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The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani , plans to deliver what his office calls a “major address” on Friday to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, “reflecting on New York City’s role in our national history and its position as the nation’s symbolic gateway.”

Mamdani is scheduled to speak at 10am local time, meaning that his remarks will come hours before Donald Trump marks the anniversary in a speech at Mount Rushmore.

The city’s immigrant mayor will deliver his remarks “surrounded by recently naturalized citizens,” from a desk used by George Washington in 1789 , when he was inaugurated as the country’s first president in New York.

“This desk is older than the Resolute Desk and was used by Washington when it was located in Federal Hall, the first capitol building for the United States,” Mamdani’s aides point out, noting that the desk currently used in the Oval Office lacks the same connection to the country’s original, New York-based administration.

Mamdani’s remarks on the country’s founding are likely to differ widely from those of the president, if they are at all influenced by his father Mahmood Mamdani ’s book, Neither Settler Nor Native , which argues that the modern nation-state began in 1492 with “the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas by the same Castilian monarchy that spearheaded ethnic cleansing.”

The first chapter of the book is about the ethnic cleansing of North America by European settlers and the role of slavery in the formation of the United States.

“This is a book about the United States as a founding experience in modern colonialism” the mayor’s father, a professor at Columbia, said in an online lecture in 2024. “The first chapter explores the Indian reservation as the site where core institutions of modern colonialism were forged. It is also a book about extreme violence as a consequence of modern nation-state building”.

“By taking the US as a case”, Mahmood Mamdani explained, “I seek to compare the conquest of Indians and the domination of Africans to distinguish between colonial conquest and racial domination as two different modern ways of subjugation, each with a radical consequence.”