Donald Trump (right) meets with New York City Mayor-elect Zoran Mamdani in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, November 21, 2025.
(Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
When Zoran Mamdani met with President Trump on Friday, the mayor-elect of New York did so as a proud democratic socialist.
And winning.
No amount of Trump's hyperbolic comments about the New York mayoral campaign, no absurd mischaracterization of Mamdani as a “communist,” no pressure tactics or threats regarding federal funding or ICE raids can change the fact that the democratic socialism that Mamdani champions has gained popularity among voters in New York and nationally who are anew looking for alternatives to status quo politics and status quo economics.
Trump, who has often said he likes to be among the winners, seemed to realize that after the two men spoke in the Oval Office on Friday. The strikingly supportive tone of their post-meeting press conference seemed a sign that the Trumps of the world were beginning to acknowledge—albeit reluctantly—that democratic socialism was here to stay in contemporary American politics.
In lieu of Trump's barbs for the New York Democrat on the campaign trail, the president said Friday: “I'm very confident that he can do a very good job.”
Trump noted that “a lot of my constituents voted for him” on Nov. 4, an acknowledgment that New Yorkers who supported Trump in 2024 over concerns about the cost of living have fled in 2025 to Mamdani, who has responded to those concerns with much more specificity. allies used during the campaign. He even laughed off a question about Mamdani calling him a “fascist,” patting the mayor-elect on the hand and cheerfully telling him that he should not be held accountable for his past remarks.
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When it came to ideological differences. On Friday, Trump went no further than saying of Mamdani: “He has a little unusual views.”
However Trump describes them, these views have proven popular in New York in this year's election – just as they have proven popular across the country, where dozens of democratic socialists now serve in the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, state legislatures and mayor's offices across the country.
On your epic election night November 4th victory speechMamdani spoke of this reality in the triumphant language of a candidate who won not only for himself, but also for his democratic socialist ideals.
“For as long as we can remember, wealthy and well-connected people have been telling working people in New York that power does not belong to them,” Mamdani said. “Bruised fingers from lifting boxes in the warehouse, calloused palms from steering deliveries, knuckles scarred from kitchen burns – these are not hands that are allowed to hold power. And yet, over the past 12 months, you have dared to achieve something more. Tonight. Against all odds, we grabbed it. The future is in our hands.”
By any standard of modern politics, and even within Trump's understanding of America's electoral heritage, this was true.
But it should be noted that democratic socialism has a great history in America, often embraced by presidents before Trump. John Fitzgerald Kennedy recognized and responded to the vital message of Michael Harrington, the veteran socialist author of the 1962 book. The Other America: Poverty in the USA. (Harrington would go on to co-found the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that provided vital support for Mamdani's mayoral candidacy.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, whose landslide election results of 1932 signaled the desire of many voters to move left in response to the Great Depression before Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933. During his presidency, Roosevelt also worked closely with many socialists and widely expressed democratic socialist idealism. his speech on the Economic Bill of Rights of 1944. Republican Warren Harding pardoned labor leader and former Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs, who had been jailed for his outspoken opposition to World War I, and invited Debs to a meeting that turned out to be friendly conversation at the White House December 26, 1921. (“Good morning, Mr. President,” Debs says). reported say, as Harding replied: “Well, I've heard so damn much about you, Mr. Debs, that I'm now very glad to meet you in person.”)
Debs featured in Mamdani's victory speech as he quoted the proudly radical labor leader who made socialism a household word and became a significant force on the American electoral landscape more than a century ago.
After polls across New York confirmed that the 34-year-old Ugandan immigrant would become the first Muslim mayor of the nation's largest city, Mamdani said: “The sun may have set on our city tonight, but as Eugene Debs once said, 'I see the dawn of a better day for mankind.'
The crowd filling Brooklyn's historic Paramount Theater for the celebration erupted in loud and knowing applause at the mention of Debs, the founder of the electorally powerful Socialist Party of America, which led its presidential bid five times in the early decades of the 20th century.
As democratic socialism has grown in popularity in recent years, especially among young voters, Debs has become an iconic figure. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanderswhose presidential bids in 2016 and 2020 did much to renew interest in socialism—and who Mamdani credits with turning him into a socialist—introduced Debs to a new generation of activists. It is therefore not surprising that the mention of him by the recently elected socialist mayor of New York drew applause.
But just as Mamdani is not the first democratic socialist to meet with the president, he is not the first mayor of a great American city to debate Debs. Indeed, when Debs ran perhaps his most successful presidential campaign—a 1912 candidacy that received 6 percent of the national vote and actually outperformed Republican incumbent William Howard Taft in seven states—his running mate was the socialist socialist mayor of Milwaukee: Emil Seidel.
Seidel was one of three Socialist Party mayors who governed Milwaukee for much of the 20th century, managing municipal affairs so skillfully that Milwaukee was regularly ranked among the most fiscally responsible, humane and healthful cities in the country. Milwaukee's health was a top priority for socialists, who focused on public health initiatives, housing and neighborhood renewal, and programs to protect the safety of workers in the city's huge factories. In fact, Milwaukee residents invested so heavily and enthusiastically in sewer projects that they became known as “sewer socialists“
Mamdani knows this story. When Katrina vanden Heuvel and I interviewed him In July, after he was nominated for the Democratic mayoral nomination, the candidate spoke at length about his socialist predecessors.
“I often think of the example of sewer socialism,” he said. “In recent years we have seen that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: the language of efficiency, [fighting] quality of life waste. Fighting for working people must also mean fighting for their quality of life. To me, sewer socialism represents the belief that the value of an ideology can only be judged by its implementation. This means improving the services and public amenities that working people encounter every day: sewers, clean drinking water, parks. You earn someone's trust through the outcome, and that's what I work backwards from: the outcome of an affordable city and a desire to show that government can actually live up to its responsibilities to working residents.”
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Mamdani Debs's quotation and references to sewer socialists serve as a reminder that the United States has a rich history of visionary, humane, and highly successful socialist governance—in Milwaukee and dozens of other cities. And that he could have a bright future in Mamdani's New York.
Donald Trump tried to prevent such a future before the November 4 election. But he failed. And now it is the emerging reality of a nation that has a long history of electing socialists and—as the recent victories of Mamdani, Seattle Mayor Kathy Wilson, and many other democratic socialists show—is poised to continue to do so.
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