President Donald Trump and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani struck a surprisingly amicable tone as they met at the White House on Friday, despite months of tense back-and-forth between the two leaders.
“We agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” Trump told reporters from the Oval Office on Friday. “I want him to do a great job and we’ll help him do a great job.”
“I feel very confident he can do a good job, he’s going to surprise some conservative people,” Trump said earlier.
Mamdani, for his part, said he is looking forward to “working together to deliver affordability for New Yorkers” and that he “appreciated” the meeting with the president, which focused on a “shared admiration and love” for the city.
The pair particularly seemed to find common ground on the issues of affordability and fighting crime in the city.
“I think we’re going to work [our differences] out,” Trump said. “If we have known murderers and known drug dealers and some very bad people we want to get them out.”
“We discussed this at great length,” Trump added, saying Mamdani “wants to have a safe New York.”
“If you don’t have safe streets, it’s not going to be a success,” he concluded. “I think he wants to get them out maybe more than I do.”
During the first mayoral debate last month, Mamdani turned away from his past comments criticizing the New York Police Department and his calls to defund the agency when confronted with his remarks.
“I am not running to defund the police,” he said. “I am running to actually work with the police to deliver public safety.”
However, in 2020, Mamdani said he believed the city needed a “socialist city council to defund the police” and called the department “wicked & corrupt.”
“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti‑queer & a major threat to public safety,” Mamdani wrote in another post that year, in response to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to investigate the department. “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”
But during an interview with Fox News last month, he apologized for his past comments.
“Absolutely, I’ll apologize to police officers right here, because this is the apology that I’ve been sharing with many rank-and-file officers,” he said. “And I apologize because of the fact that I’m looking to work with these officers. And I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day.”
During the debate, Mamdani pitched his approach to addressing crime in the city as an effort that would include working alongside police officers with the launch of a Department of Community Safety.
“We will ensure that no longer are police officers asked to do the job of both policing and responding to the mental health crisis,” he said. “We will have dedicated teams of mental health outreach workers in the top 100 subway stations with the highest levels of the mental health crisis and homelessness.”
He suggested his proposal would help ensure that police response times would return to 2020 levels (eleven minutes), rather than the 16-minute response time the department is seeing today, “because they won’t be asked to respond to the 200,000 mental health calls that are coming in through 9-1-1 every year.”
On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the meeting with Mamdani would show the president is “willing to meet with anyone, and talk to anyone, and to try to do what’s right on behalf of the American people, whether they live in blue states or red states — or blue cities.”
“It speaks volumes that tomorrow we have a communist coming to the White House, because that’s who the Democrat Party elected as the mayor of the largest city in the country,” she told reporters.
Mamdani, for his part, has dismissed claims that he is a communist and instead identifies as a Democratic socialist. He is a member of the national Democratic Socialists of America and its local New York City chapter; while attending a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021, he told attendees not to compromise on goals like “seizing the means of production.” In his time campaigning for New York City mayor, Mamdani admitted to not liking capitalism and suggested billionaires should not exist.
The former state legislator campaigned heavily on cost-of-living issues and has proposed a slate of fantastical left-wing ideas, including universal health care, rent freezes, and the elimination of city bus fares. He has also proposed opening a network of government-owned grocery stores.
Mamdani bested former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa to become mayor-elect earlier this month, has said he is willing to work with anyone to benefit New Yorkers. He previously said his meeting with Trump would be an “opportunity to make the case for New Yorkers,” and that he would “make that case to anyone.”
He said that he was looking forward to speaking with Trump about “the affordability agenda, public safety, and economic security for each and every person that calls the city home.”
The meeting takes place after months of tense back-and-forth between the two leaders.
Mamdani called Trump a “despot” in his victory remarks earlier this month and said ““if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.” (Trump, for his part, dismissed the insult on Friday, saying he has been called “much worse” than a despot.)
Trump, who has repeatedly called Mamdani a communist, had threatened ahead of Election Day to withhold federal money from the city “other than the very minimum as required” if Mamdani won.
However, more recently, Trump said, “We want to see everything work out well for New York.”