Mr. Mamdani goes to Washington
Get your popcorn ready (CNN):
Trump-Mamdani meeting: President Donald Trump will meet with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani today in the Oval Office. Trump has labeled the democratic socialist a “communist” and threatened to withhold funding from the city, and Mamdani invited Trump to “turn the volume up” in his victory speech earlier this month.
First, let’s see if Trump, 79 and increasingly erratic, thinks he still has the chops to control the narrative from this meeting with Mamdani, 34. Mamdani requested this meeting. He’ll come prepared for a frontal attack even while he hopes to head off Trump’s threatened cuts to the city’s federal funding. Mamdani told reporters, “I’ll be ready for whatever happens.”
Will Trump go one-on-one with Mamdani’s dazzle? Does Trump have the nerve? Or will he bring in JD Vance to double-team him, as Trump did with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in February?
The White House is not saying whether or not the press will be allowed into the Oval Office for any part of the meeting.
Tokyo Rose Garden (Karoline Leavitt) laid down suppressive fire on Thursday, saying, “It speaks volumes that tomorrow we have a communist coming to the White House, because that’s who the Democrat Party elected as the mayor of the largest city in the country.” Trump’s press secretary wouldn’t know a communist if one seized her means of production.
The meeting is set for 3 p.m. ET.
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