Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani’s Bromance Just Killed the GOP’s Midterm Strategy
The GOP’s boogeyman became Trump’s latest crush.
I haven’t stopped laughing since yesterday’s press conference between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani. It’s genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time.
It was so goddamn predictable. Mamdani hops on a plane, meets with Trump, and completely charms the shit out of him. I don’t know what he said behind closed doors, but in public, Trump couldn’t stop gushing over the Mayor-elect of New York City. This is the same guy Republicans have been screaming about for months—calling him a radical jihadist hellbent on world destruction.
And now here’s Trump in the Oval Office saying how much he likes Mamdani. How smart he is. How they agree on more than you’d think. How they both want the same things—lower crime, more affordability. Trump even says their policies aren’t all that different and that conservatives would be surprised by what Mamdani wants to do. Just absolute gold.
The best part? The MAGA influencer meltdown. Full-on panic mode: “This isn’t our Donald Trump! Who is this man? What is happening? Oh my God.”
This was the most predictable shit on the planet. Trump talks tough online, but get in a room with him, be nice, flatter him a little—and boom, he’s in love. That’s all he wants. Validation from whoever’s closest. Probably because his dad didn’t hug him enough.
People have used that to great effect. Gretchen Whitmer got flak online for it, but she did the exact same thing. She went to the White House, turned on the charm, and walked out with funding to save a military base in Michigan and disaster relief for the Upper Peninsula. That’s what good leaders and executives do.
Mamdani pulled a similar move—and he likely just accomplished two massive things:
First, Trump is going to think twice before attacking New York City. That’ll ripple through the whole administration. Doesn’t mean there won’t be drama, but building that relationship matters when you’re running the biggest city in America with a weirdo fascist in the White House. That ain’t nothing.
Second, he completely torpedoed the GOP’s midterm strategy.
I joked online yesterday that there’s probably some poor Republican staffer in a dark basement who’s spent months cutting ads painting Mamdani as a communist menace. The whole strategy since he beat Cuomo in the primary has been to tie every Democrat to this supposed “radical” and scare swing voters. And now? It’s toast.
For the record, I never thought that was going to work anyway. It’s been a desperate distraction from the real issues—the economy, Epstein, the cartoonishly obvious corruption in D.C. That’s what’s going to define the midterms.
Nobody outside New York actually cares who the mayor is. Sorry, New Yorkers. Your city’s great. But it’s not the center of the universe.
Still, Republicans were going to try. That was their Hail Mary. And now? Democrats are pulling ahead in the generic ballot—up to 14 points in one poll this week. I don’t think it’s that wide yet, but it’s clearly trending toward a blue wave.
And now Republicans have shot themselves in the foot. How the hell are you going to sell Mamdani as the destroyer of America when Donald J. Trump is out here calling him a genius?
It guts the whole narrative.
This is what happens when you build your entire movement around one man and convince yourselves he’s infallible. Eventually, he turns on you. He drags you down.
Sure, it felt great last year. You were winning. The economy wasn’t great. Democrats were scrambling. You had the wind at your back.
But this is the other side of that. When your party stands for nothing beyond whatever Trump feels like saying that day—when you offer no solutions and the economy is tanking—you’re completely at his mercy.
And boy, he did go off-script—because he wanted attention. He liked how Mamdani made him feel. He thought it would make for good TV. Maybe it did in the short term. But long-term? It’s a disaster for Republicans.
Mamdani is politically sharp as hell. He’s relentless about affordability. Doesn’t matter what stupid gotcha question you throw at him or what racist bait Cuomo laid out in the race—he stayed on message. And he did the same thing in that press conference, despite all the reporter questions.
People are pissed. The middle class is in shambles. People can’t afford anything—food, rent, houses, school, a damn vacation. They’re looking for someone who seems like they give a shit. And Mamdani does.
So putting him in the Oval Office with a lame-duck president was a catastrophically dumb move for the GOP. They thought they could control the narrative and use it to hurt Democrats in the midterms. But Trump didn’t play along—because he got charmed by Mamdani.
Republicans deserve what’s coming in the midterms.
They built their whole 2026 playbook around turning Zohran Mamdani into a boogeyman instead of actually doing something that would help tens of millions of struggling Americans. And now that doomed strategy is dead on arrival.
It wasn’t going to work before.
And it definitely isn’t working now.
Mamdani is, simply, a brilliant politician. You can also tell he was raised to treat others with generosity, not derision. Yes, we’ll have to see how he does as Mayor of NYC, but if he does what Obama did in his first term—surrounding himself with people who know what they are doing—I suspect he will do well. What a contrast of faux confidence and real confidence we witnessed at that Whitehouse meeting.
It was indeed the most fascinating press conference. Trump’s right wing reporters would try to ask a “got you” question and Trump quickly deflected for Mamdani. It was fun to watch. I’ve got to give Mamdani credit … he is very skilled at politics and communication. And he has an infectious smile. Trump kept looking up to him and smiling.