Trump tells Mamdani he has ‘great potential’ as New York mayor
President Donald Trump traveled to Gracie Mansion on Monday for a meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the first president to make such a visit in 45 years, according to The Guardian. The previous presidential visit to the historic riverside residence was by Ronald Reagan, who met then-Mayor Ed Koch there in 1981.
The meeting came a day before Trump was scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles and Mamdani’s chief of staff Elle Bisgaard-Church also attended the closed-door meeting.
At the lectern after the closed-door session, Mamdani described their talks as “wide-ranging,” saying topics included affordable housing, immigration and the Trump administration’s recent stripping of protections for Haitian immigrants. Pressed by reporters on why he had invited Trump, Mamdani said he was willing to work with anyone who could “deliver” for New Yorkers and pointed to a shared interest in building thousands of new housing units at Sunnyside Yard in Queens. “The president and I have been very frank about the many disagreements we have,” Mamdani added.
The mayor used the post-meeting news conference to address one of Trump’s recent domestic actions directly. Asked whether he had challenged Trump over his decision to ban CNN, MS Now and Politico from White House grounds, Mamdani said: “I told the president that we’re going to have all of the members of the press here on the lawn, and that is something that I believe in.” Trump responded by pointing to the large press contingent assembled on the lawn: “It’s interesting because they said they were going to boycott me, but they never boycott me, so I wasn’t very worried about that.”
On the Haitian immigrant protections, Mamdani said: “I shared my very strong opinions about how we can keep New Yorkers safe, how we can keep immigrant New Yorker safe, and how important immigrant New Yorkers, especially Haitian New Yorkers, are – not only to the fabric of our city, but also to our city’s economy.”
The body language at the news conference was amicable. Trump stood aside deferentially as Mamdani spoke from the lectern, and when the press conference ended, gave Mamdani what The Guardian described as an “affectionate double tap on the arm.” Trump told reporters he believed Mamdani had “great potential” and said: “I certainly hope he will be a great mayor. You have to understand – I want what’s good for New York. I want what’s good for the country … I want him to be a great mayor.”
The meeting followed a separate immigration-focused gathering one day earlier, in which Mamdani and Clara Brugada, the mayor of Mexico City, met with migrant delivery workers in New York City who described fear and precarity surrounding an increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests. Earlier in September, Mamdani helped initiate a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule change targeting immigrant communities; the suit was filed by the State of New York and 21 other states against the Department of Homeland Security and various of its agencies. It was unclear whether the lawsuit was discussed during Monday’s meeting.
Mamdani, 34, is a democratic socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Born in Uganda, he is New York City’s first Muslim mayor. Trump has focused his midterm campaign on denouncing Democrats as “godless communists” who, in his telling, seek to abolish borders and prisons and pose the greatest threat the United States has ever faced.