After the surreal summit

It was the most anticipated meeting at the White House since Donald Trump’s confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Would Trump dress down and insult New York City Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani? Would Mamdani give as good as got and humiliate Trump as effectively as he did Andrew Cuomo in their Mayoral debates?

But it was neither a battle royale nor a celebrity death match. It was a surreal, chummy meeting where the two embraced over their supposedly shared agenda of addressing the U.S. capitalism’s spiraling affordability crisis. The surprisingly affable nature of the meeting evoked a wide range of responses, from praise for Mamdani’s tactic of preemptively disarming Trump to condemnation of the Mayor Elect as a sellout.

In reality, Mamdani’s decision to avoid conflict and Trump’s embrace of the affordability agenda are both born out of a shared political weakness that drove them toward accommodating one another. Even worse, in the aftermath of their meeting, Mamdani, despite reaffirming his denunciation of Trump as a despot and fascist, persisted in saying he would work with Trump to make New York more affordable. But this friendly state of affairs will only be temporary; the knives will inevitably come out. To prepare for the confrontation, we must double down on building mass class and social struggle to win the demands and secure the rhetorical promises of Mamdani’s campaign and defend ourselves against the Trump regime.

Boxed in office

First, we must grasp the reasons behind Mamdani’s non-confrontational approach to the meeting. Remember, he is in a weak position. He won just over 50 percent of the vote, squeaking out a narrow victory against two far-right candidates, Cuomo (supported by Trump!) and Sliwa, who amassed together almost 49 percent of the vote.

Moreover, his office, while seemingly powerful, is dependent on the City Council, the state government controlled by Kathy Hochul and the Democratic Party establishment, and the federal government imperiously wielded by Trump against any and all enemies real and perceived. And, beyond these political obstacles, Mamdani’s ability to deliver anything from his office in the capitalist state depends on the growth and profitability of corporations, especially finance capital whose international headquarters is in New York, for tax revenue to fund reform.

Despite his nods to popular struggle, Mamdani is a reformist. He believes that holding office is the route to delivering social change. Given this, he has little room to maneuver and therefore every reason to cut deals in the hopes of ingratiating himself to the real power brokers in the state and capitalist economy so that they will let him enact reforms. That explains why he has met with the Democratic Party establishment, sought their endorsement, attempted to defang the opposition of the real estate bosses by meeting with them, and even reappointed the dreaded billionaire police commissioner Jessica Tisch.

All of this also explains why Mamdani (like AOC) has chosen to oppose the primary challenge by a fellow DSA member, Chi Ossé, to dethrone neoliberal Zionist and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Mamdani went further, telling NBC that he wants Jeffries to remain the Democratic Leader and become the Speaker if Democrats retake the House. The logic of reformism, especially without mass class struggle from below, is one of adaptation to the capitalist class and its politicians, at best delivering milquetoast liberal reform and at worst simply managing the existing system (remember Francois Mitterrand, the “Red Margaret Thatcher?”).

Diplomacy not confrontation

Mamdani’s objective weaknesses and his reformist strategy shaped his tactical approach to the meeting with Trump. He abandoned any pretense of confrontation with the head of a regime that is carrying out a bigoted class war at home. Trump has abolished the union rights of over a million government workers and is carrying out state terror against migrants and transactional, unilateral imperialism abroad—from murderous gunboat diplomacy in Latin America to imposing imperialist “peace deals” in Palestine and Ukraine that reward Israel and Russia as colonial aggressors. Mamdani raised none of this. Out the window went turning up the volume to denounce Trump as a despot, fascist, and genocidal war criminal.

Instead, Mamdani stuck like a broken record on appealing to Trump to join him in a partnership for affordability. He was intent on charming and, in his own mind, disarming Trump in the hopes of seducing him to sustain the flow of federal dollars into New York City’s coffers. Now, many of Mamdani’s advisers will argue that he’s playing three- or four-dimensional chess and can outfox Trump. Such arguments justify reformism’s logic of accommodation, not resistance, to someone that they readily and openly call a fascist.

This strategy will not work to stop Trump. He’s already waging war on New York. ICE is sweeping up people in the city, those dependent on Obamacare are about to lose their subsidies, Medicaid cuts are ravaging the working class, trans people are under federal siege, and on and on. And if, under pressure from below, Mamdani does stand up on any of these issues of class exploitation and social oppression, Trump will come down on the city and its people like a ton of bricks. This may happen anyway.

The high price of accommodation

Thus, the strategy of reformist accommodation comes at a high cost to workers and the oppressed. We can already see it happening. In the meeting, Mamdani underscored his commitment to keeping the police commissioner and her gestapo of 35,000 officers that enforce the brutal racist class inequalities of NYC. He didn’t blink an eye when Trump said they shared a tough on crime agenda. This is just one of many high-priced concessions to come, unless workers and the oppressed fight for the campaign’s demands and the fulfillment of its rhetorical promises.

Mamdani’s tactic in the meeting is neither the method to win his demands nor to build the resistance. A political leader like Eugene Debs would have denounced Trump to his face, while calling for a rally outside the White House by the occupied people of DC in the full knowledge that such mass class struggle is the only way to stop this regime and win reforms. In not calling out Trump, Mamdani sent a signal to the Left that we should pursue not confrontation but class collaboration— jointness in the old lingo of the trade union bureaucracy—in the hopes that a billionaire autocrat, the capitalist establishment in the Democrat Party, the real estate bosses, and Wall Street will collaborate in delivering affordability for the working class majority.

This is not a realistic strategy. And it risks defanging the Left and sowing deeper illusions in the electoral process right at the moment when the centrist Democrats like the execrable Gavin Newsom are appealing to the resistance to rally behind not Mamdani and the few other DSA candidates, but centrist national security moms like those that won on a center-right program of affordability, law and order, and imperialism in New Jersey and Virginia.

The Left should reject all this. We should push Mamdani to stand up and fight, not conciliate the powers that be. And we should enforce that effort with independent class organization and struggle to fight for the demands of the campaign, defend our communities against ICE, and increase the mass popular resistance against Trump. Only such mass struggle can win reform, not glad-handing a monster in the White House.

A fascist friend of socialism?

Perhaps the biggest surprise to some was Trump’s behavior in the meeting. Why in the world did he coddle Mamdani as his buddy from Queens and praise him after calling him a crazed communist and various Islamophobic slurs for the last several months? The superficial reasons are obvious: Trump loves a winner; adores praise, which Mamdani showered on him by repeatedly calling the bigot “Mr. President”; and likes the limelight. It’s all good TV.

But it’s important to grasp the deeper reasons behind Trump’s behavior. Trump has everything to gain and nothing to lose by embracing Mamdani for now. He has few worries about a Mamdani administration. The Mayor Elect has already conciliated the political and economic power brokers that Trump adores. And Mamdani has kept Mayor Eric Adams’ police commissioner, Tisch, who’s a close friend of Trump and his daughter Ivanka.

Trump clearly wants to use and abuse Mamdani. He will use Mamdani to advance his own purposes, and if Mamdani resists, he will abuse him. And he knows that the GOP and the bulk of the Democratic Party will side with him. Remember, all the House Republicans and 86 Democrats including Jeffries recently united to vote for a McCarthyite bill condemning “the horrors of socialism.”

Crisis and conflict in the palace

The most important reason for Trump’s welcoming of Mamdani is his own weaknesses and desperate need for some kind of course correction to save his crisis-ridden regime. He and his GOP got creamed in the recent elections, losing to Democrats across the board, most of them center-right candidates, all running on affordability mostly paired with right wing positions.

On top of that, Trump is mired in the unending Epstein crisis with more revelations of pedophilia and complicity with sex trafficking to come. That, of course, will also swamp many Democrats like Bill Clinton and Lawrence Summers that cavorted with Epstein. Trump, for his part, has lost control over the GOP and his own MAGA base over this scandal. Both have opposed him, demanding the release of the files. As a result, Trump’s cratered in the polls and is desperate to reassert his appeal to deliver affordability to his base, the signal reason why they abandoned Biden and Harris for him in the first place.

Trump knows his regime is in crisis. The factional unity, which he held together, is coming undone. The tech bros are at odds with the xenophobes.Neoliberals are at odds with the national populists. Imperialists are at odds with isolationists. The Nazis are at odds with the far right. And protectionists are at odds with small businesses and right-wing workers screwed by the tariffs and inflation.

In perhaps the most apocalyptic breakup since Trump’s divorce from Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had been Trump’s chief hatchet woman in the House, broke with him on Epstein. She forged a coalition with liberal Democrat Ro Khanna and Epstein’s survivors to successfully force the release of the file. Trump branded her a traitor and threatened to support a challenger to her in the upcoming primary, driving Greene to resign and denounce the entire Washington establishment in far-right populist terms.

Trump at a fork in the road

So, Trump is at a fork in the road. Either he rallies his divided minions with even more aggressive authoritarian populist rule, or he will collapse into premature lame duckery, a brutal succession crisis, and the likely triumph of the Democratic Party in the midterms, a victory that will guarantee his impeachment and an even greater crisis of state. As Steve Bannon warned his fellow barbarians, “I’ll tell you right, as God as my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison.”

This explains why Trump used Mamdani to trumpet affordability. He’s desperate to win people back to his side. He will opportunistically use glad handing with Mamdani to accomplish that. Trump to Mamdani: “a lot of my voters voted for Mamdani.” Mamdani: “one in ten.” That’s why it was such a terrible mistake for Mamdani to appeal to Trump to join him in a partnership for affordability; it aided and abetted Trump’s political rehabilitation with that section of his base.

Unlike Mamdani, though, Trump will pair affordability with vicious bigotry and repression. He will throw red meat to his right-wing base, attacking migrants, witch-hunting trans people, and whipping up purges of “cultural Marxists” in higher education. If that doesn’t work, he could use deployments of U.S. troops domestically to enforce his rule. It’s not an accident that he threatened the execution of six Democrats for encouraging soldiers to disobey unconstitutional orders right before he met with Mamdani.

Trump’s ability to do any of this, though, is compromised by the keystone cops that run his regime—neo-Nazi Steven Miller, drunken Pete Hegseth, and the always addled Kash Patel, among many others in the regime. The only stone cold strategist is Russ Vought. But that is not enough to carry out the kind of authoritarian measures they may need. And it’s not clear that Trump has the loyalty of the military brass let alone the state bureaucracy to do any of it. And he faces mass resistance across the country. But he may try to carry out the authoritarian turn, nonetheless. If he doesn’t, he’s toast.

Socialist strategy: for independence, struggle, and party building

What’s the task of the Left in this situation? What it has always been. We must build the independent class and social struggle. That will be the motor force to win reform under Mamdani. And it will be the best line of defense of our rights, communities, jobs, wages, and benefits against Trump’s bigoted class war on all of us. Our model is the mass resistance against ICE that workers have staged across the country, from LA to Chicago and now Charlotte. Student walkouts, potential teachers’ strikes, and mass community self-defense is the way forward.

One danger that resistance and the Left faces is falling in line behind a reformist electoral strategy like that of Mamdani’s. An even bigger danger is collapsing yet again into the Democratic Party, today’s most coherent capitalist party in the U.S., in 2026 and 2028. This will demobilize our resistance against Trump, trading struggle for the illusion that Democrats (accompanied by a few socialists in their ranks) will stop Trump—they haven’t—or redress the systemic inequalities of the capitalist system—they won’t and can’t.

In reality, whoever secures governmental power in 2026 and 2028 will inherit a dysfunctional state and a capitalist economy at best in a slump and at worst in a deep recession after the popping of the giant AI bubble. We have thus entered a whole new epoch of crisis, even more extreme polarization (Nick Fuentes is a taste of the real fascist right waiting to be born), and behind it all increased geopolitical instability and imperialist conflict. In these terrible circumstances, we have to build the resistance, our independent class and social organizations of struggle, and a new workers’ party to fight for reform on the road to political and social revolution.

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Featured Image credit: Dmitryshein, Marc Nozell; modified by Tempest.