Much of politics is asking for money, as anyone who has received text messages from, say, their close personal friend Nancy Pelosi can attest. This is even more true if you are a young socialist mayor with many big expensive plans: for Zohran Mamdani, becoming New York City’s leader has required swift public training in the art of making such requests.

Currently, for example, the Mayor is asking the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, to let New York City raise taxes on wealthy residents, something she has made clear that she does not wish to do. During the mayoral campaign, Mamdani presented taxing the rich as a first step toward fulfilling his policy promises, but also as a slogan in itself—“tax the rich” was useful shorthand for an entire political orientation. In October, when Hochul addressed a preëlection Mamdani rally in Forest Hills, the crowd heckled her by chanting “Tax the rich.” Mamdani resolved the tension by joining her onstage and taking her hand; cheers rose from the audience. Since assuming office, he has attempted to maintain the position he held in that moment: standing at the head of a movement with stark demands while offering himself to the Governor as an ally. He has been at pains to emphasize their partnership, particularly on child care, as a contrast with the bad old days when Andrew Cuomo bedevilled Bill de Blasio from up in Albany. Mamdani endorsed Hochul’s reëlection bid in early February.

The power of playing nice was visible—in the way that a billboard or skyscraper is visible—during a meeting between Mamdani and Donald Trump last week. On Thursday, Mamdani made an unannounced (and initially unexplained) trip to Washington, D.C. His public schedule for the day had been empty, to the consternation of City Hall reporters; he wore a mask and a hat on his flight to avoid being recognized. The secrecy was apparently in deference to the President’s desire for privacy.

Mamdani emerged from this shroud of mystery triumphant, posting a photograph on X of himself, firmly straight-faced, standing alongside the grinning President. A press release that followed explained that Trump was entertaining a proposal from the Mayor to build twelve thousand units of affordable housing in Queens with more than twenty-one billion dollars in federal grants. The evident coup de grâce was a mock up of a Daily News front page that Mamdani’s staff had provided to the President. “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD,” the wood read, above a reproduction of the President’s glowering official portrait. “Trump Delivers 12,000+ Homes. Most Since 1973.” As a feat of ego-stroking, this ploy was breathtakingly unsubtle and yet, to judge by Trump’s smile as he held the page aloft (in a photo taken by his own staff, according to Mamdani’s communications director), entirely effective. Later that day, Mamdani’s tête-à-tête also appeared to have secured the release of a Columbia student who had been kidnapped by ICE that morning.

The day before the Mayor flew to D.C., he had skipped a “Tax the Rich” rally in Albany. Organized by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (which Mamdani has called his political home) and Our Time for an Affordable NYC (an independent organizing group dedicated to advancing Mamdani’s agenda), the event was co-sponsored by almost two dozen other advocacy groups and unions, and billed as an Albany takeover: there were speeches, singing, a march, and a delegation from New Yorkers United for Child Care with kids in tow. The goal was to push the state government—and especially the Governor—to support legislation raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Hochul “needs to understand that it’s her fight, too,” Phara Souffrant Forrest, a State Assembly member who represents, among other areas, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, told me. “There’s so much room for the executive and the legislature to work together.” Forrest, who is a member of the D.S.A.’s “Socialists in Office” caucus, has introduced the Fair Share Act, which would allow a two-per-cent income tax on city residents who earn more than a million dollars a year.

“I’ve been told that the Governor is not very happy with us,” Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the N.Y.C.-D.S.A., said from the rally stage, with a note of pride. He went on to riff about witnessing the wealth of the Tisch family (of which Mamdani’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, is a scion) during his days as a gallery assistant. “Alice Tisch had paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that sculpture,” he recalled, of a work owned by the commissioner’s aunt. This was, presumably, the sort of scene that the Mayor had been inclined to avoid.

His choice not to attend was reportedly a gesture toward maintaining good relations with the Governor, but it presented a challenge for his comrades: a headlining mayor might have made it easier to get New Yorkers onto predawn, post-blizzard buses outside Barclays Center that Wednesday morning. His absence also left an opening for someone to serve as the event’s public face and master of ceremonies.

That role had been accepted by the City Council member Chi Ossé—although, by his own account, somewhat reluctantly. “It took multiple asks,” he told me on Tuesday afternoon. “I really do not love going up to Albany,” he said. “It’s cold. It’s far away.” Getting there would require a 5:45 a.m. departure. “But this is for a good cause,” he added. Ossé has emerged as a bit of a foil for Mamdani—he is another young left-wing upstart with an aptitude for explainer videos—though his choices have seemed to lack the strategic discipline and focus that defined Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. (Late last year, Ossé sought the D.S.A.’s endorsement for a longshot primary challenge to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jefferies, and Mamdani took time out from his mayoral transition to make the case to D.S.A. members against endorsing him.) In Albany, Ossé filmed a video, rife with quick cuts, of himself walking around briskly in a dark suit and talking about the Fair Share Act.

Still, his ambivalence about the day’s trek may have been representative. The organizers had chosen a rally venue that could accommodate forty-three hundred attendees, but the turnout on Wednesday was a bit under two thousand, Divya Sundaram, the deputy director of Our Time, said. She called the event “proof of concept” for her group’s push to organize New Yorkers beyond Election Day. “We would have loved to have the Mayor there,” she told me after the rally. “And also, you know, this is the tension of organizing from the outside, independently of the administration. Sometimes, we have to lead.” Hochul, as it happened, missed the rally, too; she was in New York City.

Mamdani deviated sharply from his general strategy of playing nice at a February press conference where he proposed his preliminary budget. In the event that the Governor does not deliver a tax increase, as few expect her to, Mamdani said that he would ask the City Council to increase property taxes, a prospect that was greeted with general horror and incredulity—“a non-starter,” in the words of the City Council speaker, Julie Menin. According to Mamdani, taxing the rich and taxing property owners represented the “two paths to bridge the city’s inherited budget gap,” even if the latter would place the burden on “the backs of working- and middle-class New Yorkers” (as the rueful Mayor put it).

It’s unclear how Mamdani might go about forcing Hochul’s hand. The Governor, at the moment, has no challengers from the left, and, in any case, Mamdani has already endorsed her. He issued his budget demand the day after he and the Governor announced an agreement to provide $1.5 billion (in addition to money she has already promised for expanding child care) toward the city’s budget gap. In January, Mamdani had said this gap stood at twelve billion dollars, a figure he later updated to seven billion, and then to $5.4 billion.

The preliminary budget will go to the City Council for public hearings this spring, after which the Mayor will issue an updated version, followed by more negotiations, with a finalized budget required by the end of June. This process has traditionally involved a degree of political theatre, albeit of a sort less theatrical than Trump and Mamdani’s public-facing performances. New York’s mayors typically underestimate the city’s revenue and then demand cuts, which are later (at least partially) restored when better-than-officially-expected revenues arrive—a ritual choreography known as “the budget dance.” Michael Bloomberg, for example, would typically propose closing firehouses; the City Council would typically protect them.

“I think we are in a different world,” Andrew Perry, the Director of Fiscal Research at the Fiscal Policy Institute, who has written about the dance, told me. Mamdani’s revenue estimates look realistic rather than usefully bleak; notwithstanding his perplexing series of revisions, the gap appears to be real. If Mamdani does not receive the money he’s asked for, he will be in the unhappy position of having to ask New York to spend less—a possibility he elided when he mapped out his “two paths” for the budget. Doing so will not be easy.

“If you want to find five billion dollars in the budget, you have to go to things that cost a lot of money, and the three biggest spending items in the city are schools, social services, and police,” Perry said. “So you’d be talking about hiring freezes for teachers and not meeting our class-size mandate. You’d be talking about having to go to City Council and roll back social services that New Yorkers are currently entitled to. And you’d be talking about relitigating the police budget, which I don’t think there’s an appetite for on any side. That’s what you’d have to be talking about—there aren’t other, secret places where you can find five billion dollars.”

Several days after the rally, I caught up with Ossé at his office near City Hall, where he lamented a water stain on the drop ceiling. “I shot a video recently about dog shit, and if you look up in the video, there’s just, like, a stain,” he said. “I don’t have one of the nicest offices. I don’t have the worst office, either—there are some windowless offices here.” He told me that the Albany gathering had had “great energy,” and that he’d heard a number of productive meetings had taken place. “It was a really beautiful, well-produced event,” he said. “There was lighting, there was a stage, there was a backstage, there were performers, there were cue cards, there were people seated behind me with signs that were produced for the event. There was a large crowd.” Especially in the context of Trump’s tax cuts, Ossé called taxing the rich “a moral duty,” if not an easy sell politically. “I know we don’t have the most leverage at this point in time,” he said. He speculated that perhaps after a successful reëlection campaign the Governor would change her mind. ♦