In a speech marking America’s 250th anniversary, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani rejected President Donald Trump’s view of the nation, and especially its immigrants, without naming him directly.
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Mamdani criticized Trump’s immigration policies, sitting behind George Washington’s desk in New York City Hall and flanked by recently-naturalized U.S. citizens, rebuking the view of “the powerful” that America “becomes less the more people it welcomes.”
“America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit how small they are. How weak, how unoriginal,” the mayor said.
He added that “the irony” of American exceptionalism was that the country’s history was often written “by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.”
Mamdani’s office told NBC News this week that the mayor would deliver a “major address” marking the country’s semiquincentennial, another major step onto the national political stage after three of his endorsed candidates defeated incumbents and incumbent-endorsed candidates in New York Democratic House primaries last month.
His speech comes hours before Trump delivers his own address commemorating the country’s 250th birthday from Mount Rushmore late Friday evening.
Mamdani was surrounded by some of America’s newest citizens waving U.S. flags the same week that the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, dealing a major blow to Trump’s immigration agenda.
“The work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, and it belongs to us all. It belongs, too, to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized,” Mamdani said.
“Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel, the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American, too,” said Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018.
The mayor called “division” the “oldest” and “cheapest” trick in politics.
“At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another,” Mamdani said. “Time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”
He concluded his address with a pitch for the future.
“Those ideals upon which our nation was built, they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them,” he said, moments before ending his address.
“Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived, a nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America, the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection,” he added.
Mamdani called it a “privilege” to live in a nation where each of its inhabitants can shape.
“What a responsibility each of us possesses to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores, the greatness that for 250 years has been America,” Mamdani concluded.
