The president welcomed the mayor elect to the Oval Office this past week.
Why are Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani, former enemies from opposite political camps, suddenly acting like the best of friends? That’s the question politicians, journalists, and New Yorkers are asking themselves after the president and next mayor of New York City held a meeting and joint press conference Friday in the Oval Office. It was actually a very, very clever move for both of them. Every leader can learn from it.
Mamdani has said that Trump has a fascist agenda. Trump has called Mamdani a communist and urged Republicans to vote for Andrew Cuomo–a Democrat–to try and keep Mamdani out of office. So it was astonishing to see them side by side, praising each other to the press.
That astonishment is the point. We live in an attention economy and Mamdani and Trump’s “love fest” captured a huge amount of attention. “You know, I’ve had a lot of meetings with the heads of major countries, nobody cared,” Trump said to the press. “This meeting, you people have gone crazy.”
Here are four more ways the meeting benefited both men, and what every leader should learn from them.
1. Use the power of being unpredictable.
Trump seems to delight in keeping people guessing, and it often works to his advantage. Though Politico’s Jonathan Martin predicted that Trump would heap praise on Mamdani, most observers expected the meeting to go very differently. The president foiled those expectations, as he has so many others.
Just two days earlier, Trump announced he had asked the Justice Department to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein, after working for months to block their release. Many MAGA Republicans, including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, had called for the files to be released. (She now says she’ll resign from the House in January, after her public falling out with Trump led to death threats.) Some suggested Trump might be losing his grip on the party.
It was clear Trump wouldn’t be able to block the files’ release. So calling for their release was a way to regain his leadership position, forging ahead in the direction the party was going, with or without him. It was a reminder that you never really know what he’s going to do next.
2. Stay in tune with the times.
Trump and Mamdani have one important thing in common: They come from outside the traditional power structures of their respective parties. In both cases, that outsider status helped them win office against opponents who’d been inside those power structures for years.
Voters from across the political landscape are frustrated with the status quo these days. They blame longtime political leaders for problems such as inflation. They seem to want to try something new. In very different ways, both men promise something other than business-as-usual. And that’s a very big part of their appeal.
3. Be practical.
Mamdani could be a useful ally for Trump. At 34, he’s young enough to be the 79-year-old president’s grandchild. He seems to represent a politician of the future. And because both men appeal to voters who want to see things get shaken up, Mamdani could conceivably help Trump win more votes.
4. Look for common ground.
That may be the biggest lesson of all. Trump and Mamdani say they share many of the same goals. They’re both concerned about inflation and high prices. Both want safe streets. They’ve both lived in Queens. And they both want the best for their home city. ” I don’t care about affiliations or parties or anything else. I want to see if this city could be unbelievable,” Trump said at their press conference.
We live in a very divisive time, when most people seem to look for disagreement, rather than agreement. They’re quick to demonize their political opponents. And they assume they’ll disagree with those opponents about absolutely everything.
That approach might make sense on social media, but in the real world, our differences are much more nuanced. And we probably share a great deal of common ground, even with our political opposites. But we don’t find that common ground because we don’t look for it.
It’s rare for anyone to do what Trump and Mamdani just did and sit down for a friendly conversation across a great political distance. That’s a shame. If more of us did it, we might learn that there’s more agreement between our different sides than we think. Like Mamdani and Trump, we might even learn how we can benefit each other.
Source: INC