Trump Charmed By Young Person, Surprise, It's Not A Co-ed, It's The NYC Mayor!

Zohran Mamdani is really good at this.

Mamdani to Trump: Who’s a good president? Is it you? Is it Donald? Do you want a walkie and a belly rub?

We are suggesting this in all seriousness: Any time the Democrats want anything from Donald Trump, they should send in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Really, anything. Leaving the Affordable Care Act alone? Mamdani. Restoring Medicaid cuts? Mamdani. Strapping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the nosecone of an Elon Musk rocket and then watching it explode over the Caribbean? Mamdani. If the guy can’t be president (and he can’t, a fact people apparently keep bemoaning to his mother), getting leftist policies implemented by yanking Trump’s strings would be a modest but still satisfying consolation prize.

We bring this up because Mamdani visited Trump at the White House on Thursday to pitch our brain-addled big boy on the federal government funding a massive affordable housing development in New York. And while he was at it, he got Trump to release an immigrant Columbia student that ICE had arrested and detained that morning. Stephen Miller probably wanted to claw his own eyes out.

First, the housing project, which would consist of as many as 12,000 units and be built on the Sunnyside railyard in Queens. New York is asking the federal government to chip in $21 billion, if such an amount can be said to be merely “chipping in.”

And we know how Trump feels about spending money on the city of his birth if he doesn’t think there’s anything in it for him. Just ask the Gateway Tunnel project. But find a way to tell Trump he could have a bigger effect on New York’s infrastructure than Robert Moses? Hoo boy, he’ll open up the United States Treasury and tell you to take what you want.

This was the second time Mamdani has been to the Oval Office. On his first trip, just after the mayor’s election in November, Trump had told him to come back with “big ideas to build big things together in New York.” Mamdani did that, and he brought props that were 100 percent guaranteed to tickle Trump’s g-spot:

Trump was just starting out when Gerald Ford told New York to drop dead in 1973. For a guy who has always resented the cold reception he got from Manhattan’s elite in those years, telling him he could be responsible for restoring the city’s greatness from its high-crime bankrupt low point is like telling Calculon he’s the greatest actor to ever stride across the universe.

Just look at the grin on Trump’s over-bronzed mug. It’s like Mamdani reached into his skull and dumped several gallons of dopamine directly into his amygdala. It’s like he shaved 50 years off Trump’s life and dragged him through the mists of time to his youth, when he set out to conquer New York and become the city’s greatest builder. When the world still felt like his oyster.

Seriously, Trump only smiles like that when he’s visiting Kim Jong-un. Even the three-hour praise sessions that substitute for Cabinet meetings don’t make him that happy. Partly because he keeps dozing off in the middle of them, but still.

The old man probably went up to the White House’s living quarters afterwards and banged Melania with an energy that no one has seen from him since the first season of Friends was on the air.

Let's Talk About Donald Trump's Totally One-Sided Infatuation With Zohran Mamdani!

The other factor here is Mamdani’s natural charisma and popularity rubbing off on a deeply insecure shell of a human whose entire life has been a sweaty search for people to like him. Trump would love to grab some of the adoration of Mamdani for himself. Which means, as Madeline Kahn once said of Cleavon Little, Trump is like wet sauerkraut in the mayor’s hands.

As it happened, on Thursday morning ICE’s goons had arrested Elle Aghayeva, an international Columbia student with a visa. Not only that, they picked Aghayeva up in an underhanded way:

University officials claimed the agents misrepresented their purpose in order to access the building, entering “without any kind of warrant” and using the false pretense of searching for a missing child.

These guys treat picking up unarmed college students the same way Tommy Lee Jones treated picking up armed escaped convicts in The Fugitive.

We all have seen how hard the Trump administration will fight to keep a Columbia student in detention. Hell, we’ve seen how hard it will fight to keep any immigrant or nonresident in detention. So it would be understandable if everyone assumed that Aghayeva was staring at a minimum of several months stuck in a detention center.

But then Mayor Mamdani met with Trump:

Perversely, how lucky is Aghayeva? If ICE had picked her up on Friday instead, Mamdani doesn’t have good vibes he can leverage in person to get Trump to get her released. If he catches Trump 24 hours later, who knows what kind of mood the president is in? He might have spent the entire interval mainlining Fox News and listening to Miller scream about murdering rapist illegal scum, and his anger levels would be apocalyptic.

No, Aghayeva would probably be in a tent city in the middle of Texas by now. Lucky for her, the mayor of her city is apparently a snake charmer.

[NBC News / CNN]

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