New York's Radical Gamble

Four years before his upset victory, Zohran Mamdani was starving in a freezing van alongside ruined taxi drivers.

[Speaker 2]: It is three o’clock in the morning. A Tuesday in late October, 2021. And we are on the pavement outside City Hall in lower Manhattan. [Speaker 1]: It’s cold. [Speaker 2]: It is bitterly cold. And parked near the park gates is a rental van. Inside, a man named Augustine Tang is trying to sleep. He’s shivering under a pile of blankets, but the cold is coming from the inside out because Augustine hasn’t eaten in five days. [Speaker 1]: Augustine isn’t homeless. In fact, on paper, he’s a business owner. He is the inheritor of a New York City taxi medallion-a piece of tin that was supposed to be a golden ticket to the American Dream. instead, it became a debt trap. [Speaker 2]: A five-hundred-and-thirty thousand dollar debt trap. [Speaker 1]: [pauses] Half a million dollars. [Speaker 2]: Right. And he is starving himself, alongside a dozen other drivers, to force the city to look at them. To look at the financial ruin the city itself helped create. [Speaker 1]: And this is the moment I want to start with. Because Augustine describes this specific night as the breaking point. He told a reporter later about lying in that van, watching the garbage trucks roll by, feeling his body shut down. [Speaker 2]: Here is exactly how he described it. He said: "As two days turned into five days, I started feeling really weak. Blurred vision, headaches, chills. I started getting really cold... Every day I woke up thinking, 'Is today going to be a day I'm going to break my promise?' But then I’d look at the guys around me, some in wheelchairs, and I knew I couldn't eat." [Speaker 1]: [pauses] The man sleeping next to Augustine that night-also starving, also shivering-was a twenty-nine-year-old state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani. [Speaker 2]: And today, four years later, that assemblyman is the Mayor-elect of New York City. [Speaker 1]: So the question is [pauses] can he actually do it? [Speaker 2]: Do what, specifically? [Speaker 1]: Survive. Zohran Mamdani just won an upset victory on a platform of "Zohranomics"-rent freezes, free buses, city-owned grocery stores. He is a socialist taking over the financial capital of the world. [Speaker 2]: But he is walking into City Hall in January 2026. Which is the exact same month Donald Trump returns to the White House. [Speaker 1]: You have a radical city hall colliding with a hostile federal government, plus a panicked real estate sector threatening to pull their money out of the city. [Speaker 2]: And what we are going to try to understand today is whether this experiment-a socialist mayor trying to "Trump-proof" New York-is a new path forward for the American left. Or if the city is about to go bankrupt. [Speaker 1]: To understand why New York voted for this-why they voted for a man who wants the government to run grocery stores-you have to understand the betrayal. [Speaker 2]: The taxi medallions. [Speaker 1]: The medallions. For decades, the City of New York artificially inflated the value of these medallions. They marketed them, specifically to immigrants, as the safest investment you could make. Better than the stock market. [Speaker 2]: And people bought in. They took out massive loans. And then, the city let companies like Uber and Lyft flood the streets. The value of the medallions crashed overnight. [Speaker 1]: But the debt stayed. [Speaker 2]: The debt stayed. By 2021, the average driver was drowning in half a million dollars of debt. And it wasn’t just numbers on a page. It was…