Former adversaries set aside campaign vitriol to discuss shared priorities on affordability and public safety while Republican candidate doubles down on Islamophobic rhetoric
Unexpected Convergence: Trump and Mamdani Find Common Ground While Stefanik Wages Islamophobic Campaign
For months, Donald Trump warned New Yorkers against electing Zohran Mamdani as mayor, referring to him as a “communist lunatic.” Mamdani, meanwhile, called Trump a “despot.” Yet on November 21, the two men met in the Oval Office for what most observers expected to be a contentious encounter but instead produced a surprisingly cordial conversation that exposed fractures within Republican strategy and raised questions about the limits of identity-based political attacks.
The Olive Branch: Trump’s Unexpected Praise
All of that campaign vitriol was put aside in an extraordinary Oval Office get-together, with Trump saying he would even be comfortable moving back to New York City and living there with Mamdani as mayor, saying he was surprised how much they had in common. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office following the private Friday afternoon meeting: “I met with a man who’s a very rational person.” The reversal caught many political observers by surprise, particularly those who had internalized Trump’s months-long campaign messaging characterizing Mamdani as an existential threat to New York’s future.
Deflating the “Jihadist” Attack: A GOP Rupture
The most significant moment came when Trump directly rejected the framing that Stefanik had made centerpiece of her gubernatorial campaign. When a reporter asked: “Mr. President Republican, Elise Stefanik has campaigned multiple times by calling Zohran Mamdani a jihadist. Do you think you’re standing next to a jihadist right now in the Oval Office?” Trump responded: “No, I don’t.” Trump added: “She’s out there campaigning, and you say things sometimes in a campaign; she’s a very capable person.” The deflectionframing Stefanik’s repeated “jihadist” attacks as merely campaign rhetoric rather than serious allegationseffectively delegitimized the attack within Republican circles.
Stefanik’s Doubling Down: Political Calculation Over Principle
Rather than accepting Trump’s dismissal, Stefanik doubled down, doubling the stakes of her gubernatorial campaign on Islamophobic rhetoric. Immediately after the Oval Office visit ended, Stefanik released a statement on X: “We all want NYC to succeed. But we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” she wrote. “If he walks like a jihadist, if he talks like a jihadist, if he campaigns like a jihadist, if he supports jihadists, he’s a jihadist.” The tautological formulation”if he walks like a jihadist, he’s a jihadist”abandoned any pretense of objective criteria for the characterization and reduced the attack to purely performative xenophobia. Her posts were accompanied by a New York Post cover photo of Mamdani with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a prominent Brooklyn cleric and ally of the mayor-elect, attempting to create associational guilt through imagery.
The Context: Mamdani’s Muslim Identity as Political Weapon
Throughout the campaign, Mamdani’s identity became the terrain on which opponents chose to fight. In the buildup to New York City’s mayoral election, prominent U.S. right wingers, including President Donald Trump, tarred the 34-year-old democratic socialist as a supposed “jihadist,” a “Jew hater,” and even a cheerleader of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 (when Mamdani was barely 10 years old). The fact that Mamdani was merely 10 years old during 9/11 made suggestions of ideological alignment with the attacks particularly absurd, yet such attacks persisted across conservative media. In the eyes of his detractors, Mamdani’s Indian-Ugandan origins were suspect, and his part Muslim background a threat.
The Broader Pattern: Islamophobia as Campaign Strategy
The National Republican Congressional Committee sent out a midterms strategy memo outlining how the national GOP strategy will tie “every House Democrat” to Mamdani’s “anti-American agenda, and the NRCC will weaponize it against them.” This suggests that Mamdani was deliberately positioned as a partisan wedgenot because of policy disagreements but because his identity made him a useful political target. Digital ads implementing this strategy have already hit the airwaves, while plenty of Republicans have hit the ground running. The national scope of the Islamophobic campaign demonstrates that what began as local electoral competition escalated into a coordinated national strategy targeting the mayor-elect’s religion and ethnicity. As the midterms approach, observers can look to the recent Nov. 4 elections to get a taste of what’s to come when Mamdani is not on the ballot. In Virginia, when Ghazala Hashmi was running to become lieutenant governorshe won her race and is now the first Muslim woman in the entire country to be elected to statewide officeher opponent, Republican John Reid, publicly described her as a “pro Hamas radical leftist” and suggested Mamdani was her “NYC twin.”
Measurable Spike in Islamophobic Attacks
Analyzing some 1,500 slurs targeted at Mamdani from October through November, Stop AAPI Hate found that 91 percent of them disparaged his Muslim faith, with overall Islamophobic slurs targeting Mamdani seeing an increase of 175 percent. These statistics reveal that campaign rhetoric translates into real-world harassment targeting not just Mamdani but the broader Muslim American and South Asian American communities that his identity signals.
The Intelligence Community Perspective: Castelli’s Intervention
Matt Castelli, a former CIA officer and director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, wrote in an op-ed for the Times Union: “As someone who spent nearly 15 years fighting actual jihadists, I can say with certainty: Zohran Mamdani is not a jihadist.” Castelli’s interventionfrom someone with institutional credibility in counterterrorismrepresented a notable departure from typical political commentary. By situating his criticism explicitly within expertise, Castelli made clear that the “jihadist” characterization represents not merely partisan dispute but actual misrepresentation of reality. Castelli continued: “And in a political climate already strained by violence, Stefanik’s rhetoric is especially dangerous because it risks fueling the kind of homegrown terrorism we are now confronting.”
The Political Calculation: Why Trump’s Shift?
To the extent there was a political calculation in Trump’s friendliness, it’s possible the White House didn’t want to get into it with Mamdani right now. After all, this is a candidate who was so successful on precisely the issue on which Trump is really struggling right now: affordability and cost of living. By maintaining cordiality with Mamdani, Trump potentially preserves leverage on policy issues important to his second term while avoiding the accusation that he’s attacking a Muslim American politician. Trump said he would not be withholding federal funding from New York City as he had previously threatened, stating: “I think if we didn’t get along, whether it’s cut off or just make it a little bit difficult, or not give as much … I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Mamdani’s Strategic Response: Affordability as Political Shield
During the meeting, Mamdani focused intensely on his affordability agenda rather than engaging Trump’s previous attacks, saying: “It was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers.” This rhetorical disciplinerefusing to be drawn into debates about campaign rhetoric and instead centering shared interestsdemonstrated political sophistication. By consistently returning to affordability, Mamdani essentially depoliticized the encounter, transforming it from a confrontation between ideological adversaries into a pragmatic governance partnership. When asked about having called Trump a “despot” who is seeking to enact a fascist agenda, Mamdani said the two men were “very clear about our positions and our views,” adding: “What I really appreciate about the president is that the meeting that we had focused not on places of disagreement, which there are many, but on the shared purpose that we have in serving New Yorkers.” When a reporter asked if New York City loved Trump, Mamdani noted: “I can tell you that there were more New Yorkers who voted for President Trump in the most recent presidential election because of that focus on cost of living,” effectively validating Trump’s electoral message while pivoting toward collaboration.
Hochul’s Intervention: Democratic Defense of Mamdani
In her own statement in response to the Trump-Mamdani meeting, Governor Kathy Hochul said she welcomed Trump’s “renewed commitment to New York’s success and his acknowledgment of our shared priorities: lowering costs and improving public safety.” Hochul added: “I also appreciate that the president rejected efforts by members of his own party to weaponize the mayor-elect’s background, faith, and identity for political gain, including the Islamophobic attacks labeling him a ‘jihadist.'”
Lingering Questions: The Durability of Civility
The Trump-Mamdani meeting raises questions about the sustainability of their apparent convergence. Campaign vitriol cannot simply evaporate; it establishes narratives that persist regardless of subsequent friendliness. Stefanik’s refusal to accept Trump’s implicit criticism suggests that substantial portions of the Republican Party are unwilling to abandon Islamophobic attacks even when national leadership signals disinterest. The response to the meeting has not been heartening, as it seems to reveal plenty of Republicans are happy to continue pandering racist and bigoted language if it means gaining political ground at the expense of the entire electorate, and especially South Asian Americans.
Historical Significance: When Identity Politics Meets Pragmatism
The Oval Office meeting between Trump and Mamdanitwo leaders who had exchanged bitter public insults only weeks earlierdemonstrates the contingency of political conflict. It also reveals something troubling: that regardless of whether national leaders engage in identity-based attacks, the damage persists. Rather than debate a political rival, a number of Republican lawmakers have sought to find ways to denaturalize and deport Mamdani, suggesting that while Trump may have offered personal olive branches, the infrastructure of opposition built around Mamdani’s identity remains fully intact. As Mamdani prepares to assume office, his ability to govern effectively will depend partly on whether he can sustain the pragmatic coalition-building demonstrated in the Oval Office meeting while simultaneously addressing the real-world harassment and political targeting that Islamophobic rhetoric has unleashed.
