President Donald Trump on Thursday hosted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for a face-to-face meeting, just days after attacking him during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.
Mamdani’s visit was not on Trump’s public schedule for the day, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the timing or substance of the planned meeting.
But Mamdani confirmed the sit-down afterwards in a post on X in which he called it “productive” and added that he was “looking forward to building more housing in New York City.”
Accompanying the brief statement was a photograph of him and Trump behind the iconic desk hewn from timbers salvaged from H.M.S. Resolute, with the president holding a pair of New York Daily News front pages.
One was a reproduction of a famous Daily News front page from October 30, 1975 which read “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” in reference to then-president Gerald Ford’s pledge to veto any federal bailout of the cash-strapped metropolis.
The other was a mock-up in the same style with a photo of Trump and the accompanying headline “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD” indicating that Trump had backed a “new era of housing.”
A smaller headline read: “Trump Delivers 12,000+ Homes” and “Most Since 1973.”
The ersatz newspaper appeared to invoke Trump’s own family history.
His father, Fred Trump Sr., was a prolific builder whose construction company built and sold thousands of single-family homes in Queens plus apartment buildings in Brooklyn as well as up and down the East Coast from the 1930s onward.
The surprise trip by the Big Apple mayor comes on the heels of him being on the receiving end of barbs from Trump, who called him “the new communist mayor of New York City” during an extended riff on the alleged popularity of a GOP voter identification bill which critics say would make it harder for many Americans to cast ballots this fall.
“I think he’s a nice guy. I actually speak to him a lot — bad policy, but nice guy,” Trump said before suggesting that Mamdani is a hypocrite for not supporting voter ID even though the city government requires people to present identification and a social security card to comply with federal immigration and tax laws before they can receive payment for shoveling snow.
Trump, a native New Yorker who was born and raised in Queens, previously hosted Mamdani for a White House visit in November, shortly after the 34-year-old was elected to become the 112th mayor of the country’s most populous city.
The president, who had for months assailed the ex-New York State assemblyman as a “communist” and suggested that the government would retaliate against New Yorkers if they elected him over ex-governor Andrew Cuomo and perennial GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa, shocked reporters by treating the then-mayor-elect warmly and predicting that the self-described Democratic Socialist would be “a really great mayor” for their shared home city.
Seated behind his desk in the Oval Office while Mamdani stood next to him during what became a half-hour love-fest between the two men on November 21, Trump told reporters he’d congratulated his hometown’s next chief executive and pledged to help him bring prices down for New Yorkers.
“I think you’re going to have, hopefully, a really great mayor — the better he does, the happier I am,” Trump said.
“I will say there’s no difference in party. There’s no difference in anything, and we’re going to be helping him to make everybody’s dream come true, having a strong and very safe New York.”
The astonishingly convivial photo opportunity then morphed into a question-and-answer session with White House reporters and select MAGA influencers who were brought into the room to witness the moment, with multiple questioners attempting to bait the men into attacking each other.
Asked about his previous comments calling Mamdani a “communist” — including one posted to Truth Social just one day ago — Trump implied that Mamdani’s views might change in the future and predicted that the youngest mayor-elect in New York history “is going to surprise some conservative people.”
When the mayor-elect was similarly pressed on past comments in which he’d called Trump a “despot,” the president jumped to Mamdani’s defense by telling reporters: “I’ve been called much worse than a despot, so it’s not that insulting.”
And after another reporter pushed Mamdani to say whether he was “affirming” prior comments in which he referred to the president as a “fascist,” Trump came to the rescue once more and implied that he did not have a problem with the attack.
“That’s OK — you can just say ‘yes,’” Trump said.
