New York City’s mayor-elect, the socialist Zohran Mamdani, is headed down the Acela corridor to meet with President Trump at the White House on Friday, in what has become one of the most anticipated first meetings since Frazier and Ali at Madison Square Garden in 1971.
So, will there be fireworks, if not fisticuffs, when these two men, with nary a good word to say of the other, make their acquaintance? I wouldn’t count on it.
If we do see the patented Trump sit down in the Oval Office with his guest and reporters, and if I was Zany Zohran’s team, I would try hard to avoid it, then the stupidest thing that Hizzoner of the Little Red Book could do is make an angry scene.
Let’s face it, if Mamdani, the 34-year-old theater kid who has never had a real job, tries to go toe-to-toe with Trump, as for example, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalenskyy famously and unfortunately, once did, the president will mop the floor with him.
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Not only does Trump have the most powerful home-field advantage in the world in the White House, he also doesn’t really need anything from Mamdani. That’s something that the incoming mayor cannot say of Trump, who holds the keys to a lot of federal money that Gotham needs.
A mayor is often defined by his first months in office, and Trump has the ability to make it very difficult, with ICE raids and freezes on federal dollars, or to give the Karl Marx acolyte some runway, perhaps even enough rope to begin hanging his goofy free-stuff initiatives.
So, there are plenty of reasons for Zohran to flash his winning smile, make nice, and pose for pictures with 47.
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On the other hand, for Mamdani’s strongest supporters, his socialist base, Trump is not just the physical embodiment of capitalism, but of fascism, not that they draw a particularly bright line between the two.
Zohran can’t really yuk it up with the president while maintaining his promise to be Trump’s worst nightmare. It wouldn’t just make his fellow Democrats feel queasy, it would undermine their entire current reason for existing.
The Democrats, lacking a cohesive identity at the moment, make up for it by hating Trump. Democrat members of Congress are urging our military to disobey his orders, Democrats in Congress spend more time making anti-Trump TikTok videos than they do reviewing legislation.
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This is the rock and the hard place that Mamdani finds himself between on Friday. If he is too rude to Trump, he undermines his own chances to do the work he wants to do in Gotham. If he is too cordial, he makes his party, its hair on fire daily over Trump, look foolish.
The wildcard in all of this, as always, is Trump himself, from whom we could see a fatherly lecture, mockery of Zohran or even the kind of backhanded praise he likes to tactically lavish on his adversaries, such as Vladimir Putin or Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
As Trump put it, back in his fateful meeting with Zelenskyy, he and the White House hold all the cards.
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The last thing to keep in mind about Friday’s meeting, whatever its form or content, is that there are already some whisperings among Mamdani’s socialist base that he is selling them out.
The mayor-elect’s decision to keep NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in place was a concession to the moderates in the Democratic Party, as is his statement that “it is not the time,” for socialist City Councilman Che Osse to primary House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in his Brooklyn district.
We have seen this before. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., also plays it a bit both ways, never quite going as far as the ‘Squad’ she leads on controversial issues, often metaphorically telling them, “You go ahead, I’ll be right behind you.”
Roughly a decade ago, Trump began a takeover of the Grand Old Party that is now all but complete. Today, Zohran Mamdani is a big part of the socialist effort to do the same thing to the Democratic Party.
When The Donald shakes Zohran’s hand on Friday, no doubt aggressively and for a long time, we may be seeing, for the first time, the versions of our two major political parties that will spar over the future of our nation for decades to come.
