Frank Parlato
Andrew Cuomo for NYC Mayor, 2025
Here comes Cuomo again.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor.
A man who built towers, poured concrete, erected airports and bridges. He signed marriage laws. He stood on television during the pandemic and told people not to fear. A governor who believed performance should be measured, and that loyalty to students mattered more than loyalty to contracts.
He resigned in August 2021. But denied the allegations. No criminal convictions followed. He survived scandal. Now he returns.
Sure, Cuomo’s abrasive, a bruiser, a pain in the ass. He hits hard. Exactly what you want when the subways are collapsing, crime’s rising, and the budget’s bleeding.
He knows the city. He knows how to bend arms, break deadlocks, build billion-dollar projects, and beat bureaucrats into submission.
That’s the job. Not singing Kumbaya at City Hall meetings. He knows the fight.
Think of Columbus. The 2020 protests. Governor Andrew Cuomo resisted calls to remove Columbus statues. A politician who didn’t fold like a cheap tent because a bunch of activists threw a tantrum on Twitter.
Cuomo saw the mob coming and figured, hell, if Columbus could survive a mutiny, maybe a statue could survive a hashtag.
Other politicians allowed the mob to pull down historic monuments out of fear of bad press. Cuomo stared down the mob reminding everyone that history belongs to the people, not just those with the loudest voices.
Maybe Cuomo remembered his grandfather’s stories —a time when the name “Italian” was a curse on the streets of America.
It was beautiful — Cuomo standing, middle finger in the air, daring the protesters to come themselves to take Columbus out of Columbus Circle.
He understands the machinery of power — and in a city on the brink, machinery matters more than rhetoric. He’s no saint. He’s a streetfighter. A mean, battered, bloodied SOB. But do you want to hand this city over to some council kid who thinks “governance” means a TikTok campaign?
Blunt, domineering. He doesn’t cry when it gets hard. And in this city, that’s something. He doesn’t smile when he doesn’t mean it. In that, he is more honest than most. And maybe that’s the only kind of bastard who can move this city forward.
Cuomo’s appeal is not warmth. It is competence. It is the promise that someone will show up, on the worst day, and refuse to blink. But in a city this broken, maybe that’s a kind of love.
Picture a man, offering one grim bargain: strength without apology. He’s mean, mad, wielding sharpened elbows. Which makes him the first person in years actually qualified to run New York.
He is a force — stubborn, aggressive, and unapologetically combative. His calculation is simple: the weak apologize, the strong endure. He does not cry into cameras. Cuomo’s not here to talk about his “healing journey” or “soul growth.” He’s here to take names and steamroll anyone who gets cute about it.
Maybe New York needs a man who doesn’t flinch, doesn’t whimper, doesn’t worry what people say behind closed doors. He has no interest in being forgiven.
In the crooked alleys of public life, where weaker men lost themselves in regret and disgrace, Cuomo said, “What’s next?”
Men like Cuomo are stitched from the same stubborn dreams that built cities from dust. You can exile him, mock him, dig his grave with headlines — but Andrew Cuomo will climb out of the dirt, and ask where the next war is. He grins, and says, “Round two.”
Cuomo built a new altar to the oldest gods: strength, survival, and the will to endure.
Imagine a man stripped bare by scandal, mocked by enemies, abandoned by friends — and still convinced, bone-deep, that history will yield to sheer, relentless willpower.
That power still belongs to those willing to claim it.
In an age of endless cowardice, there remains one man too stubborn, too beautifully tough to surrender. A fighter who lost everything — and stood up anyway. You can talk about second chances, but in the end, New York doesn’t care how many times you fall. It only cares if you get back up.
They hit him. He stood up. He didn’t smile. He didn’t flinch. He does not seek forgiveness. He seeks to win. Now he’s back to finish the fight.
Welcome to New York 2025.
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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[…] this turmoil, Andrew Cuomo presents a paradoxical lifeline. Yes, he’s flawed – brusque, scandal-scarred, forced to resign in 2021 under a cloud of harassment allegations […]
What about the corruption of the Cuomo era? I’m not talking about the Tappan Zee Bridge being named after his father, Mario Cuomo. That’s simply annoying nepotism. Rather, the radiation spewing power plant built in Orange County where the town’s approval vote was bought by the company. Cuomo’s chief backup was handling that and took the prison time. But, Cuomo knew waht was going on and the plant was still licensed by Cuomo anyway.
NYC is admittedly a very tough place to govern. Mike Bloomberg did it well. He balanced economics with a large vision of moving infrastructure projects forwards. He did things safely and smartly. Cuomo is in the mold of Rudy Guilani where brute force rules. This works for short periods out of fear and arrogance but ultimately NYer’s become weary of it.
Excellent article. Cuomo is EXACTLY who New York needs! Looking forward to his win. It will happen.