On Thursday morning, Time magazine released its latest cover dated September 8 with the lead story “The Meaning of Zohran Mamdani.” Predictably, the story by Mark Chiusano was as mind-numbingly stupid and weak-kneed as a profile of Barack Obama in the mid-2000s.
Chiusano called him “very eloquent,” “fun,” and “more gifted than almost any of his peers,” and facing “adulation” plus “notoriety” in the face of “xenophobic death threats.”
The fluff came out as thick as mud with Chiusano fawning right off the bat that “[i]t’s not easy to move around New York City as Zohran Mamdani anymore” and taking a walk downtown draws “star-treatment, in multiple languages and from all generations” despite “some heckling.”
“All this is new: the adulation, the notoriety, the xenophobic death threats that have prompted an entourage of men with spaghetti earpieces. Before 2025, basically no one knew who Mamdani was. Over the course of eight months, the democratic socialist and backbench state assemblyman went from local long shot to likely mayor of America’s biggest city. Suddenly he is a main character in national politics,” he swooned.
Chiusano predictably framed opposition as racist, calling it “a dark new birtherism” as a mere obstacle to what “progressives” believe are a politics that’s “principled, pocketbook-focused, and online...an electrifying answer for a moribund party.”
He described Mamdani’s comments to him as someone “want[ing] to be a mayor who breaks down barriers between politicians and the public.” Citing “more than 30” interviews, the Time tool said “Mamdani emerges as both more interesting and more complicated than the caricatures suggest” to the point that “[h]e is a movement politician...in touch with the streets.”
Rather, Chiusano declared, “[h]e is a very eloquent, very young man who is both less experienced than his predecessors and more gifted than almost any of his peers at connecting with the party’s voters” and “an ideologue interested in creative solutions, less radical than painted when you dig into his policy proposals and yet more sincere in his left-wing ambitions.”
Finally arriving at his coziness with anti-Semites (other than mentioning an “anti-Semite” heckle in the second graph), Chiusano boasted “Mamdani’s master class” in the primary came wearing “the mantle of democratic socialism” and “refus[ing] to back away from criticism of that country’s war in Gaza” despite New York City being “the largest Jewish community outside Israel.”
The fluff went on (click “expand”):
The prospect of Mamdani’s mayoralty scandalized many of New York’s power brokers, some of whom vowed to stop him in the November general election. It also alarmed many national Democrats, who see Mamdani’s politics—his past support for defunding the police, his criticism of Israel and defense of the Palestinian cause, his proposals for city-owned grocery stores and higher taxes on the wealthy—as a dangerous step left for a party searching for its footing in the Trump era. “Tackling the city’s challenges will require top-notch management and fresh approaches,” James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, tells me, “rather than the same old ideas like raising taxes and restricting rents.”
In the meantime, Mamdani’s shoe-leather primary campaign has given way to his indoor era. As a newcomer now in training for one of America’s toughest jobs, he lives life in 15-minute increments, working to assure skeptics that he’s ready and reasonable and won’t send businesses fleeing to Florida.
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At stake is the trust of voters thousands of miles from Midtown, for whom Mamdani would be a test case—another failed figurehead of a major Democratic city, or the leader who can get people believing in government again.
After fawning over his rise in New York state politics and even having his chief of staff vetted by “New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) reps,” Chiusano framed Mamdani’s elitist education and upbringing by a Columbia University professor and Oscar-nominee filmmaker as a way of “straddling the city’s divides” and preparations for a “world of progressive activism.”
Like a good socialist, he took part a few years ago in “a 15-day hunger strike” for taxi drivers that ended with him “in a wheelchair.”
Chisuano tried to humanize Mamdani as well, going to his roommate in Albany for legislative sessions to find out the New York City mayoral candidate “likes his TikToks” along with “reality-TV shows like Love Island” and “a big scoop of peanut butter” ahead of Ramadan fasts.
This went into a gooey look at his primary campaign bid symbolizing “a marked shift from the doom and gloom enveloping” Democrats to someone “having fun” with door-knockers “a weapon.” It was here he worked in an insistence Mamdani wouldn’t defund the police (click “expand”):
The snappy Trump-voter video went viral, helping Mamdani introduce himself to voters through the prism of policy. He cut more videos: talking “halal-flation” with street-cart workers, jumping into the wintry ocean off Coney Island to dramatize “freezing” the rent. They were a marked shift from the doom and gloom enveloping the party. Mamdani seemed intent on having fun.
Some of this was natural for a digital native. Mamdani also credits his wife Rama Duwaji, 28, an illustrator and animator with work in the New Yorker.
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The canvassers themselves were also becoming a weapon. Door-knocking is central to New York City races that demand retail politics, and progressive challengers often boast about their volunteers. But Mamdani was doing it on a different level.
The operation was unleashed not just on his far-left base but also new and more moderate voters. There was always going to be a section of the electorate that would not stomach old tweets like “Taxation isn’t theft. Capitalism is,” and his posts supporting the “defund the police” movement. Yet the city must consult the state on tax changes, and during the campaign Mamdani notably backed away from the “defund” position, promising to sustain the NYPD’s head count and praising its current technocratic commissioner. He spent more time channeling the economic insecurities of a broad group of New Yorkers into simple policy slogans like “fast and free buses.” He framed such ideas as common sense, not Leninist. Supporters noted they had precedent: the billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg once discussed free mass transit, an experiment that has been tried in jurisdictions as distant as Boston (which has multiple free bus routes) and the entire country of Luxembourg.
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His connections in elite New York circles helped land the support of local icons like Alison Roman of cookbook fame and model Emily Ratajkowski. Opponents scoffed, not realizing that Mamdani was experiencing a virtuously reinforcing cycle of vibes, field, and message: the names brought attention, which brought volunteers to knock on doors of people who thought groceries cost too much.
As for his support for the pro-intifada crowd, Time fretted his views on “‘globalize the intifada’...threatened to derail the close of his primary campaign” and that his initial comments after Hamas’s terror attack on October 7, 2023 were muted.
But, in Chiusano’s telling, it’s no problem as Mamdani “has often talked about the problem of anti-semitism and the need for anti-hate-crime funding, and his campaign attracted Jewish supporters—including many on board with his advocacy for Gaza” with Mamdani himself saying he believes “[t]he job of mayor is to” both “deliver” and “take care of New Yorkers.”
The conclusion was just as pathetic as its opening (click “expand”):
For some national Democrats, the Don’t Worry Tour will never be enough. Their concern is Mamdani’s very presence in office, which would punctuate the party’s leftward turn in major cities and give ammunition to Republicans eager to paint them as outside the mainstream in the 2026 midterms.
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One day in mid-July, Mamdani opted for the train en route to a musicians’ union event. Such trains are the city’s public forum, and soon the nominee was swarmed once more on the uptown R. A kid with shaking hands approached: “Mr. Zohran, can we get a photo?” Someone claimed Mamdani must know her. Someone else offered him their priority seat. Four stops later, the train deposited him near Times Square, and Mamdani was out in the street again, walking by a woman passed out on the sidewalk, a thicket of competing hot-dog and falafel stands, a building security guard who shouted “I voted for you!” from across the street. It was the complex and ever changing tapestry of New York, and also a totem of the kind of politics that Mamdani said he wants to practice: “one that is in person, that is in public, that is with people.”
