After the friendly White House meeting on Friday between President Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, the prospect that the National Guard would be deployed to the city in the coming months seemed less likely.
In an interview on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mamdani declined to say whether Trump had made a commitment not to send troops into the city. But Mamdani said he had made a strong case to the president that the National Guard was not needed and that crime was under control.
“I made it very clear what we wanted to do was to deliver public safety and affordability, and the NYPD would be the ones to do so,” Mamdani told Kristen Welker, the show’s moderator.
Later Sunday, after speaking at a church in the Bronx, Mamdani told reporters that he and Trump were “establishing a productive relationship.” He said he had told Trump that federal agents should not be targeting law-abiding immigrants.
“I shared with the president directly that New Yorkers want to follow the laws of our city,” Mamdani said.
For his part, Trump said Saturday that he had no immediate plans to send the Guard to New York.
“Right now, other places need it more,” he told reporters. “We had a very good meeting yesterday. We talked about that.”
Trump did suggest that those plans could change, though.
“If they need it,” he said, referring to the city’s residents, “I would do it.”
Trump has in the past threatened to send the Guard to New York, as he has to other cities. Mamdani takes office on Jan. 1, and some New Yorkers have worried that the president would immediately seek a showdown with the new mayor.
But during his appearance with Mamdani in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump seemed less inclined to confront him, praising Mamdani and Jessica Tisch, whom Mamdani is keeping on as police commissioner.
“I expect to be helping him, not hurting him,” Trump said.
Mamdani’s interview on “Meet the Press” was his first since the meeting. He stuck to his message that he wanted to find ways to work with the president to address the city’s affordability crisis.
Mamdani, though, reiterated his belief that Trump was a fascist.
“That’s something that I’ve said in the past,” he said. “I say it today.”
Asked if he stood by his past comments that Trump was a despot and represented an “attack on our democracy,” Mamdani said he did.
“Everything that I’ve said in the past, I continue to believe,” he said.
But the mayor-elect insisted that he could find ways to work with Trump on the core issues of his campaign, including the high cost of groceries, child care and housing.
Mamdani recounted how he and Trump had “admired” a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Cabinet Room. Mamdani said it had made him think about how his favorite New York City mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, could not have been as successful as he was without the help he received from Roosevelt.
“You can’t tell the story of La Guardia without telling the story of FDR and the story of a relationship with the federal government that finally delivered at the scale of the crisis it was facing,” he said.
The trip to the White House was Mamdani’s second. He first visited in 2011, with his mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, when Barack Obama was president. The pair attended an arts event at the White House, said Mamdani’s spokesperson, Dora Pekec.
At the meeting with Trump, Mamdani appeared upbeat, but also seemed stoic at times amid the president’s flattery. The mayor-elect is known for his beaming smile, but it was absent during a series of photos that Trump posted afterward.
Mamdani made clear on “Meet the Press” that he wanted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to become speaker should the party regain control of the House.
The relationship between Mamdani and Jeffries has been somewhat frosty. Jeffries resisted endorsing Mamdani for months, even while many other Democrats came around to supporting him.
But, in recent days, Mamdani has moved to stop Chi Ossé, a progressive New York City Council member, from running against Jeffries.
On Saturday, in a win for Mamdani, a key group in the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America voted against endorsing Ossé. The vote was merely a recommendation but is likely to influence the chapter’s decision overall, according to Grace Mausser, the chapter’s co-chair.
After the vote, Ossé said he was “definitely not running for Congress” without the DSA’s support.
Mamdani has said that he wants to avoid political distractions and to focus on his affordability plans, including making buses free and enacting universal child care.
On Sunday, Mamdani reiterated his campaign message in addressing a congregation at Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church in the Bronx, receiving the most applause when he mentioned the disproportionately high rates of gun violence and maternal mortality in the Black community.
The Rev. Frederick Crawford then said a prayer that alluded to the current mayor, Eric Adams, whose administration faced a constant drumbeat of legal troubles and corruption allegations.
Crawford asked God to allow Mamdani’s administration “to be without scandals.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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