Senator Ted Cruz didn’t hold back on Hannity this week, slamming far-left New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and warning voters that the city’s crime crisis would only worsen under his leadership. The Texas Republican torched Mamdani’s radical agenda—particularly his calls to abolish the NYPD—and predicted it would lead to “a whole lot more murders.”
Cruz’s comments came in the wake of yet another brazen shooting in Midtown Manhattan, a city where crime has been rising and public confidence in safety continues to erode. “If you want to stop violent crime, the way you do it is you support law enforcement. You support the police,” Cruz said. “You support the Second Amendment. The right every one of us has to defend ourselves, to defend our family, to defend our children.”
Instead, Cruz argued, Democrats have taken the opposite approach: disarming law-abiding citizens while coddling criminals. He criticized the left’s knee-jerk response to mass shootings, which he said focuses more on gun control than on holding violent offenders accountable.
The senator didn’t stop there. He took a swipe at Senate Democrats for what he described as their lax border policies and their willingness to turn a blind eye to the dangers posed by criminal illegal aliens. “They fly down to El Salvador and they have daiquiris with MS-13 members, with violent criminals, with human traffickers,” Cruz said, accusing the party of advocating for “more murderers in America, more child molesters in America, more gang members in America.”
But it was Zohran Mamdani who drew Cruz’s harshest rebuke. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a prominent defund-the-police advocate, Mamdani has called for drastic overhauls to the criminal justice system and the dismantling of the NYPD. That vision, Cruz argued, would plunge New York City into chaos.
“You put up Comrade Mamdani… what he wants to do is abolish the New York Police Department,” Cruz said. “There will be a whole lot more murders in New York City if Comrade Mamdani is elected. And they’re perfectly fine with that as long as he gets to take away your constitutional rights.”
Cruz’s blistering remarks reflect a growing concern among conservatives that major cities are becoming breeding grounds for lawlessness due to progressive policies that handcuff police, demonize legal gun ownership, and enable criminals. With New York voters heading to the polls later this year, Mamdani’s extreme platform is drawing scrutiny not just from Republican lawmakers, but from nervous residents worried about what kind of city they’ll be living in if law enforcement is gutted.
As the mayoral race heats up, the battle lines are becoming clear: pro-police versus anti-cop, law and order versus social experimentation. And if Cruz is right, the stakes aren’t just political—they’re life and death.