POLITICS: Graceless sore winner Zohran Mamdani immediately drops his mask and declares war on NYC

Having fallen in love with the sound of his own voice and apparently convinced he is heaven-sent, a besotted Zohran Mamdani missed the warning that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

So it was that his victory speech Tuesday night had no hint of grace or gratitude to New York or America.

Its sneering, triumphalist tone was especially unbecoming for an immigrant in a city that generously opened its arms to embrace him and his family decades ago.

Rather than any expression of appreciation, his relentless criticism of his political predecessors and successful New Yorkers sounded like a battle cry coming from the interior of a Trojan Horse.

Without doubt, he was declaring war against President Trump and, by extension, anyone else who has the nerve to oppose our newly crowned ruler.

Especially striking was the fact that Mamdani offered only the back of his hand to the more than 1 million New Yorkers who voted for his opponents.

Had the better angels been able to get through his self-aggrandizing armor, Gotham’s next mayor surely would have included at least perfunctory promises and pleas for civic unity.

But there was not a word of fellowship to those who didn’t buy the discount-store bromides he’s been selling.

Now that he’s been elected, he expects 8 million people to keep their mouths closed and accept him and his socialist agenda unconditionally.

His actual opponents were scorned or ignored, as if the election marks only a brief timeout in his war against them, and against disagreement itself.

Traditional niceties and graciousness apparently are far beneath chosen ones, who see themselves as the end all and be all.

In their minds, election night is only a respite in the battle for power and ideological supremacy.

If there is any upside to such a downbeat speech, it is that the image of a smiling nice guy that Mamdani worked hard to cultivate has now been exposed as a fraud.

When the mask dropped, we saw clearly the fangs of contempt and bitter grievance.

His dark heart came through loud and clear in his depiction of New York City as something of a modern slave state where a ruling class of landlords, bankers and even neighborhood merchants sucks the life out of everyone else.

Back to class war

In a sweeping statement that clearly didn’t apply only to the Adams administration, he claimed that “those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them.

But on January 1st, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”

Our new savior also decried a “prism of misinformation,” apparently referring to the fact that his opponents were able to raise money to run commercials against him.

“Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them,” he declared.

It’s called politics, and nothing is so off-putting as a sore winner, which is what he is.

From there he was back to his Bernie Sanders-like obsession with class and wealth.

“As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour,” he insisted.

Naturally, Mamdani tossed around the favorite socialist words of the day, promising a fight against “oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”

He then declared that “if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

Then it was back to all property owners, declaring that “We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants.”

Picks fight with Trump

He vowed to put an end “to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks.”

It might be news to him that tax breaks for developers and others are written into laws by Albany, where he still serves as a Queens assemblyman.

Perhaps he should have a word with his new best friend, the clueless Gov. Hochul, about how laws are written and why incentives are needed to coax builders into working in New York.

He might even learn what an enormous hindrance state and city taxes are and how endless red tape and regulations inflate the cost of even modest construction plans.

Not that he would even then have any sympathy.

See, he’s a Big Government man, and having never held a private sector job his parents didn’t give him, his contempt for the way the world works crowds out common sense.

Biz leaders fooled

If there is any potential upside to such a sour, sneering debut, it is that his speech should serve as a belated alarm to the business and political leaders who played footsie with him in the belief that underneath his radical rhetoric, there existed a reasonable man who could be charmed into cooperation.

Oh, how pleased they were with themselves when he visited their plush high-rise offices and flashed that toothy grin and put his hand over his heart, as if to signal that he and they were fellow members of the brotherhood of the enlightened.

Surely, he was someone they could work with, and that was all they wanted.

They were flattered by his attention, and now they should be prepared to be fleeced and condemned.

Similarly, significant numbers of Jewish leaders and voters were snookered by the first Muslim mayor’s promises of protection from the ravages of antisemitism.

Their capitulation is impossible to defend, given Mamdani’s virulent opposition to Israel as the Jewish homeland, and his failure to denounce Hamas and other terrorists during the last two years.

To his benighted ilk, anything Israel does to defend itself proves it’s guilty of genocide.

Jew-hating mentor

It’s not insignificant that the Jew-hating Linda Sarsour is one of his closest advisers, and she recently promised to keep him in line at City Hall.

“The story is not just that it’s random that Zohran ascended to this place, it is our Muslim-American community,” she said cryptically at an event sponsored by the radical Council on American-Islamic Relations event last month.

The image of Mamdani as a puppet whose strings are pulled by her recalls that his parents also both hate Israel.

They don’t seem to be fond of America, either.

His father, Mahmouod Mamdani, is a Columbia University professor who can be seen on a video from a 2022 conference arguing that Hitler got his idea for the Holocaust by studying how Abraham Lincoln and America dealt with native Americans.

“The US put Indians in reservations. . . . They herded American Indians into separate territories. For the Nazis, this was the inspiration. Hitler realized two things: One, that genocide was do-able, it is possible to do genocide. That’s what Hitler realized,” Mamdani’s father said.

The one concession the next mayor has made on the topic is a promise not to again use the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

That’s worth next to nothing if he continues to support the policies of antisemites and surrounds himself with terrorist sympathizers.

Good luck, New York.

You’ll need it.