Bill de Blasio once stood in front of cameras and carved a billion dollars out of the NYPD's budget while New York was on fire. Now he's sitting across from Sean Hannity, admitting it was a mistake. Welcome to 2026.
During the George Floyd rioting, de Blasio was talking out of both sides of his mouth about the NYPD.
Since leaving office, he has been a non-factor and completely irrelevant, but he appears to be trying to change that.
De Blasio was trying to walk the line during the protests, complimenting the NYPD while also firing shots at the department.
CNBC reported him as having stated, “A vast majority of officers do their job and do their job well. A vast majority of officers are trying to connect to communities and do the right thing.”
He continued, “They’re in this job for the right reason. There are some who do not belong on this job. There are some that use violence when they shouldn’t.”
Even when officers' lives were in danger, and appeared to have no choice but to drive through protesters attacking their vehicles, de Blasio stated, “There is no situation where a police vehicle should drive into a crowd of protesters or New Yorkers of any kind. It is dangerous, it is unacceptable. This was an extremely aberrant situation.”
In June 2020, de Blasio finally caved to the defund the police movement, announcing that he was going to reallocate NYPD funding.
At the time, The New York Times reported him saying, “We’re committed to seeing a shift of funding to youth services, to social services, that will happen literally in the course of the next three weeks, but I’m not going to go into detail because it is subject to negotiation and we want to figure out what makes sense.”
De Blasio was under fire from every liberal organization on the planet, it seemed at the time.
For most of his career, de Blasio had a conflicted relationship with the NYPD, but now he was being forced to turn on them completely, and it wound up costing him significantly in his post-mayoral career. He tried to run for office again (he ran for a NY congressional seat), but he never even came close to making it out of the primary.
The former mayor recently sat down to discuss a variety of topics, including defunding the police, with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. De Blasio joined Hannity on his podcast, “Hang Out with Sean Hannity.”
On the movement, reported The Hill, he stated, “It made sense to say, ‘How can we do better?’ It made sense to say, ‘Hey,’ — and, by the way, a lot of cops told me this, a lot of police leaders told me this — ‘We’ve got to do a lot more for young people to give them positive alternatives because that’s good for the police, too.’ That’s good safety, too.”
He then admitted, “So defund was a mistake. And I understand where it came from, but it was a mistake.”
De Blasio has admitted to numerous mistakes by Democrats in recent months, so it does appear like he may be trying to make a comeback, presenting himself as more of a moderate. This is nothing more than a white horse painting black stripes on it. You have been warned.
