At the climax of his victory speech, in no uncertain terms, NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani threw down the gauntlet at Donald Trump. Defiantly, he declared, “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.” He called Trump a despot. He riled up the crowd. And he summed up with a rousing challenge: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
Seventeen days later, Zohran strode into the Oval Office and shook Trump’s hand, as the president heaped praise on him and regaled the cameras with affirmations of their newfound agreement. Much of the left is celebrating Zohran’s move as the kind of game-changing savvy it needs, portraying the encounter as one of Zohran “charming” the president, thus removing an obstacle to his working-class agenda.
For many working-class New Yorkers, there is real relief that Zohran’s meeting with Trump seems to mean that the threatened ICE invasion of the city is not happening. There can also be a perception among many that it is Trump who is conceding, not Zohran. But in reality Zohran entered into the room with a viper who, while flattering Zohran now, stands firmly with Wall Street, which is utterly opposed to Zohran’s agenda. The danger is that this event disarms the movement that must be mobilized for the battles to come.
Donald Trump cannot be “charmed” into supporting a pro-working class agenda. Unfortunately, this meeting clouds the very real and decisive political differences—in reality a gulf—between Trump and Zohran’s agenda, and it fails to paint a clear pathway forward for the working class.
Negotiator-In-Chief Or Organizer-In-Chief?
Zohran’s agenda as a whole is fundamentally antithetical to the interests of the capitalist class, of whom the top boss today is Donald Trump. The most essential tool to achieve this agenda, therefore, is an organized mass movement of the working class based on his 100,000+ campaign activists and the million-plus voters who supported him. There was no trace of this movement in the room with Zohran, who convened with Trump virtually alone. It is part of the ABC’s not just of socialist politics, but even of basic union strategy, that you never meet with the enemy alone.
The meeting with Trump points instead towards a passive role for the movement, of looking on as spectators while Zohran acts as negotiator-in-chief—instead of organizer-in-chief. While Trump has put a finger to the wind and chose to flatter Zohran today, he will not hesitate for a second to crush Zohran tomorrow if he truly stands by the working class. The strength of any socialist representative of the working class does not come from their negotiation skills, but from the strength of a mass movement fighting for its agenda.
Real details of this meeting have not been divulged to the public, but one thing seems clear: despite their earlier bluster, Zohran and Trump are both currently interested in avoiding a major confrontation in New York City. Both sides lack confidence for a decisive victory. Trump has likely calculated that this is not the time. Zohran lacks confidence in the power of his base—which he should have in abundance after his blowout victory, but instead of using this momentum, chose to initiate this meeting. Trump, by contrast, is at a point of great weakness, after his party lost big on Election Day and he was forced by elements of his own base—and, in a rare show, by his own party in Congress—to reverse his position and release the Epstein files.
The effect of this meeting has been to re-cast Trump as caring about affordability (after stripping a million workers of collective bargaining rights and cutting healthcare subsidies for millions more) at a time when millions of his own supporters are beginning to realize that actually he doesn’t. Zohran should be using this period to coalesce and steel a working-class army—to exert its social pressure to tax the rich and freeze the rent, and to forge unity between immigrant and non-immigrant workers who will reject attacks of any kind on their class. After Zohran’s victory, we outlined a number of proposals for building this movement: “Using already-existing structures like those that have been built to coordinate canvassing in every neighborhood, Zohran’s office could organize dozens of local meetings; these could draw in wider layers of working people, bringing unions, faith groups, and immigrant rights organizations together to democratically discuss strategy for fighting Trump’s intimidation and austerity.” Many are understandably relieved that Trump’s invasion appears to be deterred, but the strongest possible deterrence is a movement of this kind.
There are unfortunately other signs that Zohran is making major concessions to ruling-class interests. He has welcomed the decision of Jessica Tisch to remain as NYPD commissioner. Tisch, chosen by disgraced Mayor Adams, is seen by big business as a guarantor of their interests in maintaining the necessary level of brutality in a majority Black and immigrant working-class city.
Zohran and AOC also have also come out against the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) supporting a candidate, Chi Ossé, in the Congressional primaries against House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. This is despite Jeffries, who is completely beholden to Wall Street and a major recipient of AIPAC money, only endorsing Zohran at the last possible moment in the most mealy-mouthed way. This points to an attempt to make peace with the useless Democratic establishment, almost as bad an idea as making peace with Donald Trump.
We Need A Left Alternative To Both Trump & The Democrats
Unfortunately much of the left has not reached this conclusion. Progressive commentator Ryan Grim posted on X, “Trump and Mamdani giving the country a vision of what bottom v top rather than left v right politics could look like is, if not historic, a genuinely novel development.” The meeting certainly was historic. But to say that Trump and Zohran represent the “bottom” is beyond dangerously misleading. Despite his right-populist lies, billionaire bigot union-buster-in-chief Trump is as far from the “bottom” as humanly possible. And his hollow populist overtures around affordability are poisoned with a fundamentally anti-working class approach of racist, sexist, and transphobic scapegoating of oppressed people, terror against immigrants, and imperialist warmongering.
In fact, Grim’s idea is shockingly similar to comments made by outright fascist activist Nick Fuentes: “I just want the populist Right and Left to work together to put America First instead of the center Right and Left working together for the oligarchy.” Fuentes, who has publicly called Hitler “very, very cool” and attacked “organized Jewry” as a “transnational gang” responsible for working-class decline, is gaining an increasing platform on the far right. Socialist Alternative has consistently warned that as Trump’s approval ratings continue to decline, without a clear left alternative to both Trump and the Democratic Party that stands unambiguously for working peoples’ interests against the capitalist class, the far right will increasingly step into the vacuum. The rise of Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is clearly attempting to position herself as the real inheritor of “America First” far-right politics, puts this very real danger on full display. The need for a real left, working-class alternative has never been more urgent.
Trump did win his office by running, in large part, on affordability. But no matter what he says, he doesn’t represent working people, and his track record shows it. Zohran’s politics of class compromise flow directly from his strategy to run in, and to attempt to claim, the Democratic Party, whose interests are firmly rooted in the capitalist class. These same politics point directly away from the mass movement needed to win. Zohran’s post-election trajectory urgently needs a course correction, but we shouldn’t wait for him to do it.
In this period before inauguration, there’s no time to lose. Mass meetings are needed of the thousands of supporters who formed the backbone of Zohran’s campaign, and organizations like DSA, Socialist Alternative, and the unions who endorse him, should play a leading role in organizing these in neighborhoods all over the city. The question of Zohran’s strategy in dealing with Trump and concessions to the Democratic establishment should be openly debated to develop clarity on what it will take to defeat Trump, as well as the role of the movement built in NYC. The most crucial next step is the urgent work of building a powerful movement that fights for every plank of Zohran’s campaign platform and that stiffens his spine when his negotiations with the billionaires and their representatives push him to water it down. This points to the dire need for an independent political party representing the interests of working people and the oppressed. Zohran’s win and the enthusiasm around his campaign have shown the massive space for left-wing and socialist ideas in a situation where the right is on the offensive. Now is the time to hit the gas, not to put on the brakes.
