Mamdani taps Cardi B to sell New York City's new taxpayer-funded toddler program

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched his administration's public push for a new universal childcare initiative for two-year-olds this past Friday, and he brought in rapper Cardi B to help sell it. The two appeared together in a video promoting "universal 2k," a city-funded program targeting two-year-olds, with Cardi B agreeing to judge a jingle contest tied to the launch.

The program would offer 2,000 seats beginning this fall, starting in the Bronx, with enrollment opening in June. The cost: $36,000 per child.

The mayor, who once recorded music under the name Young Cardamom, clearly felt a celebrity co-sign was the right move. He picked one of the most polarizing figures in American pop culture to deliver it.

What the video actually looked like

Cardi B opened with the kind of observation that doubles as a marketing pitch: "Can you believe that we got a 30 year old mayor?" Mamdani confirmed. She followed with her case for the program:

"I feel like free childcare is very important. Sometimes, us women, we can't really go forward because we don't have nobody to help us take care of our kids."

Mamdani then laid out the specifics, announced the jingle competition, and asked who might judge it. Cardi B did not hesitate. "Oh, I will judge it for sure," she said, adding: "The mayor is going to help you and I'm gonna judge, and he's gonna give cause he's the one with the funds."

The funds, of course, belong to New York City taxpayers.

The ambassador Mamdani chose

Setting aside the policy for a moment, the choice of Cardi B as the face of a children's program deserves some attention on its own terms.

In February, during a concert in Palm Desert, Cardi B told the crowd she was prepared to mace and "jump" ICE agents if they showed up to her show. That same month, she endorsed Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Texas Democrat Senate primary. Crockett lost to state Rep. James Talarico, as Breitbart reports.

After President Trump won the 2024 election, Cardi B posted and then deleted a video suggesting that Trump-voting states deserved their hurricane seasons. The following day, she warned Trump supporters to "leave me the f*ck alone" or she would "start lighting y'all ass up."

In 2023, she threw a microphone into a crowd at a Las Vegas concert after a concertgoer threw liquid at her. A battery investigation followed. Last year, she testified in a California civil case that she did not scratch or spit on a security guard during a 2018 argument outside a doctor's office.

This is the person Mamdani chose to introduce a city-funded children's program.

A track record that speaks for itself

Cardi B has campaigned for Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Harris lost. Her February endorsement of Jasmine Crockett ended with Crockett's defeat. NPR named her song "WAP" one of the best of 2020. That song's title is not printable in a family publication.

Let that sink in: the ambassador for a toddler program is the artist whose signature hit cannot be named in a children's context.

The program itself

The policy question conservatives should be asking is a straightforward one. New York City is proposing to spend $36,000 per child on a universal government childcare program for two-year-olds. The city frames it as an expansion of existing pre-K and 3k programs. Mamdani described it as "just like pre-K, just like 3k but 2k for two year olds."

At $36,000 per seat, with 2,000 seats in the first phase alone, the opening-year cost clears $72 million before administrative overhead, before program expansion, and before the inevitable political pressure to scale it citywide. Programs like this never stay at their announced size. The 2,000-seat pilot is the foot in the door, not the destination.

New York City already runs some of the most expensive government programs per capita of any municipality in the country. The instinct to treat every social challenge as a line item in the city budget, administered by a government that has struggled for decades to run its schools, its subways, and its streets competently, is exactly the habit that drives productive residents and businesses out of the five boroughs.

What Cardi B actually got right

It would be dishonest to pretend the underlying concern she voiced doesn't exist. Parents, including working mothers, face real costs when childcare is inaccessible. That is a legitimate problem. The disagreement isn't about whether childcare costs are burdensome. It's about whether a $36,000-per-child government program, run by a city that cannot balance its own budget, is the solution or just the next expense.

Government-run childcare at that price point doesn't solve the problem. It transfers the cost to taxpayers, buries it in a budget line, and calls it free. Nothing about it is free. It just means someone else is handed the bill.

Governing as performance

Mamdani is 33 years old, a democratic socialist, a former state assemblyman, and now the mayor of the largest city in the United States. He rapped under a stage name. His mother directed a film he contributed music to. He is, by every available measure, a product of progressive cultural politics, not executive governance.

The Cardi B video fits that portrait precisely. It is governing as content creation, policy as branding exercise, and a jingle contest as a substitute for accountability. The mayor is not holding a press conference to explain how $36,000 per child is justified. He is filming videos and asking who wants to judge the submissions.

New York City's taxpayers deserve a mayor who treats their money like it belongs to them.