WASHINGTON — President Trump joked Friday that he could be “the greatest communist in history” as he blasted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly approved rent freeze and a trio of socialist triumphs in House primary elections.
Trump said barring the owners of nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments from charging tenants more money for two years — approved Thursday by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board — would lead to ruin.
“I’ll be honest, I think I’d be the greatest communist in history,” Trump joked to religious conservatives at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference following Mamdani’s week of policy and political wins.
“Communism is very easy to sell, it destroys everything, but it’s very easy.”
“The problem is, after two or three years, the country is a disaster area. The country fails,” Trump said.
“Always so easy to sell that first year, you’re the most popular … but you’ll start living in squalor.”
The populist president and socialist mayor struck up an unlikely friendship last year, but Trump said Friday that the rent freeze is poised to turn his hometown into “ghettos and slums.”
“[Mamdani] said he was going to do this in his campaign, but nobody thought he was serious,” said the billionaire real estate developer turned chief executive.
“What the mayor doesn’t say is that these buildings will soon turn into ghettos and slums and that everybody will continue leaving New York,” Trump predicted.
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“And as this spreads throughout the country, very much like an uncontrollable form of cancer, the country itself will be taken down. It will be Third World — strictly Third World.”
Trump called the freeze unfair to landlords due to “the fact that energy, supplies, real estate taxes and just about everything else has gone up.”
“They’re basically confiscating their property,” he said.
Trump also said victories by three Mamdani allies in House primaries on Tuesday should concern his religious conservative audience. Two of the winners are part of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the third is a former DSA member.
The self-declared socialists, whom Republicans are already citing as a base-motivating factor ahead of the November midterms, “want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” Trump said.”These are not social democrats, these are hardcore godless communists,” he claimed. “This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence.”
