New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani insisted that he would be able to work with Donald Trump and the White House even as he defended his position that Trump is a fascist.
The incoming leader of the nation’s largest city was on Meet the Press on Sunday after a Friday meeting with Trump at the White House. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, represents part of his party’s emerging left flank as the greater Democratic coalition shifts and reorganizes itself following the devastating 2024 elections, which saw them lose key seats in the Senate as well as the presidency.
Mamdani reiterated that he thought he could work with Trump, a prospect that seemed fairly obvious to most people watching Friday’s meeting between the mayor-elect and a beaming, happy president who seemed almost enamored with his guest and his calls to reinvigorate the city of New York as the cameras rolled. Trump, for his part, denied racist accusations from members of his own party who claim that Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, was a “jihadist”.
In the same meeting, Trump jokingly permitted Mamdani to call him a “fascist” in response to a reporter’s question about the mayor-elect’s past characterization of the president. On Sunday, Mamdani said his stance on Trump’s use of the presidency hadn’t changed.
With moderator Kristen Welker noting that Trump had jumped in and answered for him, Mamdani clarified: “And after President Trump said that, I said yes.”
“That’s something that I’ve said in the past and I say it today [too],” Mamdani told NBC. “I think what I appreciated about the conversation that I had with the president was that we were not shy about the places of disagreement, about the politics that has brought us to this moment. And we also wanted to focus on what it could look like to deliver on a shared analysis of an affordability crisis.”
He added that as mayor, his job was to manage leadership of the city and said that he did not go to the White House to make a political show, but rather to find areas of common ground with the president on policies and plans that would benefit the city.
Asked by Welker how he could “square” doing that with his sharp disagreements with Trump, Mamdani replied: “I think working for the people of New York City demands that you work with everyone and anyone.”
His comments come as Thursday’s meeting sent off a shockwave through Washington politics.
In one fell swoop, the president disarmed his party’s favorite weapon against Mamdani, whom congressional Republicans and others had eagerly been vowing to make the face of the Democratic Party in their campaigns against more centrist members of the party who’ve been afraid to associate themselves with progressives.
But the racist smears of Mamdani being a “jihadist” simply because he is Muslim were echoed not just by Republicans but also by Democrats who supported Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary and later general election to Mamdani in New York.
That fear of the party’s progressive wing was evident on the House floor this week as many Democrats joined with their Republican colleagues to vote on a resolution condemning “socialism” as a concept, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Meanwhile, those same lawmakers were pummelled on Twitter/X. Many Democrats did not endorse Mamdani after he became the party’s official nominee, despite the demands made to progressives to “vote blue no matter who” in past presidential election cycles. Some, like Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, avoided taking a position on the general election entirely after it became clear that Mamdani was going to win. Others, like Rep. Tom Suozzi, endorsed Cuomo and by extension, the racist attacks against the new mayor-elect.
On Friday, many left-leaning Twitter/X users mocked Democrats for showing Mamdani less personal warmth than the Republican president had.
“Maybe sit this one out,” one Twitter user advised the Democratic National Committee after it posted a meme about the meeting. That user’s post was liked nearly a quarter of a million times.
Trump, however, dismissed the racist abuse entirely upon meeting Mamdani, instead referring to him as “a very rational person”.
“I met with a man who really wants New York to be great again,” said a grinning Trump.
His remarks were immediately seized upon by the re-election campaign of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. Her Republican opponent, Elise Stefanik, has been one of the loudest voices embracing the “jihadist” label for Mamdani as she pins her campaign’s hopes on using Hochul’s budding professional relationship with Mamdani to cast the governor as an unpopular figure and a radical.
Remarking of Stefanik in an interview after the meeting, Hochul smirked and said: “She’s full of s**t.”
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