President Donald Trump announced Wednesday evening that the long-awaited meeting with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will take place in Washington on Friday. This announcement prepares a face-to-face meeting between these two diametrically opposed political figures who have been clashing remotely for months.
This meeting, which will take place on Friday in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said on social networks, could mark a certain relaxation between the Republican president and the rising Democratic star.
Since Mr. Mamdani’s victory, President Trump has in fact been more conciliatory towards the latter’s main campaign argument, financial accessibility.
Addressing Mr. Mamdani by his full name, and putting his middle name, Kwame, in quotation marks, Mr. Trump indicated Wednesday evening that Mr. Mamdani had requested the meeting, saying that more details are forthcoming.
Saying it was “customary” for a new New York mayor to meet with the president, spokeswoman Dora Pekec said Mamdani planned to speak with Trump about “public safety, economic security and the affordability agenda that more than a million New Yorkers voted for just two weeks ago.”
For months, President Trump has attacked Mr. Mamdani, falsely calling him a “communist” and predicting the ruin of his hometown if the democratic socialist was elected. He also threatened to deport Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a naturalized American in 2018, and to withdraw federal funds from the city.
Following the November elections, marked by heavy Republican defeats in Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia, Mr. Trump increased his emphasis on affordability, a central theme of Democratic campaigns, including Mr. Mamdani’s.
Mr. Trump even went so far as to indicate on social media on Friday that the Republican Party is the “party of affordability.” It comes as the president and his Republican colleagues say the economy has never been stronger.
On Sunday evening, Mr. Trump told reporters that he planned to meet with Mr. Mamdani. Mr. Mamdani, who will officially take office in January, confirmed on Monday that he hoped to meet President Trump and that his team had contacted the White House to arrange a possible meeting.
During his victory speech earlier this month, Mr. Mamdani, 34, who rose in a few months from the status of an obscure local elected official representing Queens to that of elected mayor of the largest city in the country, said he wanted New York to show the country how to defeat the president.
He also spoke of the need to “protect” New York from any influence of Donald Trump once in office in January, while promising to collaborate with everyone, including the president, if it served the interests of New Yorkers.
