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(NEW YORK) — Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo told “The View” on Monday it would be a “gift” to President Donald Trump if Zohran Mamdani wins the election in November and becomes New York City’s next mayor.

Cuomo said he’s the “last person” Trump wants to see as mayor, citing their relationship while he was governor of New York. “We fought on a daily basis,” Cuomo said.

He alleged that a Mamdani win would lead to a federal takeover of New York City and then Trump would use Mamdani as an example during other elections about the dangers of electing a far-left politician.

Trump “will take a picture of Mamdani and run around the country and say, here’s what happened to the Democrats,” Cuomo said. “Mamdani is a gift for him … because it’s the excuse he needs to take over New York, which he said he will do.”

In a recent interview with “The View,” Mamdani said New York should be prepared to push back against Trump.

“This is just one of the many threats that Donald Trump makes. Every day he wakes up, he makes another threat, a lot of the times about the city that he actually comes from,” Mamdani said. “[Trump] wants to do a whole lot of things with this city, and we’re going to fight him every step of the way, as long as it is something that comes at the expense of this city.”

Cuomo denied allegations from Mamdani and other critics that he’s Trump’s pick in the race. Cuomo also denied reporting in the New York Times that he had recently discussed the race on a call with Trump.

New York City’s mayoral race is down to three candidates, including Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, after Mayor Eric Adams recently dropped out of the race. He said the race is down to a democratic socialist in Mamdani and himself, a true Democrat.

“What’s really happening is there’s a civil war within the Democratic Party going on, and the Democratic Party is looking for its identity. And there are two factions. You have the democratic socialists, and then you have the Democrats, they have a very extreme view that they’re pursuing, which is different than the Democratic Party,” Cuomo said Monday on “The View.”

After Adams announced he was dropping out of the mayor’s race, Cuomo gave him kudos and said his withdrawal indeed shakes up the race. He said that New Yorkers should be “afraid” of a win by Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.

“I believe Mayor Adams is 100% sincere. I applaud his selflessness. You know, we often wonder, is it about us, or is it about a greater calling? And I think what Mayor Adams said today speaks volumes,” Cuomo said at the time. “He said, I’m going to put my personal ambition aside for the good of the city, because he’s afraid of the result if Mr. Mamdani would have [sic] win the election, and we should all be afraid of the result.”

And Adams no longer campaigning makes a difference, Cuomo said: “It’s not just about the polling. You know, the mayor was – is the incumbent mayor, so he is a potent force in the campaign; if he is not actively campaigning, that changes the entire dynamic of the race.”

Even still, Cuomo is running an uphill campaign after Mamdani delivered an upset win during the June Democratic primary. The former governor has been trailing the Democratic nominee in most polls and Mamdani has racked up major endorsements, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Cuomo has faced scrutiny during his mayoral campaign following his exit from the governor’s office four years ago as he faced mounting sexual harassment allegations.

During his appearance on The View, Cuomo said he now acts much more cautiously due to the “very painful” allegations.

“I learned a lesson, a painful lesson, which is to be much more cautious about everything you say, any joke, any comment,” Cuomo said Monday. “I won’t kiss a person on the cheek unless they initiate a kiss. So they taught me a lesson, just to be super cautious, because there is a sensitivity that has evolved that is real. If people feel it, it’s true, and it has to be respected.”

Cuomo made apologies back in 2021 when the allegations surfaced, but has since insisted he did nothing wrong, despite a state attorney general probe alleging he harassed 11 women. He was never charged with any wrongdoing,

Mamdani and other opponents have contended that Cuomo is still unfit to serve in office.

The former governor lost the Democratic primary after three rounds of ranked choice voting by nearly 130,000 votes. Cuomo pressed on and announced shortly after the defeat that he would continue to run as an independent candidate.

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(COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.) — Conversion therapy, or the attempt to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity as a form of treatment, has been widely discredited by major American mental health and medical organizations for decades. Half the states have outlawed the practice as ineffective and harmful to minors, often on a bipartisan basis.

On Tuesday, a licensed therapist who offers “faith-informed” counseling services in Colorado will directly confront that consensus at the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to strike down the laws as infringements on free speech.

“I want to be able to speak genuinely, openly, have full conversations with my clients,” said Kaley Chiles, the plaintiff in the high court case, in an interview with ABC News, “without the state kind of peering into my office in these completely private conversations.”

“If someone comes into the office and they say, I am a biological male and I have been living and presenting as a female for a while now – those are the clients who I cannot have a full conversation with,” Chiles said.

The case pits the First Amendment against a state’s regulation of medical practices to comply with an established standard of care. It also implicates the rights of parents in search of help for children struggling during puberty and the mental health of LGBTQ young people in search of greater societal acceptance.

The Colorado Minor Conversion Therapy Law, enacted in 2019, says therapists licensed by the state are not allowed to try to “change behaviors or gender expressions” or try to “eliminate or reduce” same-sex attraction. Violators face up to a $5000 fine and potential loss of license.

The law does not apply to religious groups or faith-based ministries aimed at changing a person.

Therapists are allowed to provide “acceptance, support, and understanding” around areas of sexuality and gender identity as a child develops.

“Making you feel bad about who you are, or pressuring you to be someone else, that’s not legitimate therapy,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser told ABC. “The medical consensus is clear. That’s why it’s banned here in Colorado on a bipartisan basis.”

“This law allows children to be their best authentic selves, whatever it is. It doesn’t put a thumb on the scale either way,” Weiser said.

One in four American high schoolers identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, according to a first-of-its-kind 2023 survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three percent of teens identify as transgender and another 2 percent report questioning their gender, the survey found.

“What happens is that people do develop, their sexuality emerges, their gender emerges. Those changes happen naturally, but it’s not because some therapist has affected that change,” said Dr. Clinton Anderson, a trained psychologist who spent more than 30 years studying mental health care for LGBTQ people at the American Psychological Association (APA).

Citing scientific, ethical, and safety concerns, the APA, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association and nine other mental health and medical organizations oppose efforts by a provider to change a young person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

“If you are trying to make them change, and they’re not going to be successful,” Anderson added, “then the distress they bring into the therapy gets compounded by their concern about being a failure, particularly in these religious contexts.”

Attorneys for Chiles dispute the consensus scientific conclusions about the ineffectiveness of using talk therapy for a goal of conversion and any harm that may come from it.

Chiles won’t say directly whether she wants to practice conversion therapy or whether she has successfully used the treatment in the past to help a client eliminate unwanted feelings of same-sex attraction or reach better alignment with sex assigned at birth.

She said the law has a chilling effect that prevents her from even approaching the topics.

“The statute is broad, overarching language and it prevents me from doing what I want to do with clients,” she said. “Minors who are coming to me voluntarily of their own free will, who might have values different from the state and who have goals that the state has forbidden – they can’t come and have the same conversation with me that they could before this law.”

Erin Lee, a mother of three in Wellington, Colorado, says her daughter Chloe was unable to find a counselor willing to help her resolve a struggle over gender identity during puberty because of Colorado’s law.

“She had already made up this, ‘I’m gonna go by Toby now’ and ‘I’m ready to cut my hair’ and ‘I don’t wanna wear girls’ clothes anymore’,” Erin said of her then 12-year-old daughter in an interview at the family home.

“We knew she was not a boy who was trapped in the wrong body,” she said. “We thought, we have to talk to a professional so we know what to say, because if in fact she’s just experiencing normal distress over her sex, we don’t wanna push her further into this trans identity.”

Lee claims a counselor who worked briefly with Chloe “was dodging the issue entirely” because of the law, which in turn pushed Chloe deeper into depression and contemplation of suicide.

“The law as I very clearly – it’s very clearly written and, as I interpret it, it prevents counselors from being able to help kids through their gender confusion. They can only help them into it,” Erin said. She founded a grassroots advocacy group, Protect Kids Colorado, to oppose the restrictions on therapists.

Chloe, now 16, said she has become more comfortable as a cisgender girl despite what her parents have lamented was a lack of resources to help her. “I felt a lot of shame and despair that seemed absolutely inexplicable,” she recently told a gathering of parent advocates. “I’m not a boy, and I was just really really confused.”

Still, many Americans who have experienced conversion therapy as minors – and therapists who once pushed the practice — now say it was dangerously destructive and rightfully banned.

An estimated 700,000 LGBT adults in the US have received conversion therapy –half were subjected to the practice as adolescents, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

“The trauma of conversion therapy can last a lifetime,” said Matthew Shurka, 37, a self-described “survivor” of four conversion therapists over five years.

After sharing feelings of sexual attraction to other boys with his parents when he was 16, Shurka’s father sought out help from licensed therapists. Some said they could cure Matthew.

“They said that I was an easy case, that I should start to see my heterosexuality come back within six weeks,” he told ABC News in an interview. “My father made this situation life or death, and he really felt that he was saving my life.”

One therapist told Shurka that a key part of treatment would be no contact with female family members — his two sisters and his mother — which lasted 3 years. He was also coached as a teenager to use Viagra to help intimacy with women.

“Maybe I was able to perform on that specific evening, but the harm that I was doing to my mental self was starting – at times, it felt irreversible,” Shurka said. “That is when I knew that suicide may be an option for me, because I knew I wasn’t changing.”

In 2018, Shurka testified in Colorado about his experience, urging lawmakers to adopt the conversion therapy ban, which they later did.

“Any therapist can share their opinion on anything. That is their freedom of speech,” he said. “But when it comes to a course of treatment, that’s professional speech. I was given a treatment to cure my homosexuality that had no basis in any scientific finding.”

The Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Colorado’s law as a legitimate regulation of “professional conduct,” which incidentally restricted speech but was not viewpoint discrimination.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to affirm that conclusion and, in the process, wade into an impassioned national debate over how to best help developing teens.

“We know that young kids right now are hurting,” said Attorney General Weiser. “One of the ways we protect young people is we let them have autonomy about who they are.”

A decision in the case — Chiles v Salazar — is expected in spring 2026.

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(NEW YORK) — Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo told “The View” on Monday it would be a “gift” to President Donald Trump if Zohran Mamdani wins the election in November and becomes New York City’s next mayor.

Cuomo said he’s the “last person” Trump wants to see as mayor, citing their relationship while he was governor of New York. “We fought on a daily basis,” Cuomo said.

He alleged that a Mamdani win would lead to a federal takeover of New York City and then use Mamdani as an example during other elections about the dangers of electing a far-left politician.

New York City’s mayoral race is down to three candidates after Mayor Eric Adams recently dropped out of the race.

After Adams announced he was dropping out of the mayor’s race, Cuomo gave him kudos and said his withdrawal indeed shakes up the race. He said that New Yorkers should be “afraid” of a win by Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.

“I believe Mayor Adams is 100% sincere. I applaud his selflessness. You know, we often wonder, is it about us, or is it about a greater calling? And I think what Mayor Adams said today speaks volumes,” Cuomo said. “He said, I’m going to put my personal ambition aside for the good of the city, because he’s afraid of the result if Mr. Mamdani would have [sic] win the election, and we should all be afraid of the result,” said Cuomo.

And Adams no longer campaigning makes a difference, Cuomo said: “It’s not just about the polling. You know, the mayor was – is the incumbent mayor, so he is a potent force in the campaign; if he is not actively campaigning, that changes the entire dynamic of the race.”

Even still, Cuomo is running an uphill campaign after Mamdani delivered an upset win during the June Democratic primary. The former governor has been trailing the Democratic nominee in most polls and Mamdani has racked up major endorsements, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Cuomo has faced scrutiny during his mayoral campaign following his exit from the governor’s office four years ago as he faced mounting sexual harassment allegations.

Cuomo made apologies back in 2021 when the allegations surfaced, but has since insisted he did nothing wrong, despite a state attorney general probe alleging he harassed 11 women.

Mamdani and other opponents have contended that Cuomo is still unfit to serve in office.

The former governor lost the Democratic primary after three rounds of ranked choice voting by nearly 130,000 votes. Cuomo pressed on and announced shortly after the defeat that he would continue to run as an independent candidate.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court has declined to take up the appeal of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was contesting her prosecution and conviction on grounds that the government had violated a non-prosecution agreement made with Jeffrey Epstein before his death. 

The Supreme Court did not explain its decision. 

Maxwell’s attorney, David O. Markus said he was “disappointed” by the Supreme Court’s decision.

“We’re, of course, deeply disappointed that the Supreme Court declined to hear Ghislaine Maxwell’s case,” Markus said in a statement. “But this fight isn’t over. Serious legal and factual issues remain, and we will continue to pursue every avenue available to ensure that justice is done.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(CHICAGO) — The Illinois National Guard has received an official notification from the Pentagon authorizing a mission in Chicago, according to an Illinois official.

The official confirmed the mission will involve 300 Guardsmen tasked with protecting federal property under Title 10 authorities.

The Guard has not received mobilization orders, which means it will take a number of days to process and muster soldiers — and train them for the mission, according to the official.

At the very earliest, Guardsmen would be deployed in Chicago at the end of this week, the official said.

“The Governor did not receive any calls from any federal officials. The Illinois National Guard communicated to the Department of War that the situation in Illinois does not require the use of the military and, as a result, the Governor opposes the deployment of the National Guard under any status,” a spokesperson for Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement.

The authorization comes amid escalating tensions in Chicago over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents on Saturday shot and wounded a woman they alleged was part of a convoy of protesters that rammed their vehicles during an “ambush.”

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Border Patrol agents opened fire on the woman in self-defense, alleging she was armed with a semiautomatic weapon and was driving one of three vehicles that “cornered” and rammed the CBP agents’ vehicles.

Describing the incident as “really strange,” Noem alleged that before the shooting, a caravan of 10 vehicles was following the CBP agents and officers through the streets of Chicago.

“They had followed them and gotten them cornered, pinned them down and then our agents, when getting out of their cars, they tried to run them over and had semiautomatic handguns on them to where our agents had to protect themselves and shots were fired and an individual ended up in the hospital that was attacking these officers,” Noem said in a statement on Sunday.

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