Trump praises New York mayor Mamdani after first face-to-face meeting
Despite Donald Trump calling New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a “100% Communist lunatic” and a “total nut job”, and Mr Mamdani calling Mr Trump’s administration “authoritarian” and describing himself as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”, their first face-to-face meeting at the White House focused more on their shared goals rather than their combustible differences.
The president and the Mayor-elect discussed housing affordability and the cost of groceries and utilities, as Mr Mamdani successfully used frustration over inflation to get elected, just as the president did in the 2024 election.
The president, with Mr Mamdani standing beside him in the Oval Office, told reporters: “We’re going to be helping him, to make everybody’s dream come true, having a strong and very safe New York.”
Mr Mamdani added: “What I really appreciate about the president is that the meeting that we had focused not on places of disagreement, which there are many, and also focused on the shared purpose that we have in serving New Yorkers.”
The president brushed aside Mr Mamdani’s criticisms of him over his administration’s deportation raids and claims that Mr Trump was behaving like a despot.
Instead, the President said the responsibility of holding an executive position in the government causes a person to change, saying that had been the case for him.
“I think he is going to surprise some conservative people, actually,” said Mr Trump, who later seemed to take little umbrage when reporters asked Mr Mamdani to clarify his past statements indicating that he thought the president was acting like a fascist.
Mr Mamdani, a democratic socialist who takes office in January, said he sought the meeting with Mr Trump to talk about ways to make New York City more affordable.
Mr Trump has said he may want to help him out — although he has also falsely labelled Mr Mamdani as a “communist” and threatened to yank federal funds from his hometown.
The president loomed large over the mayoral race this year, and on the eve of the election, endorsed independent candidate and former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, predicting the city has “ZERO chance of success, or even survival” if Mr Mamdani won.
He also questioned the citizenship of Mr Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a naturalised American citizen after graduating from college, and said he’d have him arrested if he followed through on threats not to co-operate with immigration agents in the city.
Mr Mamdani beat back a challenge from Mr Cuomo, painting him as a “puppet” for the president, and said he would be “a mayor who can stand up to Donald Trump and actually deliver”.
He declared during one primary debate that “I am Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”, adding, “as a progressive Muslim immigrant who actually fights for the things that I believe in”.
The president, who has long used political opponents to fire up his backers, predicted Mr Mamdani “will prove to be one of the best things to ever happen to our great Republican Party”.
As Mr Mamdani upended the Democratic establishment by defeating Mr Cuomo and his far-left progressive policies provoked infighting, Mr Trump has repeatedly cast Mr Mamdani as the face of the Democratic Party.
For Mr Mamdani, a sit-down with the president of the United States offered the Mayor-elect, who until recently was relatively unknown, the chance to go head-to-head with the most powerful person in the world.
The meeting gave Mr Trump a high-profile chance to talk about affordability at a time when he’s under increasing political pressure to show he’s addressing voter concerns about the cost of living.
“Some of his ideas are really the same ideas that I have,” the president said of Mr Mamdani about inflationary issues.
The president has had some dramatic public Oval Office faceoffs this year, including an infamously heated exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in March.
In May, Mr Trump dimmed the lights while meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and played a four-minute video making widely rejected claims that South Africa is violently persecuting the country’s white Afrikaner minority farmers.
A senior Trump administration official said Mr Trump had not put a lot of thought into planning the meeting with the incoming mayor — but said his threats to block federal dollars from flowing to New York remained on the table.
Mr Mamdani said that he was not concerned about the president potentially trying to use the meeting to publicly embarrass him and said he saw it as a chance to make his case, even while acknowledging “many disagreements with the president”.
Instead, both men avoided a public confrontation in a remarkably calm and cordial series of comments in front of news reporters.
Mr Mamdani, who lives in Queens — where Mr Trump was raised — has shown a cutthroat streak just as Mr Trump has as a candidate.
During his campaign, he appeared to borrow from Mr Trump’s playbook when he noted during a televised debate with Mr Cuomo that one of the women who had accused the former governor of sexual harassment was in the audience.
Mr Cuomo has denied wrongdoing.
But the tensions were subdued as Mr Trump seemed sympathetic to his policies to want to build more housing.
“People would be shocked, but I want to see the same thing,” the president said.
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