US President Donald Trump has confirmed a long-awaited meeting with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will take place in Washington this week, setting up an in-person encounter between the political opposites who have antagonised each other for months. The sit-down is scheduled for Friday in the Oval Office, Trump announced on social media.
Calling Mamdani by his full name and putting the mayor-elect’s middle name of Kwame in quotation marks, Trump posted on Wednesday night that Mamdani had asked for the meeting. Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said it was “customary” for an incoming New York City mayor to meet with the president, and that the mayor-elect planned to discuss “public safety, economic security and the affordability agenda that over one million New Yorkers voted for just two weeks ago”.
Trump has previously criticised Mamdani, falsely labelling him a “communist” and threatening to deport him, despite Mamdani being a naturalised US citizen from Uganda. However, following November elections in which Republicans lost in several states, including New York, Trump has shifted focus to affordability, recently declaring the Republicans the “Party of Affordability”.
Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic socialist who rose from state lawmaker to mayor-elect of the nation’s biggest city, has spoken of “Trump-proofing” New York once he takes office in January, but also promised to work with anyone, including the president, if it benefited New Yorkers.
