New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani recently met with President Trump in the Oval Office, prompting outcry and commentary from all sides. On today’s edition of The Editors, Rich asks his panelists what they took away from this meeting.
Noah is “apprehensive” about the optics. “I don’t think it was good for our politics,” he says, “for the president to be normalizing an individual, to be acclimatizing the public to the notion that this is somebody who is a responsible political figure.” But overall, Noah doesn’t “think any of this matters. I think this meeting will be forgotten in very short order. Everybody will return to their respective corners.”
Charlie looks at the various responses to this meeting and finds “the need to justify everything Trump does annoying. I find it annoying that after that meeting, people immediately jumped to what should now be a joke alongside ‘Republicans pounce’: ‘8D chess.’ “Quite seriously, this was the case that was made: ‘No you don’t understand, it was 52D chess.'”
He agrees with Noah that there isn’t much to be gleaned from the meeting and stresses that while he thinks “Trump is drawn to winners” and “easily flattered,” he doesn’t believe Trump “is anything other than a normal politician who has to do normal politician things. . . . And it’s annoying that any evaluation of Trump on those terms is met immediately by his Amen chorus with the repudiation that ‘you just don’t understand but at some point in the future you’ll see why.’ I don’t buy it.”
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