Queens Victoria

 

 City And State

“Go fuck yourself.” 

“Go fuck yourself, how’s that?”

That’s how Republican New York City Council Member Vickie Paladino responded to a man she thought was a squatter outside a Whitestone, Queens, home after she called the dilapidated property “a disgrace.” The August 2022 exchange between the small, straight-talking lawmaker and a very surly large man smoking a joint was filmed by her staffer. Paladino chose to post it online, and, like much Paladino content, it went viral. 

Paladino drove by the house on her way to work after a constituent complained, not expecting to meet the man face to face. “We won’t have this goings on in this neighborhood,” she tells the man shortly before he exhales his marijuana smoke in her face. “It won’t happen. It just won’t happen.”

Paladino flipped “this neighborhood” red by a razor-thin margin in 2021. Months after his loss to her that year, Democratic former state Sen. Tony Avella said, “It may be necessary to create an unofficial government in exile in order to show the rest of the city she does not properly represent Northeast Queens.”

That’s the thing, though: She does represent Northeast Queens. Everything about the alleged squatter video – Paladino’s nerve, her husky voice and her intolerance of the appearance of the man’s house and his blasé attitude – is just so Northeast Queens, and so Vickie Paladino, the Republican lawmaker known for her silver hair, direct confrontations and extreme right-wing politics.

She carried the district by 20 points in her 2023 rematch against Avella. President Donald Trump – who Paladino passionately supports – won back the White House in November with the strongest show of support in New York in decades, making dramatic gains in New York City. That rightward shift has been brewing in Queens for several election cycles, as Paladino’s popularity evinces. Many may find her extreme online rhetoric about immigrants and transgender people, congestion pricing and vaccine mandates abhorrent, but when you visit her in her district office and see how people respond to her in real life, it’s difficult to deny that what she is doing is working politically.

“I think if you’re going to talk objectively and talk about what’s going to lead to the most electoral success (for the GOP) – especially on the heels of President Trump’s results in the city and state – the only direction is to embrace a more populist, MAGA tone and direction,” said New York Young Republican Club President Gavin Wax. “And that’s embodied by Vickie Paladino.”

Paladino is aware of her reputation. When I tell her the question my Gen Z friends and millennial peers have asked me most often about her over my three years covering her – “Is she actually crazy?” – the 70-year-old laughs. “I love it when they ask that.”

Council Member Chi Ossé, the progressive, TikTok-loving 26-year-old lawmaker from  Bedford-Stuyvesant, has been among Paladino’s harshest critics, particularly online. So you can imagine my surprise when, at the end of a contentious council meeting on Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes housing proposal, I saw Paladino and Ossé among the few still lingering in the council chamber, laughing together – hard. What was so funny? “We said we’d be, like, the best of friends if we weren’t living in alternate universes – but we do,” Paladino said, “alternate universes,” meaning “far left, far right, whatever you want to call it.”

“We have so many disagreements … I would say she’s my rival, in a way, my tether,” Ossé said a few minutes later. “But … whether you like what she says or not, she tells it like it is – she’s truthful, she’s upfront. And I think in a world of politicians who bundle a bunch of things up through niceties and fakeness, Vickie’s 100% herself.”