Mayor Zohran Mamdani made an unannounced trip to Washington on Thursday to meet with President Trump, and suggested afterward that they had found common ground around building more housing in New York City.
Mr. Mamdani also said he had secured a promise that federal immigration agents would release a Columbia University undergraduate they had arrested early Thursday morning.
“He has just informed me that she will be released imminently,” Mr. Mamdani wrote on social media, referring to the student, Elmina Aghayeva, a senior from Azerbaijan. Columbia later confirmed she had been released.
It was the latest turn in one of the most unlikely relationships in American politics, one that has seen two men at opposite ends of the political spectrum find common ground around their shared hometown.
Mr. Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, is New York City’s first Muslim mayor, and an immigrant from Uganda who came of age in the pro-Palestinian movement. Mr. Trump, the 79-year-old leader of the right whom Mr. Mamdani once described as a “despot,” has campaigned against immigration from Muslim-majority countries, aligned himself with the Netanyahu government in Israel, and inaccurately described Mr. Mamdani as a “communist.”
And yet, for the second time since Mr. Mamdani won the November election, the two men came together and projected mutual regard.
Mr. Mamdani’s representatives have said that the mayor, who has promised to address New York’s affordability crisis by building more housing, found common ground on land-use issues with Mr. Trump, who first made his name in real estate. But it is also possible that Mr. Trump finds himself ineluctably drawn to Mr. Mamdani’s status as an international political celebrity.
“I had a productive meeting with President Trump this afternoon,” Mr. Mamdani wrote on X, alongside of a photo of him standing next to a grinning Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.
In the photo, Mr. Trump is pictured holding two printouts of New York Daily News front pages, one real and one fake.
The one in his left hand shows a real front page from 1975, with the infamous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” published after President Gerald Ford refused to bail out New York City, which was nearing bankruptcy.
The fake front page, which Mr. Trump holds in his other hand, reads “Trump to City: Let’s Build.”
In smaller type beneath that headline, the page reads “Backs New Era of Housing.” And in even smaller type, it reads “Trump Delivers 12,000+ Homes; Most Since 1973.”
Mr. Mamdani provided the printouts to Mr. Trump, Anna Bahr, a spokeswoman for City Hall, said. She said the 12,000-unit number referred to an actual proposal. She declined to provide any further detail, but it is possibly a reference to Sunnyside Yards, the massive rail yard in Queens over which the city has long dreamed of building 12,000 units of housing.
“He came to the president today with a couple of pitches that would produce and construct more housing in a handful of projects than has happened in 50 years,” Ms. Bahr said.
Ms. Bahr said that Thursday’s meeting stemmed from the last one, when the president had asked the mayor to come to him “with ideas of big things that they could build together,” and that the housing proposal was an example of one such idea.
Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Trump were joined at the meeting by Elle Bisgaard-Church, the mayor’s chief of staff, and Susie Wiles, the president’s chief of staff, Ms. Bahr said.
In addition to the Daily News front-page mock-ups, Mr. Mamdani came to the meeting with a list of five people from the New York City area who had been detained by immigration authorities, Ms. Bahr said, and asked that the cases against them be dropped.
The list included Ms. Aghayeva, Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi and Leqaa Kordia.
Both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Trump left the meeting off their public schedules. Mr. Mamdani evidently left the White House without addressing reporters there.
The New York Post first reported that Mr. Mamdani was traveling to Washington, though it did not say why.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Mamdani first met in November, after Mr. Mamdani won the mayoral election. Despite their vast political differences, they exhibited a surprising level of good feeling during the meeting.
At the time, Mr. Trump expressed optimism about Mr. Mamdani’s coming mayoralty, and Mr. Mamdani voiced appreciation for the president’s willingness to discuss areas of overlapping concern.
During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he spoke often to Mr. Mamdani and described him as a “nice guy,” even if he embraced “bad policy.”
He also criticized New York City’s use of volunteer emergency shovelers to help clean up after this week’s snowstorm. The city asked the shovelers to provide two forms of identification, a federal requirement that Republicans who support voter identification laws have nevertheless seized on as evidence of hypocrisy.
For his part, Mr. Mamdani has largely avoided directly criticizing Mr. Trump, who wields substantial control over federal funding streams that New York relies on. One deviation from that stance came in January, after the U.S. military’s capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, which Mr. Mamdani described as “an act of war and a violation of federal and international law.”
Mr. Mamdani also called Mr. Trump to express his objections at the time, a move that was said to have annoyed the president.
Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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