president donald trump Late Wednesday, he announced a long-awaited meeting with New York City’s next mayor. Zoran Mandani There will be a direct clash between the two sides later this week in Washington. politically opposite people People who have been playing against each other from afar for months.
The sit-in, which Trump said on social media would take place Friday in the Oval Office, could represent a kind of détente between the Republican president and the rising Democratic star, as Trump moves toward embracing the issue of affordability, which has been at the center of his campaign since Mamdani’s victory.
Calling Mamdani by his full name and putting the mayor-elect’s middle name, Kwame, in quotation marks, President Trump posted Wednesday night that Mamdani had requested a meeting and promised “further details to come!”
Press secretary Dora Pekek said it was “traditional” for New York’s next mayor to meet with the president, and that Mamdani would discuss with Trump “public safety, economic security and the affordability agenda that more than 1 million New Yorkers voted for just two weeks ago.”
President Trump has been attacking Mamdani for months, falsely labeling him a “communist” and predicting his homeland would be destroyed if the democratic socialist was elected. He also threatened to deport Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018, and to withdraw federal funds from the city.
But after the November election, Republicans lost badly Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia — President Trump spoke Learn more about affordabilityThis has been the focus of the entire Democratic campaign, including Mamdani’s camp, which even declared in a social media post on Friday that the Republican Party is “the party of affordability!” This is exactly what the president and his fellow Republicans claim. economy We’ve never been stronger.
President Trump told reporters on Sunday night that he planned to meet with Mamdani, saying: we will solve something” On Monday, Mamdani, who officially takes office in January, said he would like to meet with President Trump and confirmed that his team had contacted the White House to set up a possible sit-in.
The 34-year-old Mamdani, who rose from an unknown state representative representing Queens to the next mayor of the nation’s largest city in just a few months, said in his victory speech earlier this month that he wanted New York to show the country how to defeat the president.
He also talked about “stopping President Trump” in New York once he takes office in January, pledging to work with anyone, including the president, if it benefits New Yorkers.
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Associated Press writer Michael R. Sisak in New York City contributed to this report.
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Meg Kinard can be contacted at: http://x.com/MegKinnardAP
