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Maybe We Can Learn Something From Mamdani After All

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On Thursday (tomorrow) I’m talking John & Paul at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Come along, it’s free.

This week the new mayor of New York went to see the president. What a show it was. The funniest moment came when a reporter asked Mamdani if he still believes Trump is a fascist. As Mamdani launched into a polite evasion, Trump grinned, patted him affectionately on the arm, and said, “You can just say yes. It’s easier than explaining it.” At other points, Trump jumped in to defend Mamdani for travelling to Washington by plane, applauded his policy agenda, and told reporters that this self-declared socialist will do a great job as mayor of New York. “I’ll be cheering for him,” he said. It was quite sweet!

In general, politics offers fewer transferable insights than we imagine. I’ve written about how we can’t really learn anything from a politician who was elected mayor of a peculiar city in a peculiar country after beating the worst candidate in the world. And yet, after watching this irresistibly charming spectacle I find myself compelled to be a hypocrite. I think there is something to learn from Zohran Mamdani - about politics and also about life, specifically one of my pet subjects: how to disagree.