Trump’s Rational Socialist: Zohran Mamdani

From communist lunatic to rational ally, from loyalist to liability, the Trump–Mamdani moment shows the system closing ranks around money, not ideas.

Let me tell you about the moment American conservatism ate itself.

On November 21, 2025, Donald Trump welcomed Zohran Mamdani into the Oval Office. The same Zohran Mamdani he’d spent months calling a 100% Communist Lunatic. The same one he’d threatened to sic ICE on. And then something truly deranged happened: they got along.

Within hours, Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she was resigning from Congress.

Rewind three weeks. Mamdani, a 34-year-old Ugandan-born Muslim from Queens, had just won the New York City mayoral race on a platform that would make Elizabeth Warren blush. Rent freezes for a million apartments. Free bus service. City-run grocery stores to fight what he brilliantly termed halalflation, corporate price gouging targeting immigrant communities.

Mamdani Won. Now What?

He’d run against Trump. Called him a fascist. Declared himself Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.

Trump responded by calling Mamdani a total nut job and threatening to arrest him for refusing to cooperate with federal immigration raids. The president even endorsed Andrew Cuomo (yes, that Andrew Cuomo) to stop the socialist. When Mamdani won anyway, the MAGA media complex melted down.

Steve Bannon mocked Republicans who wanted Mamdani to win as Bolsheviks. Sean Hannity warned of the coming Mamdani Effect that would crash New York real estate. Representative Elise Stefanik called him a jihadist.

Trump had been unequivocal: New York had ZERO chance of success under socialist leadership. He questioned Mamdani’s citizenship and threatened to withhold federal funding.

So naturally, two weeks later, they were shaking hands in the Oval Office like old friends.

Trump, smiling broadly, patted Mamdani on the arm. A gesture of protection. Of paternal approval. This person is under my wing now.

I met with a man who’s a very rational person. I met with a man who wants to see, really wants to see, New York be great again. I’ll be cheering for him.

Rational. Not lunatic. Not the communist label his allies had been using. Rational.

Mamdani had proven himself by winning an election Trump couldn’t stop. That earned respect. Ideology? Irrelevant.

A reporter asked Mamdani if he still thought Trump was a fascist. As Mamdani began to diplomatically pivot, Trump jumped in with a grin: That’s OK, you can just say yes. It’s easier than explaining.

The room erupted. The accusation was transformed from existential indictment to inside joke.

But the real bombshell came when Trump was asked about Stefanik calling Mamdani a jihadist. Stefanik is a Trump loyalist. A rising star in the party. A potential gubernatorial candidate.

No, I don’t agree. I just met with a man who’s a very rational person.

He threw her under the bus without hesitation. Mamdani was useful and present. Stefanik’s Islamophobia was inconvenient.

Beneath the circus, something substantive was happening. Trump and Mamdani discussed policy and found common ground.

On rent: Mamdani wants rent freezes through municipal power. Trump said, unprompted, he wants to see rents coming down, that people would be shocked, but he wants to see the same thing.

On inflation: Mamdani wants city-run grocery stores to combat corporate price gouging. Trump has launched a federal drug-pricing transparency initiative, branded as TrumpRx, forcing pharmaceutical companies into lower prices.

On trade: Mamdani rails against multinational corporate greed. Trump rails against America getting ripped off by global markets.

In different ways, they were both pushing against the same thing: the neoliberal consensus that prioritized free markets over working-class affordability.

Trump even name-checked Bernie Sanders, arguing that he and Bernie agreed on much more than people thought because they both opposed trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. By extension, Mamdani wasn’t a scary Marxist. He was a trade populist in the Sanders mold.

As Trump put it: We agreed a lot more than I would have thought.

For Mamdani, this meeting represents a calculated risk. He is betting he can use Trump without being fully co-opted. He is making a deliberate bet that material gains for his constituents outweigh ideological purity.

New York City needs federal funding. Infrastructure dollars, transit money, housing support. All of it flows through a White House controlled by a man who holds grudges and rewards loyalty. Mamdani chose to swallow his pride and secure the resources his agenda requires.

But this pragmatism comes at a steep cost.

Large sections of the left watched him smile next to Trump and felt betrayed. The attack ads for 2029 write themselves: footage of the socialist mayor cozying up to the fascist he campaigned against.

Mamdani’s only escape route is delivery. If he can dramatically lower rents, make transit free, and get city-run grocery stores operational, voters might forgive the optics. If he can’t, he’s finished. He’s betting that people care more about cheaper groceries than ideological consistency.

Later that day, Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she was resigning from Congress. The woman who built her brand on crusading against socialism. Effective January 2026.

Greene’s statement cited a loss of self-respect and dignity, refusing to be a battered wife of the party. Her relationship with Trump had been fraying for months, particularly over her push to release the Epstein files.

The image of Trump embracing a self-described socialist while one of his most visible loyalists walks away crystallizes the fractures inside Trumpism.

This is not a story of principled courage. Greene’s history remains toxic. Years of conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, bigotry. Her resignation reflects wounded ego and absolutist thinking turned inward, not moral awakening.

But her departure does expose a contradiction.

The conservative movement spent years telling its base that socialism was an existential threat. Greene made that threat central to her identity. Watching Trump casually discard that narrative through sheer transactional convenience created a split her absolutism couldn’t rationalize.

The party demanded she believe two things simultaneously: socialists are civilization-ending threats and this particular socialist is rational and deserves support. Her rigid worldview couldn’t process it.

The MAGA media apparatus suddenly had to execute a 180-degree pivot. They’d spent weeks conditioning viewers to see Mamdani as an existential threat.

Sean Hannity, who’d warned about the Mamdani Effect destroying New York, was suddenly covering the productive talks. Brian Kilmeade tried to deflect by suggesting JD Vance was jealous of the attention Trump gave Mamdani, as if this was relationship drama rather than ideological contradiction.

Laura Loomer expressed genuine anguish. Wild to allow a jihadist communist into the White House, she said, accusing Trump of drifting from the America First agenda.

Steve Bannon, who’d mocked Republicans as Bolsheviks for wanting Mamdani to win, found his own logic turned against him.

These people had built careers on ideological rigidity. Trump revealed it was all negotiable.

While Republicans imploded, Democrats faced their own embarrassment.

Earlier that same day, hours before the Trump-Mamdani meeting, House Democrats voted on a symbolic resolution denouncing the horrors of socialism. Eighty-six Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, voted yes.

Democratic leadership officially condemning socialism at the exact moment the Republican president was validating a Democratic Socialist mayor in the Oval Office.

Jeffries had dodged endorsing Mamdani until the eleventh hour. Now Trump was making him look like a coward.

For progressives like AOC, who’d backed Mamdani from the beginning, the meeting was vindication. If the Republican Party’s leader could find common ground with a DSA member, maybe the problem wasn’t socialism. Maybe it was the feckless centrism of the Democratic establishment.

Governor Kathy Hochul released a carefully worded statement focusing on Stefanik’s Islamophobic attacks while studiously avoiding Mamdani’s actual politics. She had to defend him without endorsing him.

Meanwhile, the Republican strategy for 2026, painting Democrats as radical socialists, was suddenly a lot harder to sell. How do you run ads warning about the socialist menace when Trump himself says he wants the socialist mayor to succeed?

Because of Trump’s personal attachment to New York, he’s creating an exception to his usual partisan warfare. His identity as a New Yorker. His need to win the cultural narrative of his hometown. A socialist mayor can operate with federal support, provided he maintains personal rapport with the president.

This is favor-based rule. Proximity to Trump’s ego matters more than ideology.