New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani faced a fresh wave of conservative fury on Tuesday after invoking Ronald Reagan during an 18 May speech in the Bronx, where he defended a new city-run grocery store and openly rejected the former Republican president's famous scepticism of government.
For context, Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist and Uganda-born lawmaker, has already become a lightning rod in US politics, long before cutting the ribbon on a publicly operated supermarket. His election as mayor of America's largest city unsettled Republicans and moderate Democrats alike, and his policy agenda, from housing to food pricing, has routinely been denounced on the right as hard-left social engineering rather than municipal governance.
