In a triumphant election-night speech earlier this month, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani addressed President Donald Trump directly, telling the president to “turn the volume up.” Trump has repeatedly called Mamdani a “Communist” and questioned his citizenship status.
But when the two met in the Oval Office on Friday, it was all strikingly cordial — almost affectionate. “Hopefully, you’ll have a really great mayor,” Trump told reporters. “The better he does, the happier I am.”
To break down what happened in their meeting, why it wasn’t entirely surprising, and what it could mean for New York City and the GOP, I turned to my colleague Astead Herndon, who has covered Trump and recently wrote a definitive profile of Mamdani. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
So Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani had this strikingly friendly appearance in the Oval. What happened? Is this a big deal?
I certainly think it’s a big deal. It reflects the intention that Mamdani approached his entire campaign with, and particularly the general election — his consistent ability to turn skeptics into supporters. That was consistently happening in such a way that it was built into his strategy, and I think we saw that on the biggest stage yesterday.
In some ways, it reflects a lot of the meetings that he’s had already, but in some ways, it’s so much more extraordinary considering what Trump has said, and considering the way Trump was really coming to him. Trump’s the one throwing up the thumbs-up in the photos, not Mamdani. And I think that is reflective of an approach where Mamdani and his team come to these [meetings] and try to focus on areas of agreement and shared values. They identified affordability as one that they think Donald Trump shared, and so they came with that intention in mind. That’s the same strategy they’ve used for meetings of all sorts.
He has this playbook that’s worked really well. He’s won over a lot of folks in New York City politics, in business. Even given that, were you surprised at how well Friday went?
I thought that Trump would like him, but I didn’t know that Trump would shower praise on him. I didn’t think that Trump would look at him kind of like an uncle and nephew. He’s smiling in ways I haven’t seen him smile, even with political allies.
I do think that it reflects two politicians whose visions overlap. These are people who have both overcome political establishments and who both engage in a kind of movement-based politics, not relying on transactional old-guard endorsement machines. I do think there is a kind of New York, Queens respect for one another, and the ladder that Mamdani had to climb to become mayor. These are also two people who see politics as a collective action rather than an individual game, and that’s not true of everybody.
When I was at a Mamdani rally and the crowd can do call-and-response to his to his top policies — freeze the rent, make buses fast and free, make child care free — the only other time I’ve heard that, where people are able to call back the signature policy, is with “build the wall.” So it’s not just showmanship, it’s showmanship plus a value that people trust and engaging with it beyond the traditional political structures.
Trump entered the political scene as this New York guy, and that has faded a little bit over time. He’s moved to Florida; he’s down at Mar-a-Lago all the time. But he’s still kind of charmed by getting back to his Queens roots, right?
I think he cares deeply about New York. The traditional Republican playbook is to let cities fail, or to even revel in some cities’ failure, as they’ve done with Chicago. I don’t think Trump feels the same way about New York because he’s invested his life in the place, and so I believe him when he says he wants the city to thrive.
Donald Trump felt so rejected by certain classes of New York, by certain kinds of ways that elite New York Democratic liberalism had shut him out. But those same structures have shut out Zohran Mamdani, too. There’s an element of Queens outsider in this that does bond them.
Trump, in his early days in New York City, was very flexible about working with and donating to Democrats and Republicans. He was very practical, coming up as a builder in the New York political scene.
I think that that is required, and that practicality is reflected in Mamdani. When people were seeing him as ideologically rigid because of things like DSA and his political history, one thing that was very clear to me during that campaign was he was not seeing being mayor the same way he was seeing his job as a member of the New York State Assembly.
He understood that it is a role where he would have to compromise, he would have to put DSA at a distance, he would have to excite his base. I think there was a recognition that there would need to be flexibility. These are all of the same things Donald Trump rises in and that jack-of-all-trades, “be who you need to be” kind of mindset.
Why did this meeting happen in the first place, after the very contentious back-and-forth Trump and Mamdani had during the campaign?
Mamdani’s team reached out, and I think there was a real sense that it was in the city’s interest not to provoke Donald Trump, considering all of the rhetoric going back and forth that Trump could impose a disaster on New York, even as soon as Inauguration Day.
Mamdani’s election night speech was directed at Trump in their moment of triumph, but it did not seem to me as if they would take a fully oppositional tone, at least from the start. It seems to me to be in line with the strategy they’ve taken with opponents of all sorts — a willingness to engage, given an initial belief of good faith. I don’t think that that’s where all Democrats have been, but I do think it’s a quality that is sort of baseline if you want to be successful, particularly in the role of mayor.
Do you think there is anything here resembling a playbook for other Democrats or other mayors?
I don’t think it’s different from the lesson that Mamdani has already shown. Donald Trump has always rewarded someone who engaged with him directly about their beliefs and came from that place. I think that was true in Nancy Pelosi, just as true as it is in Zohran.
But there are a lot of other factors happening here that matter. I think the New Yorkness matters. I think Mamdani as a communicator and his comfort in those spaces matters. Just coming from a place of values allows you to move on a podcast easier, move in the Oval Office easier, move an opponent or allies. That comfort is coming from the fact that Mamdani knows he’s not trying to triangulate. That’s not where Democrats have always been.
Where do you think the Mamdani-Trump relationship goes from here?
There are Republicans who are trying to run the straight jihadist fear-mongering playbook. Things can change. They might be back to calling him Mamdani the Commie by next week, and I think we kind of can expect that. But I think these images were so searing that it’s going to be hard.
They’re not only searing, they follow a pattern, which is that when people have engaged with Mamdani, he has not matched the radical that Republicans and some Democrats were trying to paint him as. That’s the reason he was successful in the mayoral race, and it’s a reason why the Republican boogeyman strategy was always threatening to be exposed. In this moment, I think Trump actually has exposed it.
