NEW YORK – President Donald Trump is casting a long shadow over New York as he begins to assert unprecedented control over his old home state.
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is locked in a power struggle with billions on the line as Trump moves to dismantle a new toll into Manhattan. The president, meanwhile, has threatened to cripple some of the city’s most powerful institutions unless they comply with his policy agenda.
Columbia University offered a laundry list of concessions Friday after the White House withheld $400 million in funding over its handling of campus protests. A day earlier, Trump announced that Paul Weiss, a Democratic-aligned law firm in Manhattan, would abandon its diversity initiatives and perform pro bono work for the administration.
Trump had threatened to bar its lawyers from federal contracts, citing the firm’s past association with an attorney who investigated the president in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
The strong-arm tactics are not isolated to New York. Trump has targeted law firms elsewhere over their perceived hostility, while universities across the country risk loss of federal funding if they run afoul of administration policy.
On Wednesday, the White House withheld $175 million from the University of Pennsylvania over its policy on transgender participation in women’s sports.
But nowhere have Trump’s interventions been so sweeping or polarizing as in New York. It has become the epicenter of debate over the president’s controversial deportation agenda after federal agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and green card holder who led campus protests against Israel.
At the same time, Trump has fanned a leadership crisis in New York City after the Justice Department moved to drop federal corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams. The dismissal prompted allegations of a quid pro quo arrangement and calls for Adams’s resignation. Adams denies the allegations and refuses to step down.
Trump’s determination to involve himself in New York’s affairs has created a series of uncomfortable choices for its Democratic leaders. Hochul, the New York governor, opted not to use her authority to remove Adams from office despite immense pressure from within her party, instead promising to place new guardrails on the remainder of his tenure.
In terms of her relationship with Trump, she has alternated between unabashed opposition, declaring she would retaliate after the president drew “first blood,” and pragmatic cooperation. Hochul has visited the White House twice over the last month to discuss priorities ranging from the redevelopment of Penn Station to energy policy.
“It’s a pressure cooker, and now it’s even worse,” said Joseph Addabbo, a state senator from Trump’s hometown borough of Queens. “I’ve never, ever seen, really, a situation like this, where the president, the governor, and the mayor are all interacting, and it’s not positive, you know – it’s all quite confrontational.”
Hochul, who is up for reelection in 2026, is only willing to give so much ground on immigration enforcement after the Trump administration sued New York last month to end its “sanctuary” laws.
She’s also drawn a red line on congestion pricing, with the Metropolitan Transit Authority fighting the administration in court after it moved to terminate a toll program that is expected to generate $15 billion in revenue.
Hochul has bargaining chips of her own, including new pipelines the president wants New York to green-light. For a time, Democrats even prepared legislation to delay a special election to replace Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a move widely seen as a point of leverage over Trump.
“No matter how much I hate to say it, he’s the goddamn president, and so we’re stuck with him,” Bob Liff, a longtime political operative in New York, said of Hochul’s predicament. “So, she’ll work with him where she can, but she’s not going to throw her state and all of her values under the bus.”
“She’ll fight with him as she has to, and she’ll work with him where she can,” he added.
Adams, for his part, has told city officials not to criticize Trump, reasoning it could jeopardize federal funding, and has broadly committed to cooperating with the president on immigration enforcement. He has agreed to grant federal authorities access to a major New York City jail, in effect creating a carve-out to its sanctuary policies.
Adams is a centrist on immigration, but the cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement is at the center of the quid pro quo allegations.
With Hochul, there are signs the Trump administration wants to make a deal. The Transportation Department delayed the deadline for New York to terminate its toll program by 30 days, mentioning the pipelines specifically in its statement. It has simultaneously threatened MTA funds if the state does not cooperate on other priorities like subway safety in New York City.
The prospect of lost funding has created odd bedfellows on congestion pricing. Addabbo is opposed to the toll program, viewing gaming licenses as a better avenue to raise revenue for the state, but he disagrees with the federal government unilaterally shuttering it without compensation or some way to offset the fiscal impact.
“You just can’t leave us high and dry,” Addabbo said. “And that’s what I’m hoping – I’m hoping the president doesn’t leave New York high and dry on many things, healthcare, transit, you know, basic services.”
“Unless we work out an alternative, I can’t stand for that,” he added. “I can’t support something like that.”
Progressives, meanwhile, are dismayed at what they believe is a flat-footed response to the president. Jabari Brisport, a democratic socialist who represents Brooklyn in the state Senate, said Hochul had been sending mixed signals on Trump.
“I mean, I think she needs to be consistent above all else,” Brisport said. “You know, we have Kathy Hochul in one breath saying she’s going to be the leader of the resistance and then in another breath, not resisting. And it just really destroys credibility when Kathy Hochul, or really other politicians, do that too.”
In the legislature, Brisport will be advocating legislation that prevents New York and its localities from cooperating with federal immigration authorities and guarantees access to legal representation for migrants in the country illegally.
The divisions over Trump mirror those playing out nationally. The president is orchestrating a sweeping rollback of the federal government, slashing tens of thousands of agency jobs, but the top two Democrats in Congress, both from Brooklyn, have taken diverging approaches in how to respond.
In a fight over government funding, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the top Senate Democrat, handed Republicans the votes to avoid what he viewed as a politically costly shutdown, prompting blowback from House Democrats who wanted the party to take a harder line.
Last week, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) offered a delayed and perfunctory vote of confidence in Schumer, who has faced calls to step down from leadership over his shutdown vote.
The dispute over strategy has kept Democrats from mounting a united response to Trump, leaving the courts as one of the only forms of recourse available to the party. New York has led a coalition of Democratic states in challenging his efforts to dismantle federal agencies.
By contrast, Trump’s willingness to intervene in New York politics has been welcomed by state Republicans, who have been locked out of power since 2019, when Democrats took back control of the state Senate. In New York City, a Republican has not been mayor since Michael Bloomberg’s tenure in the early 2000s.
“I think that the new administration and President Trump is pulling the reins tight like he should, because they’ve been loose for much too long,” said Joann Ariola, the minority leader of the New York City Council.
“It’s immigration enforcement, it’s overspending, it’s congestion pricing, it’s overtaxing of the middle class. It’s everything that’s been going on,” she added. “And that’s going to be a bit of a hard pill to swallow, but it’s something that needs to be done.”
Brisport, for his part, panned Trump’s involvement as hypocritical given the GOP’s past support for federalism.
“During his campaign, he pretended to believe in state’s rights and giving more power to the states, but already, we’re seeing him do exactly the opposite – in fact, threatening New York for using our state’s rights,” Brisport said.
Trump has spent his political career feuding with New York, a state he left for Florida claiming mistreatment by its leaders in 2019. Like Hochul, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was forced to adopt a more friendly posture toward Trump in the throes of the pandemic as Trump, then in his first term, threatened to withhold coronavirus relief funding.
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The hostility reached new lows after Trump left office, with New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg launching investigations into his business practices.
Trump would claim to be a victim of political “witch hunts” as he was found liable for civil fraud and later convicted of falsifying business records. A judge sentenced Trump to an “unconditional discharge” in the business records case shortly before he took office again in January, allowing him to avoid jail time or fines.
