The ‘communist’ decisively charmed the ‘fascist.’
When New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump met for the first time at the White House, all previous invectives were forgotten. They laughed. They bonded over a shared affection for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When cameras were rolling, they practically bear-hugged in the Oval Office. And in a tremendous display of ideological flexibility, Trump, at one point, motioned to Mamdani and said of the democratic socialist, “Some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have.”
It was not immediately clear if that included free bussing or free childcare or government-run grocery stores or more stringent rent control or higher taxes on the wealthy.
The self-described socialist ran on those ideas successfully. And to the delight of the left, the mayor-elect repeatedly called Trump a “fascist.” The president, in turn, called Mamdani a “communist.” And hours before the bromance burgeoned, 86 Democrats joined 199 Republicans to pass a bipartisan resolution denouncing the “horrors of socialism,” splitting the liberal party.
But none of it seemed to matter as the two populists cast aside long-held beliefs long enough to bask in the warm glow of their new friendship.
In the head-spinning moment, the New York Post grasped for a point of ideological certainty and reminded Mamdani how he had just called Trump “a despot who betrayed his country.” A reporter from the hometown paper of both men confronted the mayor-elect, now smiling next to the president, with his words from the day before when he accused Trump of advancing “a fascist agenda.”
Mamdani was sheepish for just a moment. “We are very clear about our positions and our views,” he said, dodging the question before pivoting to insist that he and Trump had a “shared purpose,” namely confronting “a cost-of-living crisis.” Then Trump rescued his new friend.
“I’ve been called much worse than a despot,” Trump joked, “so it’s not that insulting.”
The president may not be personally insulted, but his hopes of retaining majorities in Congress could be severely damaged. Mamdani was the one bright spot for Republicans in the blue wave that came crashing down on Trump’s party in the off-year elections.
Speaker Mike Johnson told RealClearPolitics the day after those elections that he was prepared to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party. The next leader of the biggest metropolis in America, he said, was about to become the biggest liberal liability for Democrats. “The reason I’m optimistic is they’ve handed the keys to the kingdom to the Marxist,” Johnson predicted, “and he will destroy it.”
But the president does not think so. At least not now, after his visit with Mamdani. “I think you’re going to have, hopefully, a really great mayor,” Trump said, promising to help Mamdani “make everybody’s dream come true.” It was a stark reversal given how Trump had floated the idea of cutting off all federal funding to the city just weeks earlier.
And then the president made it personal. Mamdani had provided Republicans with a foil to depict New York as a socialist hellhole on the Hudson, that is, right until Trump took that talking point away from them. The billionaire real estate mogul said he would “absolutely” feel comfortable moving back to Manhattan under Mamdani. “I really would,” Trump replied when asked about returning to his hometown, “especially after the meeting.”
Trump even managed to neuter the campaign of Rep. Elise Stefanik. She is running for governor of New York and has accused Democrats of embracing, not just a socialist in Mamdani, but “a jihadist,” given his past criticisms of Israel. When asked if he believed he was standing next to a jihadist, the president demurred that sometimes politicians say things to the public just to get elected.
“No, I don’t. But she’s out there campaigning, and you know, you say things sometimes in a campaign. She’s a very capable person. But you’d really have to ask her about that,” Trump said. “I met with a man who is a very rational person. I met with a man who really wants to see New York be great again.”
Stefanik attempted damage control by pointing to the record.
“We all want NYC to succeed,” she wrote in a social media post after the meeting wrapped. “But we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.”
“If he walks like a jihadist, if he talks like a jihadist, if he campaigns like a jihadist, if he supports jihadists,” she continued, “he’s a jihadist.”
Stefanik included a screen grab of the front page of a recent copy of the New York Post. On the cover: a picture of a smiling Mamdani posing with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who has been linked to other terrorist activity in the United States
More than politics, the Trump family previously looked at Mamdani as a threat to their New York real-estate empire. The president has changed his residence to Florida, but his children maintain a robust presence in the city. Eric Trump previously blasted the Democratic Socialist as a threat to the metropolis and even to the free-enterprise system.
“This should not be a social experiment. They should just have somebody who can be a good leader, do the basics, and get the hell out of the way,” Eric Trump told RCP, “and honestly, the capitalists in New York will take care of the rest.”
A card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani ascribes to the view of that party that “capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit.” As far as a political capital goes, he gained plenty after his meeting with Trump – the president just humanized the face of the liberal opposition.
Karoline Leavitt had previewed the meeting as the unthinkable. “Tomorrow we have a communist coming to the White House because that is who the Democrat Party elected as the mayor of the largest city in the country,” she told reporters 24 hours before the Trump-Mamdani bromance blossomed.
That kind of rhetoric had conservatives hoping for fireworks before the meeting. They were crestfallen afterwards. “Trump’s Mamdani message is as useless and unhelpful as his affordability message,” a senior Republican official in the business of helping the GOP keep their majorities texted RCP.
A veteran of Trump’s 2024 campaign dismissed the détente in the Oval Office as just another photo-op. The Republican operative texted, “Is the midterm next week? No. This bromance won’t last long, so it won’t matter.”
Trump and Mamdani remain on a collision course. “There is nothing to beef over right now,” the Trump campaign official said, “so they are starting with a clean slate, apparently.”
