Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Feb. 26, 2026. Photo by Mayor Zohran Mamdani via X.
A man known for his smile came with an iron face, while a man often scowling couldn’t help but beam.
On Thursday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani traveled to Washington, DC, for a surprise visit with President Donald Trump. There, a canny Mamdani brought mocked-up newspapers to present to the narcissistic Trump, to help the attention-seeking president imagine what the headlines could look like if he joined with Mamdani to build 12,000 new housing units in New York. Mamdani called the meeting “productive,” and based on Trump’s charmed smile, it seemed so.
The mayor’s office is now calling it ”the largest housing and infrastructure investment in New York City in more than 50 years.”
The meeting was all the more productive given what else Mamdani seemed to help secure: the release of another detained Columbia University student.
On Thursday morning, DHS agents descended upon Columbia’s campus to detain a student from a university residential building. The school had quickly announced DHS seemed to be lying, but the bombshell came Thursday evening.
In a video, Columbia University president Claire Shipman said that five agents breached a residency with no warrant, had claimed to be police officers looking for a missing child, even being caught on security footage flashing photos of the “missing child,” and ignored a campus safety officer’s demands for a warrant to call their boss.
In short, DHS agents lied, in order to gain access to the building and detain their target student, Ellie Aghayeva.
An instantaneous reversal by Trump on a DHS operation.
Mamdani also asked Trump to drop the ongoing cases against Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Leqaa Kordia – the latter of whom is still in detention almost a year later.
The meeting was yet another installment in Trump’s fascinating treatment of the mayor many feared would be the target of the president’s ire. (In their first meeting last month, the pair made global headlines for a surprisingly cordial meeting, in which Trump defended Mamdani against critics, calling him a “very rational person.”)
Regardless of the interpersonal dynamics, Mamdani’s record cannot be discounted. His back-to-back meetings with the president in the White House have not only normalized him – and his socialist ideals – they have also secured the release of a student targeted by DHS, advanced the case for other pro-Palestine student protesters, and possibly unleashed a historic new city housing project.
Last year, Mamdani’s opponent in the mayoral election, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, claimed that “Trump would go through Mr. Mamdani like a hot knife through butter,” that the young candidate “would be Trump’s delight.” He thus far seems completely wrong about the former, but apparently and bizarrely right on the money about the latter.