They both come from the same neighborhood, Queens, but they inhabit planets separated by light years. Or not so much, judging by the meeting that the American president, Donald Trump, and the elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, held this Friday at the White House, at the end of which they exhibited a surprising harmony in the Oval Office. So much so that they gave the impression – or the mirage, it remains to be seen – that they have taken aim at each other in recent months.
“The better he does, the happier I will be,” said Trump, who treated a political rival with unusual courtesy, and only one day after proposing the death penalty. “I am convinced that he will do a good job in New York,” added the host (seated at the Oval Office table) of the guest, who remained standing in an impromptu meeting with the press. “I think it’s going to surprise a lot of conservatives.”
“We don’t agree on almost anything, but we will help you do a great job,” Trump promised during question time. “Something unites us. We both want our city to do very well.”
Mamdani spoke of a very productive meeting, “which focused on a shared admiration and love for New York,” as well as “the need to improve the cost of living for those trying to afford it in the most expensive city in the United States.” He also said he was “looking forward to working with the White House.” “It was a great meeting,” the president clarified again and again.
Trump’s change of attitude toward someone he has repeatedly attacked in recent months may be due to his known weakness for other people’s charisma, of which his guest has plenty. At one point, he even came to Mamdani’s defense when asked by a journalist. The reporter wanted to know if the mayor believed, as he had said in the past, that the president is a “fascist.” The young politician began to answer, but Trump interrupted him and blurted out: “Oh, leave it alone, tell him yes, and let’s move on to something else, you’ll waste more time trying to explain it to him.”
Common points
Maybe it’s because, as he himself admitted, “being mayor of New York” was always a dream for Trump. Or because of the common points – which there always were, even before the explosion of friendship this Friday – between both politicians. In one of the most successful videos of the campaign that led him to the mayor’s office, Mamdani went to certain areas of the city where Trump improved his numbers in the 2024 elections to ask people why they had voted for the Republican in the presidential elections. The reasons they gave him – which can be summarized in one, the intolerable tolls of the “cost of living” – are not far from those that will lead him to become, starting in January, the first Muslim mayor and
The real estate magnate and politician who won by proposing a rent freeze for 2.5 million people living in rent-controlled apartments came at a request that insists on calling him “communist” (although he is not). Also, after the cry of resistance launched by Mamdani on the night of his electoral victory, during a speech in which he appealed directly to the president of the United States.
“Donald Trump, I know you’re watching me. I only have three words for you: turn up the volume!” [del televisor]” he cried. “New York will continue to be a city of immigrants, built by immigrants and driven by immigrants. And, starting tonight, led by an immigrant,” he continued. “To get to any of us he will have to go over all of us,” he warned Trump in what could be interpreted as a reference to the raids against undocumented immigrants that have proliferated throughout the country.
The day before, Trump, who this Friday said that they had talked more about crime than about those raids, had written a message on his social networks in which he offered his support to Mamdani’s rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who had to reinvent himself as an independent after the resounding and unexpected defeat in the June primaries. “I am firmly convinced that New York City will be a total economic and social disaster if Mamdani wins,” who slipped the idea that he would pressure the elected mayor by withdrawing federal funding from the city or that he would send the National Guard, as he has done before with cities governed by the left such as Los Angeles or New York.
All of this, for which local and state authorities have been preparing in recent weeks based on confidential meetings, seems more distant after the meeting between Trump and Mamdani this Friday.
Despite these tense precedents, Mamdani’s team wanted to reduce the drama prior to the meeting. “As is customary for an incoming City Administration, the mayor-elect plans to meet with the president in Washington to discuss public safety, economic stability and the affordable housing agenda that more than one million New Yorkers approved just two weeks ago,” Mamdani spokeswoman Dora Pekec said in a statement Thursday. In the hours before, Trump predicted in a radio interview that they were going to “get along well.” “We have very different philosophies, but we both want the same thing: a strong New York.”
“Clearly, Trump feels threatened by the figure of Mamdani,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-president of the New York faction of the Democratic Socialist Party of the United States (DSA), explained this Friday in a telephone interview prior to the White House meeting. “He is a New Yorker, so he knows the city and it is not lost on him that what he has achieved is not easy.”
To the extensive repertoire of achievements of the last year, in which the young member of the state assembly whom few knew became a star of the global left, this Friday another had to be added: having managed against all odds to appease Trump in his own lair.
