The president hosted the mayor-elect at the White House – and seemed enamoured of his fellow New Yorker
The highly anticipated Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani – the mayor-elect of New York City, the US president’s beloved home town – was hardly the combustible tête-à-tête many had predicted. For the moment at least, the two New Yorkers appeared friendly, smiling and cautiously optimistic about the work they might accomplish together.
Neither revived their hot campaign trail rhetoric, in which they cast each other as diametrically opposed political adversaries. Trump had labeled Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic” and urged voters to back his opponent, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. In turn, Mamdani had assailed Trump as a “despot” and pledged to be the president’s “worst nightmare”. Here are 5 things that stood out from their surprising display of political bonhomie:
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Trump and Mamdani <3 New York
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Trump would live in Mamdani’s New York
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Trump dismisses Republican attacks on Mamdani
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Trump deflected pointed questions from conservative journalists to Mamdani
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Adversaries turned affordability agenda partners
Trump has always appeared to be easily persuadable by people with strong personalities and conviction as long as they weren’t directly attacking him at the time. That’s why his opinions on this seem to change to match whoever he last had a conversation with. He’s a sucker for what the incels refer to as alpha males.
And he’s always been a clout chaser. Zohran is getting a lot of media attention, and there’s nothing he likes more than being seen with popular people