27.11.2025
Kissing the ring
Zohran Mamdani’s amiable presser with Donald Trump caught many by surprise. But the left must end its dependence on such unaccountable career politicians, argues Paul Demarty
It was already fair to say that we are in Zohran Mamdani’s honeymoon period as New York mayor - after all, he has not been sworn in yet, and is therefore more or less immune to scandal.
What we did not expect to see, peeking out from the bridal veil, is a certain Donald J Trump. A meeting between the two men was announced and relentlessly trailed in the media. Maga-brained rightists hoped to see Mamdani humiliated in the Oval Office, as Volodymyr Zelensky was not long ago. Leftwing Zohran superfans hoped, perhaps, to see their man strike a defiant pose. What we got was something different: two Queens natives yucking it up and beaming at the press throng - and each other, afterwards.
Having denounced Mamdani as a communist lunatic - and worse - during the campaign, Trump suddenly had hardly a bad word to say about him. On the C-word itself, Trump was sanguine: “He’s got views out there, but who knows - I mean, we’re going to see what works.” He went on: “And I can tell you, some of my views have changed. We had discussions on some things - I am not going to discuss what they were - but I feel very confident that he can do a very good job.”1
Price control
We are not privy, of course, to the discussions Trump refuses to disclose, but, from the content of the press conference as a whole, a hypothesis presents itself. In the room with Trump, Mamdani bit his tongue, when it came to ICE raids, Palestine and who knows what. He said: “you and I, Mr President, disagree on many things. But we have one thing in common - we both campaigned on making life more affordable for Americans. So let’s work together on that.”
Thus Trump denounced the Con Edison electrical monopoly that serves New York for holding prices high, despite the fact that natural gas prices are down (thanks to Trump’s genius for good government, we’re sure!). This has the smell of a line fed directly to him by Mamdani, and catered to Trump’s egotism: “Your heroic efforts for the American people are being squandered by these parasites, Mr President … ”
For the duration of the interview, Trump was seated, and Mamdani stood, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. (Maybe it is just my own psychological quirks at work, but it is the first time I have seen him smile obviously disingenuously. It was part smirk, part rictus, all control.) Tough questions did come his way, from the beginning. A reporter asked him: “Just days ago you referred to president Trump as a despot who betrayed the country … and accused him of having a fascist agenda. Are you planning to retract any of these remarks in order to improve your relationship?”
Mamdani’s answer:
I think both president Trump and I, we are very clear about our positions and our views. And what I really appreciate about the president is the meeting that we had focused not on places of disagreement, which there are many, and also focused on the shared purpose that we have in serving New Yorkers … And the meeting came back again and again to what it could look like to lift those New Yorkers out of struggle and start to deliver them the city that they can do more than just struggle to afford it, but also start to live in.
I quote it at length because this is a characteristic Mamdani move. He does not abandon his previous positions: merely swerves them. His anti-Zionism was no obstacle, so far as he was concerned, to reaching out sincerely to parts of the New York Jewish population for whom Zionism is intensely important; the same could be said for his opposition, as a Muslim of south Asian heritage, to Hindutva chauvinism. From the kosher store to the halal cart, to the curry house, all suffer under high prices and rapacious landlords.
Likewise with Trump: there was little point, from Mamdani’s point of view, in giving him a lecture on political authoritarianism. He could only lose by doing so. By achieving this chummy press conference, Mamdani may well have put off the paramilitary occupation of New York City - à la Chicago or Portland - by some months. When it comes, he can at least claim that he tried to be reasonable. The strangest moment of the event came when a reporter pushed Mamdani to say definitively whether or not he thought Trump was a fascist. Trump himself interrupted: “That’s OK. You can just say it. That’s easier. It’s easier than explaining it. I don’t mind.”
The response from Trumpworld has been one of its periodic episodes of total bafflement. Laura Loomer, an ideological gatekeeper for the Maga scene of doubtful sanity (and definitely on the Zionist wing of the now-divided American right), was bereft that Trump was so chummy with someone she considered a jihadist and a communist. That kind of rhetoric was absolutely typical during the mayoral campaign, and indeed many ostensibly liberal commentators have availed themselves of effectively Islamo-gauchiste theories of the case. Trump’s insouciance is hardly unprecedented - consider his ‘kiss and make up’ routine with Kim Jong Un in his first term. For all his pathologies, Trump is not fundamentally an ideologically motivated character; but his hardcore supporters are, and that is their curse.
MTG resignation
This seems a good moment to bring in a character who contrasts usefully with Mamdani - Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who announced her resignation on the same day as the Mamdani-Trump love-in. Greene (or MTG, as she is known) has a rather spicy political history. She is an anti-vaxxer, a former believer in the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories: indeed someone who promoted the idea that California wildfires in 2018 were the result of laser blasts from outer space on the dime of the Rothschilds and other - ahem - usual suspects. Her insatiable addiction to such conspiracy narratives naturally led her to become a disciple of Donald Trump.
Her resignation is thus, on one level, a shock, but also seems to have been a long time coming. Her belief in every paedophile-cabal conspiracy theory going could not survive contact with Trump’s obvious complicity with Jeffrey Epstein, and - more to the point - she cannot reconcile herself to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, and American complicity with it. So she has resigned, conscience intact. Here, she contrasts sharply with the general run of Maga types, whose attachment is entirely to the person of Trump, and have mastered the art of forgetfulness. MTG refuses to forget the sight of dismembered Palestinian babies, or the promises to blow open the Epstein scandal for good, and so she is walking away.
She is thus a vanishingly rare example of political principle among the American governing class. That is not to say that her politics, such as they are, are not barbaric and insane for the most part; but there is such a thing as honour, and it is a good idea to acknowledge it.
Mamdani seems a very different character. He is charismatic, and a dab hand at keeping control of everything. Though his political background is unambiguously leftwing, and he is quite sincerely motivated to improve the lot of his fellow men and women, he seems increasingly to have wandered into our timeline from somewhere very different. He would have made, we suspect, an excellent party boss in the days of Tammany Hall. He is good for a stump speech, good for retail politics, and - it now seems clear - good at ‘managing upwards’. Whether that translates into long-term success is another matter - he has no machine of the kind of strength that Boss Tweed had - but the picture remains unmistakeable.
Discomfort
Hence a certain amount of leftwing discomfort at the Trump-Mamdani summit. Wasn’t this supposed to be a grassroots insurgency against the powers-that-be? A people-powered festival of resistance? How do we get from there to the chummy photo-op in front of a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
A representative example here would be Kshama Sawant - one-time Taaffite and long-time Seattle city councillor - who tweeted in response:
If I were in Mamdani's position, instead of asking Trump to meet with me, I would have announced a mass rally of tens of thousands of people in New York City to protest against ICE raids, to declare that New York City will not tolerate ICE and will fight Trump every inch of the way. I would launch a mass campaign for free transit and free childcare and build a militant movement to win.2
Though we do not endorse Boss-Tweedism in politics, whether in its original form or in its current Mamdani glow-up, it should be said that it is more serious than this kind of verbiage. “If I were in Mamdani’s position” - that is, if she had won a mayoral election promising without qualification to lower people’s household expenses, a task which is only very partially in the power of the mayor’s office - she would announce a mass rally … to do what? Advertise her own powerlessness? Why would one launch a “mass campaign” for free transit after winning the election, instead of campaigning for it in the election in the first place?
As for ICE, protests of many millions, in the form of ‘no kings’, have failed to intimidate them. Why would protests of the order of tens of thousands do so now? To be blunt, there are two hypothetically reasonable options for dealing with this problem. One is to cut a deal - the logic of Mamdani’s recent behaviour. The other is armed self-defence. Cutting a deal is certainly more realistic at the present time. Armed self-defence is not impossible, but easy to screw up with adventurism, and dependent on other variables - principally the general organisational strength of the movement - but it is a serious option, and indeed the course we advocate (via partyism in the broader movement, of course). Protest politics is not useless, but has already run up against the basic problem it always does: now what? What do we do when the rally ends and we go home?
Why not Boss-Tweed-Mamdani-ism? We have mentioned practical problems - Mamdani is not the author of his own fate. If the mayoralty of New York is unusually defanged, however, the truth is that political and economic power in modern society is organised not at the municipal level, or even the national level, but supranationally. Bonapartism does not scale terribly well - power must devolve at some point. It is preferable that it does so democratically, and so local decisions are made locally, but global decisions are nevertheless binding - by the rules, but also morally - on the localities.
Concretely, if Mamdani really is faced with the choice of muting any resistance to the ICE or having his affordability efforts sabotaged from on high, what should he do? He has campaigned for election on the platform of affordability for New Yorkers; yet he is a humane socialist for whom mass deportations of illegal New Yorkers would be a moral insult. There is no good answer to this question for the New York City mayor per se. The only feasible moral agent here would be a party, which would be in a position to delegitimise state violence and make armed self-defence a fait accompli. (Under such circumstances, let Trump try the loyalty of his troops against the cities from which they were recruited.)
Mamdani’s success as an old-style party boss is yet to be determined. But the party we need is one without ‘bosses’ - otherwise it is inconceivable that we would be able to meet the challenge of our enemies. You can only grin your way through so much.
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Quotes are from the New York Times transcript of the news conference: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/nyregion/trump-mamdani-meeting-press-conference-transcript.html.↩︎