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New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, may soon visit the White House, amid his push to politically reinvent the greatest city in the world – a place President Donald Trump once called home.
During comments to reporters this week, President Trump revealed that Mamdani had reached out to the White House.
“[He] would like to meet with us,” the president said. “We’ll work something out. But he would like to come to Washington and meet…we want to see everything work out well for New York.”
Mamdani, while speaking to the press in the Bronx this week, confirmed that his campaign had, indeed, reached out to the White House, per NBC.
Upon Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral race just a few weeks ago, there has been considerable speculation about his vision for the city. Mamdani – an open socialist whose policy platform included universal child care and city-owned public grocery stores – drew the ire of President Trump during his candidacy.
The president told reporters last month, “We have a problem, we have a communist who’s 33 years old, he doesn’t know a damn thing, he’s never worked a day in his life. And he’s sort of caught on. I’m not going to send a lot of money to New York. I don’t have to.”
The president was referring to possibly withholding federal funding from NYC in the event of a then-potential win for Mamdani.
According to RSBN, Mamdani has denied being a communist. He is, however, a practicing Muslim.
Since winning the mayoral race in NYC, Mamdani has continued to ask for money as his team begins transitioning from a campaign to a city cabinet.
He has also controversially stated that, as the incoming mayor of New York, he would observe international law, and suggested that he would uphold international arrest warrants for individuals like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Conversely, in a direct affront to President Trump’s nationwide deportation operations, Mamdani said this month that “my NYPD will continue to NOT be of assistance to ICE whenever they are trying to terrorize New Yorkers across the five boroughs.”