– President Trump recently shared a video by Michael Savage, who’s a pro-Trump pundit calling for you to be criminalized and deported. And my question is, what does it mean when the president of the United States shares a sentiment like that? And how do you deal with it? I think that it’s part of the corrosion of political and public life that this is a frankly, something that I don’t even blink at anymore because it’s become in many ways, a norm of the last few years. And I also think that Americans are hungry for a very different kind of politics, one where disagreement is a part of it. Deportation and demonization is not. These kinds of attacks against you, and I can hear you deliberately not trying to personalize it, not trying to respond to it, but does it impact you and your security, for example? There are threats, the kinds of which that sadly became familiar over the course of the campaign. I am lucky in that I’m protected by the best of the best in our N.Y.P.D. And I’m also concerned because if these threats have changed my life and have changed the lives of those that I love, I often wonder about the threats to those whose names we don’t even know. Because what is so terrifying about the normalization of political violence is not even just those to whom it’s directed towards, but what it makes acceptable towards any “other” in this city, in this country. And that is a real fear that I have as we try and show what a city can look like, where everyone belongs, that there are those firmly invested in a — a kind of division that is at odds with that. Did you at some point have to make peace with the fact that you are a target? I don’t know if you can make peace with it. I think you can come to expect it. You can come to rationalize it as if it is part of what it is that you do. And look, I grew up and I would hear politicians say things about their family, how they didn’t sign up for it, this, that and the other. And when you’re on the outside and you’re hearing that, it sounds at a certain point to be quite cliché, and when you’re living it, you realize the depth of that sentiment. And you know, I grew up in New York City. To me, disagreeing is one of the most New York things you can do. Sometimes you’ll hear two people and it sounds like they’re fighting, but that’s just how they say, “I love you” in New York City. And so it’s not to say that we shouldn’t have that kind of disagreement or dissent or debate, and even that it not be vehement. But what it has become instead, it actually silences that debate out of fear.
