New York
In the Halls of Power, Trump’s Demands Force Agonizing Choices
An Ivy League university. Distinguished law firms with Fortune 500 clients. The highest levels of government in the nation’s largest city.
As President Trump seeks to extract concessions from elite institutions and punish his perceived enemies, some of New York’s most powerful people are suddenly confronting excruciating decisions.
The hard choices they face seem almost to be pulled from the pages of a college ethics textbook: Fight back and put your institution and even your livelihood in jeopardy? Or yield and risk compromising foundational values and ideals?
Some have sued, or walked away from their jobs. Others have cut deals with the Trump administration, and faced ferocious criticism for what many see as capitulation.
Mr. Trump has sought financial agreements, fealty pledges and other concessions from all across the United States, and even from other countries. But his former hometown, New York City, is a prime target: It is a capital of industrial and cultural institutions — and of the elite liberal establishment that his presidency pits itself against.
The deal-cutting has come as a shock to some leaders.
“I have been surprised at the rush at times to assuage the White House from activity that has gone on from people who I just thought would display more courage,” said David Paterson, a former Democratic governor of New York.
But the choices can be agonizing.
“It becomes a challenge for them to speak out against something they know is wrong,” said Chris Dietrich, chair of the history department at Fordham University. “If they stick their head above the parapet, they feel they could be putting a number of other people at risk.”
He compared the current moment to the McCarthy era, when many stayed silent as Joseph McCarthy, the Red-baiting senator falsely accused citizens of being Communists.
‘Pillars of America’
Last week, sold-out Broadway crowds were leaping to their feet to cheer the actor George Clooney after his rousing performance as Edward R. Murrow, the 1950s-era broadcast journalist. Mr. Murrow famously stood up to Mr. McCarthy.
Just a couple blocks away in Midtown, Brad Karp, the chairman of the top-tier law firm Paul Weiss, was writing a memo to his employees explaining why he had reached a deal with Mr. Trump to do $40 million in pro bono work for causes the White House supports.
Mr. Trump, in an executive order, had threatened to suspend the law firm’s security clearances and bar its lawyers from federal buildings, which would have severely restricted its ability to represent clients in some cases involving the federal government.
Three other elite law firms Mr. Trump threatened — Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Perkins Coie — have fought back by suing the administration. But Mr. Karp argued that in being targeted by Mr. Trump for its ties to the president’s political and legal enemies, the firm faced an “unprecedented threat” and an “existential crisis.” He wrote that he had learned “other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”
On Friday, another top New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work on issues Mr. Trump supports in an effort to avoid its own punishing executive order.
Earlier this month, Rachel Cohen, a Skadden associate, submitted her notice of resignation after putting together an open letter that was signed anonymously by others from numerous firms in hopes of pressuring their own employers to speak out.
And in response to the actions at Paul Weiss, about 140 alumni of the law firm signed a letter to its chairman, calling the decision to settle “cowardly.”
“It is a permanent stain on the face of a great firm that sought to gain a profit by forfeiting its soul,” the lawyers wrote in the letter.
The firms’ willingness to make deals followed a move by Columbia University, which in the face of being threatened with losing $400 million in federal funding, announced plans to overhaul its protest policies and security practices and make other changes in line with the Trump administration’s demands.
On Friday, a week after the plans were announced, the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned and was replaced by Claire Shipman, a co-chair of the school’s board of trustees.
Some have welcomed the changes Columbia announced, which were already in progress before Mr. Trump’s demands as part of an effort to combat antisemitism. And Samantha Slater, a Columbia spokeswoman, defended the concessions to the White House.
“We will always uphold the university’s mission and values,” she said.
But the deal incited faculty protests and a lawsuit by faculty groups against the Trump administration saying that the planned cuts “represent an existential ‘gun to the head’ for a university,” according to the complaint.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said institutions like Columbia and major law firms, which he called “pillars of America,” should be role models for resistance.
“When an institution fights back, it makes it easier for everyone else to fight back,” he said. “Giant law firms and a highly endowed Ivy League university — they’re going to be here long after Donald Trump. They have the resources to sustain a fight. If you give in on this one, there will be something else.”
A City’s Identity
New York has a long history of resisting presidents whose policies or actions were viewed as politically unfavorable or damaging to the city: Mr. Murrow called out Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tolerance of McCarthyism; Martin Luther King Jr. led huge protests against Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for the Vietnam War; and Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail out the city during a fiscal crisis in 1975 likely cost him re-election.
But today, some of the city’s strongest pillars are quivering.
“Now,” said Mark Levine, a Democratic candidate for city comptroller, “we’re the center of appeasement.”
The city has been a reliable Democratic stronghold for decades, so much so that some New Yorkers were shocked by Mr. Trump’s electoral gains in November’s presidential election compared with his performance in 2020.
But it’s also a city where adoration of capitalism gave rise to Wall Street billionaires and real estate scions like Mr. Trump himself. Now, some of the city’s leaders and thinkers are wondering whether the responses to Mr. Trump expose more of New York’s true identity.
“We are a city of rollovers, institutionalists who don’t want to rock the boat,” said Richard Flanagan, a political science professor at the College of Staten Island. “Deals before principles. A capitalist city before a progressive one.”
All the backing down has made the Rev. Al Sharpton question whether New York is as tough as he thought it was.
“You never know how strong you are until you’re tested,” he said, noting that civil rights protesters have learned that upholding values often comes at a steep cost. “If people really believed in what they stood for they wouldn’t capitulate. It makes me wonder if they ever believed in the first place.”
But while Mr. Trump’s detractors call him a bully, his supporters say his actions are nothing more than deal-making — that making demands and exerting leverage are the way things get done.
And Mr. Trump has gloated over his wins.
“You see what we’re doing with the colleges, and they’re all bending and saying: ‘Sir, thank you very much. We appreciate it,’” he said on Wednesday. “Nobody can believe it, including law firms that have been so horrible, law firms that, nobody would believe this, just saying: ‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?’”
A President, a Mayor and a Dilemma
Perhaps no one has brought the ethical dilemmas engendered by Mr. Trump’s deals and demands into sharper relief than Mayor Eric Adams.
Facing corruption-related charges, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, sought to cozy up to Mr. Trump even before the election in what was widely criticized as an attempt to make his criminal case go away.
But when those efforts appeared to pay off, and a Trump appointee at the Justice Department sought to abandon the case against Mr. Adams, prosecutors and city officials found themselves confronted with a difficult decision.
Rather than cut bait on the case, the interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned, as did the case’s lead attorney, Hagan Scotten.
Mr. Scotten, who served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces officer and earned two bronze stars, said in a resignation letter that only a fool or a coward would obey the order.
Ms. Sassoon, in her resignation letter, indicated that she believed Mr. Adams and the Trump administration were engaging in essentially a quid pro quo, with the mayor agreeing to help cooperate on the president’s immigration agenda in exchange for the dropped charges.
Concerns about the mayor’s indebtedness to the Trump administration led four deputy mayors to make their own difficult choice: Amid the controversy, concerned that Mr. Adams’s personal interests risked outweighing the interests of New Yorkers, they resigned.
The ramifications spread further. In Washington, five Justice Department prosecutors resigned rather than sign the motion to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams.
In the end, a veteran prosecutor, Ed Sullivan, agreed to file the request in order to save more of his colleagues from losing their jobs, according to three people briefed on the interaction. The judge overseeing the mayor’s case is still reviewing the request.
For some who have chosen to fight Mr. Trump’s demands, much hangs in the balance, and the outcome will not be clear anytime soon.
New York transit officials and Gov. Kathy Hochul have held firm during a standoff with federal officials over the fate of congestion pricing, which seeks to cut traffic and raise money for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority by charging drivers who enter Manhattan’s central business district.
As soon as Sean Duffy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, sent a letter ordering the M.T.A. to shut down the program, the authority sued and has so far ignored the administration’s deadlines. And Ms. Hochul has invoked the action movie “Rambo” to suggest that Mr. Trump would pay for drawing “first blood.”
Donovan Richards, the borough president of Queens, where Mr. Trump was born, said officials couldn’t stop resisting a president who went against the values of many New Yorkers.
“We have to fight,” he said. “There is enough room for everybody to win here.”
Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
new video loaded: What You Need to Know About New York City’s Ballot Measures
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Karen Hanley, Melanie Bencosme, Nikolay Nikolov and James Surdam
November 1, 2025
It’s certainly exciting to see an elite runner like Abdi Nageeye or Sheila Chepkirui cruise by on First Avenue during the New York City Marathon. But for many it’s just as exciting to catch a glimpse of someone like Alanis Morissette, or Will Ferrell, posting far slower times.
See if you can recall (or guess) some of the other celebrities who have run the 26 miles and 385 yards on the streets of the five boroughs over the years.
On a rough day, a bus ride in New York starts like this:
Then there are the traffic jams …
the mistimed stop lights …
the bunched-up buses …
and the cars blocking the bus lane.
Zohran Mamdani has made this grim experience central to his pledge to improve city life. Can his bus plan actually do that?
Some of the slowest buses in America plod through New York, stopping and starting, bunching and idling, at about eight miles per hour on average. Speeds have improved little over the past decade. The least reliable buses seldom show up on time.
Zohran Mamdani has built a strikingly successful mayoral campaign by tapping frustration with this system and marrying it to his broader campaign pledge to make New York more affordable.
“Fast and free buses,” he has promised, the two goals always locked together.
Get rid of fares, in theory, and that should speed things up, ending the backlog of riders lined up at every stop. More bus lanes and better infrastructure could bolster those gains. And making buses free would be a boon, Mr. Mamdani argues, for New Yorkers who have said in surveys that they’ve often struggled to come up with fare money.
“Today in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one in five New Yorkers cannot afford the bus fare,” Mr. Mamdani said, defending his plan in the campaign’s final debate last week. Give people back that money, and more of their time, he suggests, and the economic benefits for the city would outweigh even the cost of a fare-free program he estimates could run $700 million a year.
Critics, and even some transit advocates, warn that his two goals are in tension: Spend such vast sums subsidizing the bus, and there won’t be much left over to improve it, especially at a time when the federal government is undercutting support for transit and the economy is shaky. Under any reasonable estimate, the annual cost to the city of making buses free would be more than transit officials expect to raise this year from congestion pricing, the Manhattan tolling program in the middle of its own political fight.
Whether fast buses and free ones can really go together depends on many questions, some beyond a mayor’s control, including whether Gov. Kathy Hochul would cooperate on higher taxes to raise revenue. Even if Mr. Mamdani were able to eliminate fares, what effect would it really have? And would it be enough to change the slog of riding a bus in the city?
Free and maybe faster
To understand the ambition of Mr. Mamdani’s plan, it’s helpful to first take in the vastness of New York’s bus network. It’s at a whole other scale from the subway system (and from any city currently running free buses):
Mr. Mamdani, who is the front-runner in the Nov. 4 general election, first championed the idea of free buses by pushing for a one-year pilot that made a single route in each borough free for one year starting in September 2023. Expanding the idea citywide would cover 340 routes that carry about 1.5 million paid trips per weekday.
Those rides represent a lot of money that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the bus and subway systems, would no longer be collecting at the fare box. The fare today is $2.90, set to rise to $3 in January (although the actual fare collected per paying rider is more like $1.90, after accounting for free transfers and discounted fare cards). If the city were to pay for this instead, the total cost would depend on ridership numbers.
The M.T.A. says the cost of a free-fare program is probably higher than Mr. Mamdani’s estimate. As the authority cracks down on fare evasion, and ridership and fares increase, it projects that by 2028 the annual bus fare revenue, including paratransit, could exceed $1 billion — much higher than the campaign’s numbers.
About a quarter of bus riders also transfer to the subway. And if they haven’t paid for the first leg of the trip, the M.T.A. fears that more passengers may be inclined to skip the train fare, too.
John J. McCarthy, chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said in a statement that the authority was pleased with the attention that transit has gotten in the mayoral race, but also expressed caution about making the buses free without more study.
“Why is congestion pricing successful? Because we took the time to study its benefits and impacts,” he said about the yearslong review for the toll program. “This proposal would demand the same kind of rigorous analysis.”
Still, the Mamdani campaign says the overall cost is relatively small — less than 1 percent of the city’s annual budget. But for the M.T.A., fare revenue covers about 19 percent of its $4.8 billion bus operating budget.
Mr. Mamdani suggests that the economic benefits of free fares could be twice as large as the costs. That’s hard to evaluate (the figure includes assigning a dollar value to the time you’d save by spending less of it stuck on the bus). His other claim is that eliminating the fare would itself speed up the buses.
That is theoretically true. All those seconds it can take each passenger to root around in a pocket, count out change or fuss with the card reader — at every stop — add up to real delays. And just one rider doing this can be the difference between making and missing a green light.
But New York’s own pilot program illustrates one hitch. Across all five free routes, ridership increased during the pilot by about 30 to 40 percent, mostly driven by existing riders taking more trips. The buses, however, actually slowed, because all those new riders still had to board the bus and request stops, offsetting the time savings from getting rid of fares.
That’s another complication: If ridership rises substantially, you have to add service to keep up with it, or you may not see any speed benefits. And that costs money, too.
Mr. Mamdani cites an estimate that free buses could shave 12 percent off trip times. The number comes from Charles Komanoff, a longtime transit advocate and mathematician whose traffic modeling helped inform congestion pricing. He first tried to assess the impact of free buses in 2007, as part of a study of whether congestion pricing could generate enough revenue to make transit free.
“That idea of free transit — it was visionary, it was lovely, it was beguiling,” Mr. Komanoff recalled recently. Politically at the time, though, “it was completely impractical.”
He put down the idea for nearly two decades. Then last December, he heard Mr. Mamdani, polling at the time in single digits, talk about free buses at a mayoral transit forum.
In April, Mr. Komanoff published a new report that is the closest thing to a white paper for the Mamdani campaign on the topic. His 12 percent time savings relies on some of his 2007-era data (bus riders then dipped a card instead of tapping it). This fall, he reran his analysis again, after riding the B41 bus in Brooklyn with The New York Times to collect new data. He estimates that ending fares could cut 7 percent off a trip on the route, assuming the ridership stays constant. That would still be, he said, “a triumph” — an improvement akin to what drivers have seen inside Manhattan’s congestion zone.
Faster but not free
The B41 bus, connecting the Flatbush commercial corridor to Downtown Brooklyn, is one of the busiest routes in the city. The comptroller’s office gives it a D grade for its poor on-time performance and high rate of “bunching” — when buses arrive too close together and disrupt scheduling. On the route’s slowest stretch, speeds dip below four m.p.h.
Flatbush Avenue is, in short, a prime target for redesign and better bus service — something the New York City Department of Transportation has already begun to work on. And it’s a prominent example of how buses could be made faster without killing the fare box.
We rode the corridor, timed how long it takes riders to board the bus, counted all the intersections, and worked with the transportation planner Annie Weinstock to analyze the route. A trip in the evening rush hour covering the Flatbush portion of the B41 takes 58 minutes on average. But if the bus were traveling the corridor totally unimpeded, it would need only 16 minutes to go from end to end. Everything else is a form of delay: The bus spends more time sitting at red lights, and almost as much time sitting in traffic:
Making the B41 substantially faster would require a series of changes:
Mr. Mamdani has voiced support for infrastructure initiatives like this, although the campaign’s estimated cost for the free-fare program doesn’t include the sizable expenses needed to do such projects in tandem. Transit advocates are also pushing the city to go further, leveraging an array of “bus rapid transit” improvements that would also enable riders to enter from all bus doors and to pay for the bus at sidewalk kiosks, while revamping more intersection signals to prioritize buses.
All-door boarding and off-board payment would logistically have the same effect as free fares, cutting the time it takes passengers to board. We asked Ms. Weinstock, who has studied how to implement faster buses in New York, to estimate how much all of these changes together would speed up the B41.
In an ideal world, all these investments could cut about 40 percent off the time of a B41 trip — far more than doing free fares alone. It certainly helps to speed up the process of boarding riders. But that’s not the thing that helps the most. And there are other ways to get those same savings while still collecting fares.
Of course, free fares are about financial savings for riders as much as time savings. But there are some other, less sweeping ways to do that, too.
About 375,000 low-income riders already pay half-cost fares under the Fair Fares program funded by the city. It subsidizes fares on the bus and subway for households making less than 145 percent of the federal poverty level.
But advocates want to push the threshold up to 200 percent — or even 300 percent, where a family of four earning as much as $96,500 a year would qualify.
“We think it would be much less costly than a totally free system,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society, which has pushed for Fair Fares. He’s also a member of the M.T.A. board.
Mr. Mamdani supports expanding Fair Fares for the subway, alongside free buses. Doing both would further drive up the total cost of his transit agenda.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is polling behind Mr. Mamdani in the mayoral race, has said he would make the subway and buses free for New Yorkers making up to 150 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $48,000 for a family of four.
Free for some, faster for more
The allure of free buses is partly that many of these other interventions are harder. Roads must be ripped up and redesigned. Neighbors will complain. Infrastructure projects take years (the redesign of a roughly one-mile stretch of Flatbush Avenue is scheduled to be done next year). Even scaling up Fair Fares would require the city to do more to reach people who qualify — today only about a third of residents who do are in the program.
But you can declare the bus to be free tomorrow, and it will be free tomorrow. It’s a shortcut to improving an aspect of city life where nearly all other answers are slow and hard.
“It’s a guarantee that your life will be better in a way that you can feel every single day,” said Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston and someone Mr. Mamdani has often cited.
In Boston, the city pays to offset the fares on three high-ridership bus routes that serve lower-income neighborhoods (ridership is up, travel times about the same). That’s the kind of partial measure Mr. Mamdani could pursue: a larger pilot, a targeted set of routes, perhaps while expanding Fair Fares to aid more riders citywide. Maybe that buys patience for the harder improvements.
His campaign insists that the universality of free fares is the point. It’s what gives working-class riders access to the whole city. It’s what could unlock faster speeds for everyone.
But there’s evidence that New Yorkers might like the spirit of the pitch more than the potential reality of it. A recent New York Times/Siena polling experiment of two groups of likely voters showed 56 percent supported making the buses free, even as 57 percent said the city “should not do this.”
To voters, the value of Mr. Mamdani’s promise may largely be in the signal it sends: that he sees New Yorkers struggling on the bus and wants to make things better with big ideas. And that whether or not he really turns off all the card readers, surely he’ll do something to help your wallet, and to fix the buses.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller and an ally of Mr. Mamdani who also ran for mayor in the primary, suggested “fast and free” has a logic to it that’s not necessarily literal. Yes, you need resources to make the buses faster, he allowed, but you also need political will. And Mr. Mamdani is building it in a way that might not have worked had he promised “fast buses” alone.
“If you had had someone say, ‘Well, what if we make the bus a dollar cheaper than the subway, but also produce 20 interborough bus rapid transit lanes, and do all-door boarding to help everyone!’ — those might have been really good ideas,” Mr. Lander said, poking fun at his own policy-dense campaign.
“But they didn’t sufficiently capture the imagination of New Yorkers.”
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