By pandering to the president’s vanity, the New York mayor reinforced Trump’s image as a strongman commanding deference—an especially bad look on the eve of Trump’s war with Iran
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani makes a strongman happy.
(Image via X.com)
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
At just before 11 pm last Wednesday, the press release issued by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office advising the city’s media of the mayor’s plans for the following day was uncharacteristically brief: “Mayor Mamdani has no public events.” Although true, that statement was also intentionally misleading.
Wearing a dark hat and a mask to hide his face, the mayor boarded a flight to Washington, where—we now know—he met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. At their previous meeting, shortly after Mamdani’s election victory in November, the unexpectedly cordial rapport between the democratic socialist mayor and the MAGA president generated headlines around the world. During that introductory confab, Trump invited Mamdani to return “with ideas of big things” they could build together. At the top of Mamdani’s agenda last week was just such a proposal: that Trump provide federal aid to revive a long-shelved plan, developed during the de Blasio administration, to build 12,000 affordable apartments over the massive 180-acre Sunnyside Yard railroad junction and maintenance facility in Queens.
Catering—or, as some might say, pandering—to his audience, Mamdani came bearing the gift of two Daily News front pages: the famous (and genuine) “Ford to City: Drop Dead” from the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis and a (fake) mock-up bearing the heroic headline: “Trump to City: Let’s Build.” This actual specimen of fake news celebrated the president for backing a “new era of housing.” Thanks in part to the secrecy surrounding the meeting, and to Trump’s good-natured willingness to pose holding up both front pages behind the Resolute Desk, the photo commemorating the meeting soon went viral (the mayor’s tweet of the event garnered 28.5 million views).
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The news that, during the meeting, Mamdani had also intervened on behalf of Columbia senior Ellie Aghayeva, who had been seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at her university-owned apartment earlier that morning, seemed designed to neutralize criticism of the mayor for cozying up to the president—especially when, in response to Mamdani’s urging, Aghayeva was released from custody by the end of the day.
Although the housing announcement was all smoke and mirrors—Trump didn’t actually commit a single dollar, and Queens elected officials reiterated many of the same concerns about displacement and affordability that put the project on hold in 2019—the whole episode seemed like just another example of what we might as well call the “Mamdani effect”: the ability to dominate a news cycle (and charm potential adversaries) through sheer force of personality.
That changed on Saturday morning, when New Yorkers woke to the news that their country was, once again, at war in the Middle East. The mayor’s immediate response was forthright. He condemned the initial strikes as “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression.” Noting that the United States and Israel were already “bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war,” Mamdani declared, “Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change.”
But this time the mayor’s charm—and his ability to disarm his critics—seemed to have limits. Some Jews complained that while he spoke “directly to Iranian New Yorkers,” assuring them, “You will be safe here,” Mamdani offered no words of comfort to Israelis or others on the receiving end of Teheran’s missile barrages. An Iranian exile criticized the mayor’s failure to say anything about the repressive nature of the Islamic Republic. Nor did the conspicuous absence of any mention of Trump in Mamdani’s statement escape notice.
By Tuesday morning, the retrospective grumbling about Mamdani’s stunt in the Oval Office threatened to derail what was meant to be the triumphal rollout of the city’s new 2-K free childcare program in four neighborhoods. The announcement itself—a reprisal of the double act the mayor and Kathy Hochul had first debuted eight days into the new administration, when the governor committed two years’ worth of state funds for the program—went perfectly smoothly. Mamdani spoke with evident warmth of “our partner in this work…the first Mom governor of New York state,” while Hochul told the story of how she’d been forced to put her own career on hold when, at the age of 27, she found herself “having to stay home because I could not find childcare we could afford.”
While the first few queries from the press corps were focussed on funding—inevitably, Hochul was asked whether at some point “raising taxes on corporations and…the wealthy would be in the cards”—matters of war and peace soon dominated the proceedings.
“Mr. Mayor, do you think Iran is better off without the ayatollah?”
In his reply, Mamdani did his best to thread the needle, noting that he has “said before that the Iranian government has engaged in systematic repression of its own people…. It is a brutal government,” while also pointing out that he is “old enough to remember the devastating consequences for our country pursuing a war with the intent of regime change in that very same region not that many years ago.”
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None of the remaining questions were about childcare. Instead, the reporters asked whether he had anything in particular to say to Jewish New Yorkers or Iranian dissidents, pressed him on his use of the Signal messaging app, wondered if he’d spoken again with Trump since his White House visit, requested updates on the status of his application for a security clearance, and solicited his response to WABC radio host Sid Rosenberg describing him as a “Radical Islam cockroach.”
Describing the slur as “painfully familiar,” Mamdani countered Rosenberg’s bigotry in remarks that are worth watching in their entirety—both for their dignity and for the mayor’s moving defense of his faith and his determination to lead “a city where every single New Yorker who lives here can call it his home.”
But if that eloquence represented Mamdani’s best face, the same can’t be said of his sycophantic courting of the president. The mayor who was shrewd enough to appoint Ana Maria Archila, former codirector of the Working Families Party, as commissioner of international affairs must know that diplomacy is as important to this city’s identity as food carts or taxicabs. The candidate who was confident enough to break the mold by not promising to visit Israel—or Italy, or Ireland—as mayor should realize that while clever media stunts might win the news cycle, succeeding in office will require other, more demanding qualities. As another famously charming American, Benjamin Franklin, once observed: “He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”
Perhaps next time the mayor feels that particular itch coming on, he’ll resist the urge to scratch.
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