Larry Kudlow brands Zohran Mamdani a ‘stupid kid’ and ‘throwback to Stalin’ over radical rent plan
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Fox Business host Larry Kudlow torched New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday, branding the newly elected Democrat a “stupid kid” and comparing his housing agenda to Soviet-style communism.
The comments came during Fox Business’ 'The Money Show,' where Kudlow mocked Mamdani’s newly unveiled housing proposal aimed at creating and preserving hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments across the city.
Larry Kudlow likens Mamdani’s housing push to Soviet takeover
Kudlow opened the segment with a sarcastic nod to the 34-year-old mayor, saying he was “proud of him” for staying true to his democratic socialist politics.
“It’s just pure communist, pure Stalinism,” Kudlow said.
The longtime TV host then compared Mamdani’s housing ambitions to the policies of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
“He’s actually a throwback to Stalin in the ’20s, ’30s, and 40s, when the Soviet Union would confiscate the means of production. They would take out the steel mills and the iron mills and the railroads from any private sector hands,” Kudlow continued. “You know, this stupid kid is doing the same thing, because it’s what he thinks is the right thing to do."
Kudlow argued that modern Democrats are increasingly embracing socialism through government regulation and state intervention.
“Nowadays, the modern socialist Democratic Party uses regulatory apparatus to do this kind of thing,” Kudlow said. “This kid’s coming in, and just, he’s just taking the assets and changing ownership… I mean, it’s like setting up little Soviets.”
“The Soviet Union hung around a while,” Co-host Brian Brenberg chimed in, before asking, “Is he doomed, or does this have staying power?”
“He’s just gonna have his fling, and then people are going to boot him out,” Kudlow predicted. “Just boot him out of here.”
Zohran Mamdani rolls out massive housing proposal
Kudlow’s remarks came one day after Mamdani introduced a massive housing initiative that would build 200,000 new rent-stabilized apartments in New York City while preserving another 200,000 existing units. The mayor said the proposal would include $5.6 billion in spending on public housing over the next five years as part of a $22 billion housing package.
Housing affordability has become one of Mamdani’s signature issues. One of his major slogans during last year’s campaign was “Freeze the Rent,” a proposal aimed at halting rent increases on roughly 1 million New York apartments.
In an interview, Mamdani declined to say whether the success of the housing plan would ultimately define his administration, but stressed that affordability remains the city’s biggest issue.
Housing is “the No. 1 driver” of the affordability crisis, Mamdani said, adding that the proposal “is going to deliver the kinds of investments that for too long New Yorkers have been denied.”
“Too often in conversations around housing, there is a sense of a choice that has to be made, a choice between fighting to build more housing or fighting to organize to preserve the housing that we have,” Mamdani said. “And that doesn’t have to be the case any longer.”
“What we actually see the choice is being a government that debates or a government that delivers,” he said, adding that his administration intends to “reckon with the multifaceted nature of the housing crisis and deliver on all of it at once.”
City housing production had already accelerated before Mamdani entered office. According to data cited in the proposal, more than 150,000 new housing units were completed in New York City between 2021 and 2025 — the highest five-year total since the 1960s.
“If the absence of good government created the conditions we now face, the presence of good government can build the solutions we now need,” Mamdani said Tuesday morning.
As his administration developed the proposal, the mayor said that “one thing became increasingly clear: There was no way to drive down housing costs without also building more housing.”
