U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as they meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Friday.
U.S. President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani maintained a friendly tone and focused on how they’re both aiming to tackle the high cost of living, as they met Friday afternoon in the Oval Office of the White House.
Trump and Mamdani previously have expressed fierce criticisms of each other, but both of their political futures rest in large part on their ability to address Americans’ concerns about affordability, so they mostly stuck to that issue while discussing their meeting with reporters.
Mamdani told reporters in the Oval Office that he shared with Trump that New Yorkers had voted for the Republican president a year ago because of the cost of groceries, the cost of rent, their Consolidated Edison bills and other elevated expenses. Trump, a New York City native, then offered his own criticism of the utility company, which is also called ConEdison or ConEd, while saying the two politicians had talked about the company.
“We’ve gotten fuel prices way down, but it hasn’t shown up in ConEdison, and we’re going to have to talk to them,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We have to get ConEdison to start lowering the rates.”
Mamdani in response said: “Absolutely.”
ConEd shares (ED), which had been trading about 1% higher on Friday afternoon, turned negative after those comments and finished down 0.8%. The company didn’t immediately respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment.
“We talked about some things in very strong common like housing and getting housing built, and food and prices, and the price of oil (CL00) is coming way down,” Trump also told reporters. “If I can get prices down, it’s good for New York.”
Mamdani said they had “a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers.” The mayor-elect said he looks forward to working with Trump to “deliver that affordability for New Yorkers.”
Ahead of the meeting, Mamdani – a democratic socialist who was elected mayor of the country’s biggest city on Nov. 4 – had emphasized that his campaign focused on affordability in part because it was important for New Yorkers who had voted for Trump.
“What we found when we went to Hillside Avenue in Queens, went to Fordham Road in the Bronx – two of the neighborhoods with the largest swings toward Trump – when we asked people, ‘Why did you vote for Trump?’ they said, ‘Cost of living, cost of living, cost of living,'” Mamdani said in an interview with MS NOW, the left-leaning cable news channel that previously was called MSNBC.
“By focusing on cost of living, as opposed to paying consultants to tell New Yorkers what they should think, we were able to actually craft the campaign,” the mayor-elect added. He said one supporter came to a rally in Forest Hills, a neighborhood in Queens, in a hat emblazoned with the words “MAGA” and “Mamdani.”
Related: Why Mamdani and other Democrats won: Voters’ finances are even worse now than when Trump won in 2024
From MarketWatch’s archives (Nov. 6, 2024): High inflation – the killer of governments – doomed Harris and put Trump back in power
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that Trump’s meeting with Mamdani in part “speaks to the fact that President Trump is willing to meet with anyone and talk to anyone and to try to do what’s right on behalf of the American people, whether they live in blue states or red states or blue cities.”
Trump told Fox News Radio before the meeting that Mamdani has “such a different philosophy” but predicted a cordial get-together. “I think we’ll get along fine,” the president said. “Look, we’re looking for the same thing: We want to make New York strong.”
