It’s the meeting people still can’t stop talking about. While many analysts predicted that President Donald Trump and New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s first official face-to-face meeting would be more akin to Trump’s shouting match with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, everyone in the United States was shocked when the two New Yorkers were actually incredibly nice to each other.
Trump even praised Mamdani, time and time again. Many jokes and memes have already come from this meeting. Analysts have called it bizarre, and many GOP politicians don’t seem to know what to do with Trump’s sudden shift into being a Mamdani supporter. Mamdani, for his part, is still calling Trump a fascist and a despot.
While many are pointing out how odd it is that Mamdani and Trump seem to be willing to get along, not enough are seeing how Mamdani’s White House visit highlights just how anti-Republican Trump’s policies can be.
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Mamdani and Trump Both Want to Intervene
Many critics of Trump, particularly those within what we would call the “old” part of the GOP, have claimed that Trump really isn’t all that Republican to begin with. However, Trump’s MAGA movement has changed the Republican Party. Now, Trump’s policies are Republican policies, whether old-time conservatives like it or not.
For example, one major thing Mamdani and Trump have in common is their belief in state intervention when it comes to the United States’ economy. That is not a normal Republican view. Once upon a time, American conservatives pushed for a free market — and for the federal government to keep its hands off.
Mamdani and Trump disagree with this assessment. Instead, both believe in state intervention for different reasons. Mamdani wants to use the state to help out the people. Trump, meanwhile, has already used the federal government to pursue tax cuts for the rich, give aid to industries, and increase private profits for firms.
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The Destruction of the GOP?
Prior to this Trump-Mamdani meeting, Trump railed against the mayor-elect’s democratic socialist status. Many Republicans have used Mamdani as a socialist boogeyman to scare regular Americans, though perhaps that scheme will now be ruined because of Trump’s approval of him.
However, Trump’s own government interventionist policies have been more aligned with socialism than many conservatives want to admit. Trump’s use of government power to aid certain businesses and industries, to get tax cuts for corporations and rich Americans, is very similar to what many call “socialism for the rich.”
Clearly, Trump’s policies during his second term are not conservative. Instead of Republicans truly fighting for conservative policies, they’re ignoring their own ideological ideals, possibly because they all seem so scared to get on Trump’s bad side. As a result, the socialism they’re afraid of in Mamdani is something they praise in Trump.
If the Republican Party sticks with this course, Trump’s own socialism for the rich might just leave the GOP with no clear ideology to stand on.
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