100 Days of Zohran: The Museum Tour Nobody Asked For

PART ONE: THE ACHIEVEMENT MUSEUM

The day before Zohran Mamdani threw himself a 3,200-person party to celebrate his first 100 days in office, a man named Anthony Griffin boarded the 7 train at Vernon Boulevard in Queens, pulled out a machete, and started slashing people at Grand Central Terminal.

He slashed an 84-year-old man across the head and face. He slashed a 65-year-old man so severely the man suffered an open skull fracture. He slashed a 70-year-old woman across the shoulder. Witnesses described chaos on the platform. The MTA shut down service on the 4, 5, 6, and 7 lines. Tourists from Montreal and Utah told reporters they'd never seen anything like it. Griffin, who police say had prior arrests including for menacing and slashing people with sharp objects, identified himself to officers as Lucifer. He ignored 20 direct commands to drop the machete. He advanced on the officers with the blade extended. They shot him twice. He died at Bellevue.

Mamdani issued a statement saying he was "grateful to the NYPD for their quick response."

The next evening, at the Knockdown Center in Queens, he took the stage to celebrate.

The party featured a "100 Days Museum," a self-congratulatory pop-up exhibition curated by his own office. Among the artifacts on display: a child-sized podium from a day care announcement. And the leftover Taco Bell wrapper from a March Q&A about fast food workers.

The Taco Bell wrapper is in the museum.

The mayor of New York City is running a $127 billion budget with a $5.4 billion fiscal gap. The city has a housing crisis, a mental health and public safety problem on full display at Grand Central the morning before the party, and a sewer system older than the Soviet Union. He preserved his Crunchwrap Supreme as a historical artifact. He put it in a glass case, or whatever the DSA version of that is.

Bernie Sanders showed up to bless the proceedings. Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia grad student detained by ICE and released, was in the crowd, which says something about who Mamdani considers his people. The mayor quoted Margaret Thatcher to criticize capitalism, which either takes audacity or a lack of self-awareness, and with Mamdani it's genuinely hard to tell which. The audience held signs reading "CHILDCARE ALL" and "TACKLE CORRUPTION AND WASTE." Admirable goals. The problem is he hasn't delivered the first one and his administration has already generated its own material for the second.

"For 102 days," Mamdani told the crowd, "we have endeavored to do exactly that, delivering both public goods and public excellence."

That sentence has two debatable claims and a miscounted day.

The administration also launched an interactive website. A map. Dozens of photos of the mayor smiling with children. A tracker of his achievements. A digital monument to 100 days of governing that reads like a campaign site written by someone who won and never stopped running.

An Adams administration official told the Post what everyone in the room already knew: "This whole thing is just massive insecurity about how little they've actually accomplished."

Harsh. Also accurate.

Pothole Politics

Let's take the victory lap seriously before we examine whether there's anything to lap around, because that's only fair.

The mayor talked about potholes. At length. "On day six, when we paved the bump at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, that was pothole politics," he said. He coined a philosophy. "Pothole politics." The man who ran on free buses, city-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze, universal child care, a $1.1 billion Department of Community Safety, disbanding the NYPD's Strategic Response Group, and ending homeless encampment sweeps spent a meaningful chunk of his 100-day address talking about road maintenance.

Roads should be paved. Potholes are bad. The Department of Transportation repaving streets is not a socialist innovation. It is something the city has done, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, since the city had streets. When the signature achievement of your first 100 days is infrastructure maintenance that would not move the needle for a county executive in rural Ohio, you are not governing. You are managing expectations downward in real time.

"If government can't do the small things," Mamdani said, "how could you ever trust it to do the big ones?"

Excellent question, Mayor.

The Scorecard

Here is what was promised and what was delivered.

The grocery stores. Mamdani ran on five city-owned grocery stores, one per borough, selling food at wholesale prices, exempt from rent and property taxes, no profit motive. What exists today: a $70 million proposal to the Economic Development Corporation to scout locations. No stores. One announced site at La Marqueta in East Harlem, which the city already owns, that will consume nearly half the entire $70 million budget for a single store. Maybe open next year. Maybe. The American Enterprise Institute called the underlying fiscal math an accounting error before he was even elected. Kansas City tried this and lost $900,000 in a year. Baldwin, Florida tried it and it closed after five years. The original five-borough wholesale price promise is not what is being built. What is being built is a slower, more expensive, less ambitious version of a promise that was already questionable.

The Department of Community Safety. The promise was a $1.1 billion department with social workers responding to non-violent 911 calls instead of cops. What exists: a Mayor's Office of Community Safety with two staffers and a murky $260 million budget. Two. Staffers. The NYPD still responds to non-violent 911 calls because there is no one else. The Strategic Response Group, which Mamdani said he would dismantle, is still intact and still deploying. The mayor told the Times that disbanding it was "an active conversation" with Commissioner Tisch. Conversations don't dispatch to protest lines.

Homeless encampments. The promise was to end Adams-era sweeps and focus on housing. Within two months, after 29 people froze to death in back-to-back winter storms, Mamdani reversed course. He now requires workers to return to encampments for seven consecutive days before clearing them, which is marginally softer than Adams and structurally identical to Adams. His supporters called it a reversal. He called it a revamp. The 29 people who froze were unavailable for comment.

Housing vouchers. Mamdani's campaign website explicitly promised he would drop Adams' lawsuits fighting expansion of the CityFHEPS housing voucher program. Once in office, his administration formally filed an appeal to keep the anti-CityFHEPS lawsuit alive. A housing advocate called it a "betrayal." There is no gentler word for it.

Libraries. He promised to "end the practice of using library funding as a bargaining chip" and commit 0.5% of the city budget to libraries. He then slashed library funding by $30 million and allocated 0.39% of the budget. The NYC Public Library Action Network put it plainly: "Mayor Mamdani has broken his promise." He said 0.5%. He gave 0.39% and took $30 million away.

The gang database. He promised to abolish it as racial profiling. He went quiet while Commissioner Tisch said officers use it "every day." When pressed, Mamdani said he had made his critiques clear and that reforms were in progress. The database operates. The critiques are on file somewhere and doing nothing.

Antisemitism. On Day One, Mamdani revoked the IHRA definition of antisemitism as part of a mass rollback of Adams executive orders, framed as administrative housekeeping. Antisemitic hate crimes spiked 182% in January. The administration later quietly revised how those crimes are classified, prompting Tisch to publicly distance herself from City Hall on the issue. In the Marist poll, 49% of Jewish voters disapprove of Mamdani. Only 38% approve. The man who governed from a city where antisemitism is a documented, accelerating threat opened his mayoralty by removing the primary definitional standard used to identify it.

The Numbers

The Marist poll is being treated as validation. It shouldn't be.

Forty-eight percent approval, 30% disapproval, and a notable 23% still unsure after 100 days. That last number is the tell. Nearly a quarter of the city hasn't formed an opinion about the guy they've been watching govern for three months. That isn't enthusiasm. That's an electorate that hasn't made up its mind and hasn't seen enough to commit.

Emerson's numbers are worse: 43% approval among registered voters, with 59% saying New York City is on the wrong track. The economic polling is grim. Forty percent of New Yorkers rate the economy as poor. Thirty-eight percent say fair. Three percent say excellent. Only 4% support the property tax increase Mamdani floated as a last resort on the budget.

Eric Adams had 61% approval at the same mark. Bill de Blasio had 49%. Mamdani is trailing a mayor who ended up federally indicted and running even with a mayor whose legacy is now a cautionary tale for progressive governance.

The party, the museum, the website, the interactive map, the Bernie cameo — none of that is the behavior of an administration confident in its record. That is the behavior of an administration that knows the record needs help.