Their barks were much worse than their bites.
The steel cage match we were anticipating on Friday between President Trump and Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani never materialized.
Instead of a nuclear fallout, the much-ballyhooed meeting was more like the social media video of two dogs barking at each other from the opposite sides of a sliding glass door.
As soon as the door opens the dogs stop barking.
“I think you’re going to have, hopefully, a really great mayor,” Trump said after an Oval Office meeting with the man he once threatened to have deported. “The better he does, the happier I am.”
OK. What’s going on here, and what have you done with the real president?
Trump couldn’t have been more cordial if he were talking to the pope.
Did Mamdani find something in the Epstein files that the rest of us don’t know about?
Just days earlier, Trump was his usual name-calling self, hurling insults at New York City’s newly elected mayor.
“Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran “Kwame” Mamdani, has asked for a meeting. We have agreed that this meeting will take place at the Oval Office on Friday, November 21st,” Trump said in a social media post ahead of the sit-down.
Mamdani, of course, isn’t a communist, but a little unfriendly needling was never above Trump.
Just ask Crooked Hillary, Pocahontas or Sleepy Joe.
Of course, we’ll never know what was said before the cameras came on.
If ever there was a fly-on-the-wall moment, it was before the reporters stepped in, when the democratic socialist Mayor-elect of New York City met in the Oval Office with the MAGA Republican president of the United States.
There is nothing a “Saturday Night Live” writer likes more than when a name-calling commander-in-chief sits down with a populist political upstart.
Like, what would Mamdani wear? Because the last time an Oval Office visitor wore anything but a suit and tie for a sit-down with the leader of the free world, he was mercilessly ridiculed by the host.
But that never happened. Trump never even came close.
He shook Mamdani’s hand. He patted his arm. He even made a joke about being called a fascist.
“What I really appreciate about the president is that the meeting that we had focused not on places of disagreement, which there are many, and also focused on the shared purpose that we have in serving New Yorkers,” Mamdani said.
President Donald Trump meets with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 21, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
OK, OK. Enough already.
In the days before the meeting, Mamdani said he was willing to work with anyone to improve the lives of New Yorkers.
That’s interesting, because the last elected New York City mayor who said anything close to that was excoriated by his colleagues and accused of selling out the city.
“I communicated with the president yesterday to state that there are many issues here in the city that we want to work together with the administration to address,” Mayor Adams said in the weeks before Trump took office again. “I look forward to coordinating with any and everyone to keep this great city safe.”
That, of course, was before Trump’s Justice Department dropped corruption charges against the outgoing mayor, raising the specter that Adams had cut a deal to do Trump’s bidding in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Mamdani has no such encumbrances, but let’s not act like he’s the first New York City mayor to realize that you have to go along to get along,
So, what say the critics now? Is Mamdani a traitor for not giving Trump the business? Should he rot in hell for consorting with the enemy?
Or do we slide the door shut again and let them get back to their barking?
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