In a rare show of camaraderie, US President Donald Trump’s first-ever meeting with New York City’s Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, on Friday at the White House, displayed shared goals rather than combustible differences that were evident until recently, when Mamdani was campaigning for the election.
From discussing housing affordability and the cost of groceries and utilities, the two seemed to have come a long since Trump called Mamdani a “100 per cent Communist Lunatic” and a “total nut job”, while Mamdani called Trump’s administration “authoritarian” and described himself as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”.
“We’re going to be helping him, to make everybody’s dream come true, having a strong and very safe New York,” the president told reporters with Mamdani beside him in the Oval Office.
“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,” Mamdani said.
Brushing aside Mamdani’s public criticisms of the president over his administration’s deportation raids and claims that Trump was behaving like a despot, Trump said “the responsibility of holding an executive position in the government causes a person to change”.
Also Read: Trump-Mamdani exchange barbs over political ideologies
“I think he is going to surprise some conservative people, actually,” said Trump, who later seemed to take little umbrage when reporters asked Mamdani to clarify his past statements indicating that he thought the president was acting like a fascist.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who takes office in January, said he sought the meeting with Trump to talk about ways to make New York City more affordable.
For Mamdani, a sit-down with the president of the United States offered the state lawmaker the chance to go head-to-head with the most powerful person in the world.
Meanwhile, it gave 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.
Saying he “may want to help him out”, Trump went on to say that “some of his ideas are really the same ideas that I have”.
Mamdani, who lives in Queens – where Trump was raised – was born in Uganda and became a naturalised American citizen after graduating from college.
Both men avoided a public confrontation in a remarkably calm and cordial series of comments in front of news reporters, with Trump sounding also sympathetic to Mamdani’s policies to want to build more housing.
“People would be shocked, but I want to see the same thing,” the president said.
However, a senior Trump administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Trump had not put a lot of thought into planning the meeting with the incoming mayor, and that the president’s threats to block federal dollars from flowing to New York remained on the table.
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