From shocked to bemused to barely surprised — New Yorkers voiced a gamut of reactions after watching President Donald Trump’s unexpected embrace of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the Oval Office Friday.
But the biggest question for many was: How is this going to play in 2026?
Republicans nationwide have been planning to use Mamdani as the poster boy for liberalism run amok, but on Friday Trump told reporters he was confident that Mamdani “can do a good job. I think he is going to surprise some conservative people actually.”
Perhaps nowhere did the unexpected praise land more awkwardly than in the New York governor’s race where Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik has been relentlessly trying to tie Gov. Kathy Hochul to Mamdani since Hochul endorsed the incoming mayor in September.
Immediately following Friday’s press conference, Stefanik dug in further.
She posted a short note on X calling Mamdani “@KathyHochul’s jihadist” and saying she’d “have to agree to disagree on this one” with the president — a rare departure from someone whose political identity is largely defined by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
Hochul hit back during a Friday night interview with Chris Hayes.
“She's full of sh-t,” Hochul said. “I'm sorry, I mean she really is. This is such an extreme position ... She's even more extreme than Donald Trump. I didn't think that was possible.”
As for the meeting itself, Hochul said she wasn’t “terribly surprised” by what unfolded.
She said it was always her hope the president “would see in Zohran Mamdani someone who can lead the city, who is focused on public safety, who is working on affordability and quality of life issues, and to give the president — who is a New Yorker, who cares about the city — the confidence to know that he can lead.”
Chris Coffey, a political strategist who worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said Trump’s change of tone was politically expedient – and that it could undermine Stefanik’s gubernatorial bid. Republicans are still shaking off the government shutdown and the Democratic election victories in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere earlier this month.
“And so the political winds have changed a little bit,” Coffey said. “The shutdown was not popular for the Republican Party and [Trump] likes a winner.”
Doubling down on the jihadist line won’t do Stefanik any favors, he added. That sort of rhetoric “plays to the farthest right of the Republican Party. New York is a blue state … And now that the president has expressed a willingness to work with him and validated Mamdani, it makes it a lot harder to rally Republicans.”
Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also noted that the encounter served Trump’s immediate political needs — citing his declining poll numbers and the fallout from the recently released Epstein files — but that can and will change.
“For Mamdani, it was the right thing to do as a leader, but I know he went into it with no illusions about Trump,” de Blasio said. “This is just a moment in time. By next week, they could be at loggerheads easily … This is not gonna be a chummy relationship, I guarantee it.”
Susan Kang, a political science professor at John Jay College and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, acknowledged the president’s pattern of being blustery in one breath while trying to charm in the next.
While it seems unlikely that this new political romance will last, Kang said she’s sensing some cautious optimism.
“There was a lot of fear that Trump would try to destroy this administration, but the evidence suggests that he's not gonna do that,” she said. “In fact, maybe he'll send, maybe he'll reinstate some federal aid, maybe he'll send extra money to build housing.”
