Trump and Mamdani to meet at Gracie Mansion

President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are expected to meet Monday at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence in Manhattan, for their first meeting in New York City since Mamdani took office.

Mamdani’s office confirmed the meeting to NBC News, saying the two will discuss “issues affecting New York City and New Yorkers.” A city official and the White House also confirmed the meeting to CBS News on Sunday, though officials did not specify what time it will take place.

Trump will be in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, where he is scheduled to deliver remarks Tuesday and meet with global leaders.

The meeting will be at least the third public meeting between the president and the Democratic mayor. Mamdani has traveled to Washington at least twice to meet with Trump at the White House, and CBS News reported Monday will be the first time the two meet in New York City.

Their relationship has been unusually cordial compared with Trump’s dealings with many other Democrats, even as both men have sharply criticized each other in public. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, ran for office as a critic of Trump. During the campaign, he called the president a “despot” and a “fascist,” comments he later defended after their first Oval Office meeting.

“That’s something I’ve said in the past and I say today,” Mamdani told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” after that meeting.

Trump also strongly opposed Mamdani during the mayoral campaign, CBS News reported, and even threatened to arrest and deport him. Before their first meeting in November 2025, Trump described Mamdani as a “communist lunatic.” After meeting with the then-mayor-elect in the Oval Office, however, Trump told reporters he would be “cheering” for Mamdani and called him a “very rational person.”

In that November meeting, the two pledged to work together to make New York City better and more affordable. After their second White House meeting in February, Mamdani said they spoke about housing development and that he raised the arrest of a Columbia University student by Department of Homeland Security agents. The student was released shortly after the meeting, according to NBC News.

Mamdani has described his relationship with Trump as functional despite their political differences. In an April interview with “Meet the Press,” he called it “honest, direct and productive.”

He added that their shared New York roots had helped shape their rapport. “New York City holds a very special place for him as well as for me,” Mamdani said. “We’re both from the same city.”

Mamdani told CBS News earlier this year that he and Trump remain in touch on a number of issues outside their in-person meetings, but said he prefers to keep the “frequency and the nature of those conversations private, because that’s the premise of them.”

The two have continued to clash publicly. Earlier this year, Mamdani proposed a pied-à-terre tax on New York City homeowners who keep a nonprimary residence in the city. Trump denounced the plan on Truth Social, writing, “Sadly, Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York! It has no chance! The United States of America should not contribute to its failure. It will only get WORSE. The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG.”

Mamdani has also criticized Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, saying in April that the military conflict worsened the city’s cost-of-living crisis.

“I wish that the words of Tupac from the ’90s weren’t still prescient, but they continue to be true for too many, which is that ‘We always have money for war and not to feed the poor,’” he told “Meet the Press.”