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President Donald Trump supplied reward for New York Metropolis Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on Friday after the 2 males met for the primary time on the White Home to debate the rising difficulty of affordability.
Whereas the Republican president and the Democratic mayor-elect have hurled searing assaults at one another within the current previous, they repeatedly shrugged off these phrases whereas showing facet by facet within the Oval Workplace.
At one level, when Mamdani was requested for the second time about having referred to as Trump a “fascist,” the president gave him cowl.
“That is OK, you may simply say sure,” Trump stated after Mamdani started to reply. “It is simpler than explaining it.”
As a substitute of rehashing their feud, they talked up their areas of settlement — particularly on working to make New York Metropolis cheaper — and even traded some compliments.
“I feel you are going to have, hopefully, a extremely nice mayor,” Trump stated. “The higher he does, the happier I’m.”
“I appreciated the assembly with the president,” stated Mamdani, who stood whereas Trump sat on the Resolute Desk. “And as he stated, it was a productive assembly targeted on a spot of shared admiration and love, which is New York Metropolis and the necessity to ship affordability to New Yorkers.”
The conciliatory tone was model new. Mamdani had laced into the president in his electoral victory speech on Nov. 5, saying, “If anybody can present a nation betrayed by Donald Trump find out how to defeat him, it’s the metropolis that gave rise to him.”
And simply two days earlier, Trump had referred to as Mamdani the “Communist Mayor of New York Metropolis.” The mayor-elect is a self-described democratic socialist who denies being a communist.
The Oval Workplace assembly was requested by Mamdani, the 34-year-old whose beautiful triumph within the mayoral race over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has put him on the middle of American politics.
“I’ll work with anybody to make life extra reasonably priced for the greater than eight-and-a-half million individuals who name town house,” Mamdani stated Thursday.
Earlier than the mayoral election, Trump had threatened to withhold federal funding for New York Metropolis if Mamdani received.
That menace was not off the desk forward of the assembly. Requested on Thursday if there was any likelihood Mamdani might persuade Trump to not lower NYC off, White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated, “We’ll see how the assembly goes tomorrow.”
In the meantime, the president’s approval rankings have fallen precipitously in quite a few polls, with respondents persistently pointing to the excessive price of dwelling as a fundamental concern.
Mamdani and different Democrats who received a bevy of elections this month had targeted relentlessly on the difficulty of affordability — a phrase that Trump has chafed at, whereas insisting that costs are broadly down already.
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