.”
The president has vowed to cut federal dollars to Mamdani’s New York, and however unfulfilled that promise may remain (pending a series of court decisions), it pales next to the harsh ICE deployment he’s already inflicted on Chicago.
City and state officials were rattled, however, by the I.C.E. raid last month on Manhattan’s Canal Street, where migrants who have long sold their wares along a bustling downtown thoroughfare were rounded up. It was a test of what the city, its leaders, law enforcement, and citizens would do. And it was almost certainly just the opening test.
