On Friday night, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a new, combative strategy for his general election campaign against Zohran Mamdani. On X, he attacked the avowed socialist for bragging about living in a $2,300 rent controlled apartment despite coming from a wealthy family, marrying a wealthy woman, and earning over $200,000 annually.

“You’ve had weddings on 3 continents,” Cuomo wrote. “You own property in LGTBQIA+ murderous Uganda… Zohran Mamdani is a rich person. You are actually very rich. Yet you and your wife pay $2,300 a month, as you have bragged, for a nice apartment in Astoria. That should be housing for someone who needs it. We are in the middle of a historic affordability crisis… Yet your apartment remains rented to rich people who don’t need it.”

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To make sure no one missed the dawn of Dark Cuomo, the former governor penned an equally edgy post a couple hours later, writing, “In case you forgot, I’m Andrew Cuomo, son of Mario, grandson of Andrea. Welcome to the heavyweight bout, @ZohranKMamdani This is a two man race. You look tired already. It’s just the second round.”

Followers reacted to this impossibly cringey yet compelling turn with a mixture of shock, amusement, and encouragement.

Shaun Maguire, a prominent venture capitalist and Mamdani critic, responded saying, “It’s good to see you fighting,” to which Cuomo responded, “Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

Cuomo’s mangling of Muhammad Ali’s famous adage, which uses the word “float” not “fly,” was poetic in its own right. It would have been impossible to better capture Cuomo’s inauthenticity with a different phrase. To be utterly certain, Cuomo is no champion of the working class — his callous indifference toward suffering is the stuff of legend. The former governor is unfit to run a hot dog cart or a laundromat, let alone a city.

But he is, for reasons we couldn’t comprehend or codify (in the immortal words of The Soprano’s Hesh Rabkin), the city’s only hope against a socialist disaster of its own making. Should Cuomo fail to outmaneuver Mamdani, America’s greatest city will fall to a series of half-baked utopian schemes — rent controls that choke housing, taxes that crush small businesses — that will leave it in darkness.

FOUR LIES THAT TOPPLED THE ESTABLISHMENT

In this light, Cuomo’s decision to go dark carries an irresistible charm. The former governor is, after all, a devil with whom I and millions of other native New Yorkers are familiar. Indeed, we know his tricks — and we know how to chasten him when he gets handsy with the secretary. Cuomo’s ordinary, commonplace corruption, bountiful as it may be, appears La Guardia-esque beside Mamdani’s wild-eyed crusade to turn Gotham into a warped, socialist funhouse.

Though it is a tragedy to see the race to lead our greatest city devolve into a live-action black comedy, Dark Cuomo is the hero New York needs right now — and ironically, the one it also apparently deserves.