It was diplomacy through arts and crafts. It was a master class in political psychology, the specific savvy of one New Yorker who knows a son of Queens’s love of a tabloid front page.
There stood Mayor Zohran Mamdani, relatively straight-faced with just a hint of impish smile. At his side in the Oval Office sat the president of the United States, beaming.
Mr. Mamdani went to Washington on Thursday carrying props: two mock-ups of a Daily News Page 1, one with the famous headline that recorded President Gerald Ford’s snubbing of New York at a moment of crisis and the other with a new faux headline celebrating the current president.
“Ford to City: Drop Dead” read the headline from 1975. Thursday’s version was tailor-made for a president whose name is emblazoned on New York skyscrapers: “Trump to City: Let’s Build.”
The maneuver was well received.
Not long after he was elected in November, Mr. Mamdani met with the president at the White House, and their meeting turned surprisingly chummy. Mr. Trump patted the mayor’s arm and lavished praise on him in a scene reminiscent of a buddy comedy.
The unlikely pair — leader of the MAGA movement and democratic socialist, brash scion of an outer-borough real estate empire and earnest millennial upstart — had more in common than either might have anticipated. They’re shaped by and well versed in the showmanship that drives New York City. They’re maestros of the media, drawn to camera flashes like aspiring actors to Broadway.
So when Mr. Mamdani and his team were asked to return to the Oval Office, they came ready to play to Mr. Trump’s enthusiasms. Mr. Trump in November had invited Mr. Mamdani to come back with an ambitious pitch. So the mayor’s staff members custom-made a tabloid front page celebrating the investment that the president could make in the future of a city that has lionized him and shunned him, one that he has mocked and yet can’t seem to quit.
Mr. Mamdani’s closest advisers had the idea earlier this week, staff members said. They mocked up designs. They work-shopped headlines, wanting to make sure that the Trump headline clearly echoed the famous one about President Ford, printed at the depths of New York City’s fiscal crisis. They finally settled on the text on Wednesday night and printed the final version. The prop was nothing fancy — standard printer paper without laminate.
(Some inside baseball: The Daily News staff has been frustrated in recent weeks by a decision its owner, Alden Capital, made to abandon its classic Page 1 font. One longtime Daily News staff member, Michael Sheridan, noted that a close read of the Mamdani team’s page reveals that the font isn’t a perfect imitation of the classic News typeface — the “a” in “Era” doesn’t match the “a” in “Bail” on the 1975 front page, for example.)
Mr. Mamdani presented the printouts to Mr. Trump late in the meeting. In the photo that resulted, the reaction is clear. The president, once a frequent star of the “wood,” or front page, of city tabloids, displays his souvenir with evident glee.
The photo that Mr. Mamdani shared on social media looks oversaturated and a little surreal — as if it had been put through Instagram’s Juno filter, a cringe move befitting the 34-year-old who shared it — but Mr. Mamdani’s team said it was the digital file that the White House shared with them. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the image.
These days, Mr. Trump gets more love from The New York Post than from The News. But The Post’s recent front pages featuring Mr. Mamdani have included headlines like “You’re Zo Vain” and “Frosty the Zo Man,” so it was perhaps little surprise that Mr. Mamdani’s team swung with The Daily News.
There may be a long road ahead for the mayor in securing the White House’s support to actually build more housing, but in the meantime he and the president seem to have found a new area of agreement: the power of the tabs.
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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