How Mayor Mamdani Should Handle the Cea Weaver Media Storm

One week into the mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani, there is already a political crisis. Yesterday, Cea Weaver, his pick to lead the revived Office to Protect Tenants, was on the front page of the New York Post and making international headlines; the Daily Mail, along with the Post, has been camped outside her Crown Heights apartment, photographing her in distress. She was caught — and mocked — for tearing up. At issue are deleted tweets and posts from the 2010s that called home ownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and another that declared, simply, “Seize private property!” Other posts said private property should be treated as a “collective good” and that it was important to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” The Trump Justice Department and Washington Post editorial board both condemned the posts, and Mamdani’s critics have reacted with both horror and thinly disguised glee: Here is the first domino that may fall against the 34-year-old democratic-socialist mayor.

Mamdani, during his transition period, already forced one top aide to quit after old tweets surfaced that were plainly antisemitic. Weaver did not attack Jews, but her posts could be deemed radical enough, in theory, for Mamdani to oust her. It didn’t help, as the tabloids revealed, that Weaver’s mother, a professor at Vanderbilt, owned a home worth more than a million dollars, or that Weaver, who is white and resides in Crown Heights, could be contributing to the gentrification she so decries.

Mamdani, though, isn’t moving against Weaver like he did his old director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa. “Cea Weaver is someone that we hired to stand up for tenants across the city based on the track record that she had of standing up for tenants across the city and the state,” Mamdani told reporters on Wednesday in Jackson Heights, where he was announcing his pick to lead the Commission on Human Rights.

Sticking by Weaver is the right political move for Mamdani. She has a long track record in the housing movement, having spent more than a decade organizing tenants and negotiating legislation in Albany. She is not easily replaced, and dumping her would create yet another challenging news cycle for Mamdani while handing his opponents an early victory. None of the Weaver posts are recent, and if they are histrionic, recalling the nauseating apogee of the woke era, they are not all wrong on the substance. Home ownership, historically, was a way to reinforce white wealth — the suburbs of Long Island were built on racist, discriminatory housing practices — and political leaders, in a humane society, would be working toward making housing a human right and not a commodity. Wealth-building through homeownership is a deeply American value, one shared across racial lines, but that does not mean it should be viewed as one of the only paths to financial stability. The subprime-mortgage crisis of the 2000s showed the risk of steering so many Americans into risky financial arrangements. If state and federal governments committed to subsidizing affordable housing at mass scale — building out the sort of public housing we saw in the 20th century, as well as backing more egalitarian programs like Mitchell-Lama — we would have far fewer homeless and rent-burdened people in this country.

Mamdani, as mayor, has not advocated for the seizure of private property — it’s not like he could do this, anyway, even if he wanted. He and Weaver want to tip the scale back toward tenants after Eric Adams, a mayor very close to the real-estate lobby, consistently supported landlords and hiked rents on rent-stabilized apartments. There are plenty of centrist, real-estate-aligned Democrats and Republicans in New York who would love to see Weaver embarrassed and Mamdani fail altogether. Many of them still resent that it was Weaver, as a lead housing activist, who helped to secure sweeping tenant protections in 2019, including ending the ability of landlords to rip affordable units out of the rent-stabilization system altogether. For two decades, landlords had been able to raise rents and make these apartments subject to the full brunt of the market, costing New York City hundreds of thousands of stabilized units. They remain furious at her and the tenant movement broadly. Her ascension, for them, is especially galling.

If Mamdani sticks by Weaver, he can survive this news cycle. Eventually, the media will lose interest, especially since there is, by definition, nothing new here. Weaver made these tweets during the first Trump term. And unlike Almonte, who was not terribly close to Mamdani before she was elevated to her post — she came from the Bill de Blasio and NGO orbits — Weaver has deep ties to the organizations and movements that made Mamdani’s rise possible. Weaver is a DSA member and popular among New York socialists. She is one of their own. Mamdani knows this. He’s worked with her for years and he prizes this relationship.

The greater question, for Mamdani, is if this uproar will ultimately matter. He’s got a strong approval rating. What could damage him are actual failures of governance. A corruption scandal swallows his administration, for example, or if his supporters feel he is not earnestly working toward the policy aims he campaigned on. So far, however, Mamdani shows no signs of repudiating his base or elevating self-dealing bureaucrats. Old critics like Matt Yglesias have been, if anything, heartened by the approach Mamdani has taken so far; the socialist mayor has talked often about the need to build more housing and involve for-profit developers. He’s also imported Lina Khan–style governing to New York, promising to crack down on the various junk fees that torment consumers. He’s talked Governor Kathy Hochul into kicking in state funding to allow for a universal child-care expansion in the five boroughs. He won great praise from transit advocates for promising to finish the McGuinness Boulevard redesign — the one Adams temporarily scuttled and allowed scandal to engulf.

Mamdani is internationally famous, and the scrutiny he receives will be unlike that faced by any mayor in the city’s history. This will make his job especially difficult. Victories — and defeats — will be all the more magnified.