New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave a speech sitting behind the George Washington desk at City Hall on Friday morning to mark America’s 250th birthday.
He was surrounded by recently naturalized citizens.
Mamdani himself is also a naturalized citizen, and the topic is important to him personally.
The speech was given hours before President Trump is expected to give his America 250 address in South Dakota.
“Here, at City Hall, as I sit behind George Washington’s desk, I cannot see all of America. But like so many who came before, I can see New York City. The city I see today looks very different from the one that greeted George Washington,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani on “the promise of America”
Mamdani talked about immigrants coming to New York City and seeing it is an opportunity to forge a new life.
“That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is no relic of the past,” Mamdani said. “It is what brought my family to this city when I was seven years old. My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America. The promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals.”
Mamdani on what “American exceptionalism” means to him
Mamdani spoke about the idea of American exceptionalism.
“American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free. It’s how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West. It’s why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here,” Mamdani said. “And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional. For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best.”
He pointed to the waves of immigrants who were in poverty when they arrived, and believed in various different religions.
“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than anyone else. The truth my friends is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, and it belongs to us all,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani on “the forces of division”
Mamdani then addressed other recently naturalized citizens.
“You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means. The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, 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,” Mamdani said. “The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are. How weak. How unoriginal.”
Mamdani pointed to prior efforts to turn Americans against each other.
“Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress,” Mamdani said.