• The Trump and Mamdani meeting demonstrated that once Muslims are humanised in real political spaces, the fear-based narratives surrounding them lose their power.
• The encounter exposed how media outlets continue to manufacture division.
On 21st November 2025 came a political plot twist no one expected. President Donald Trump and New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met in the Oval Office. A moment widely expected to be tense, instead turned into one of the most unexpectedly calm and constructive political encounters of the year. Their exchange was measured, direct and largely cooperative. It has already triggered an intense reaction online and across media platforms.
What made the meeting remarkable was largely the shift in tone, posture and interaction between two men who, until now, had publicly criticised each other with sharp rhetoric. In the lead-up to the meeting, Trump regularly invoked London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan when speaking about Mamdani, framing the two as parallel figures. Both are Muslim mayors of major global cities, and both had been targeted by Trump in similar terms. Trump had previously called Khan “a terrible, terrible mayor” claimed London had been “so changed” and suggested that it was moving toward “Sharia law”. The criticism was rarely about policy; it was about who Khan was. A Muslim man.
When Mamdani won the New York mayoral race, Trump revived parts of that same vocabulary. He described Mamdani as “a communist” and implied his win threatened American “sovereignty”, warning that New York could follow London’s supposed decline. The comparison circulated widely on social media, where many repeated the criticism without understanding the real metrics of London’s governance. London’s crime, economic performance and tourism figures showed no such collapse.
In fact, Sadiq Khan’s tenure tells a different story. London’s air quality improved significantly through the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which cut toxic emissions in central areas. The expansion of electric buses, cycling infrastructure and climate-focused transport reshaped London’s environmental strategy. The city’s economic influence remained intact, and population trends did not reflect the collapse implied by online caricatures. For many commentators, the hostility directed at Mamdani resembled the hostility previously directed at Khan and reinforced the notion that it was less about their political agendas and more about their Muslim identity. That dynamic formed the political atmosphere of this Oval Office meeting.
Where the meeting diverged from public expectation was in tone. While reporters pressed with questions that seemed designed to polarise or reignite past conflict, Mamdani held his line. He entered the Oval Office with a deliberate mix of respect and conviction, setting out his priorities from the outset: housing affordability, rising costs, public safety and the wider economic pressures facing New Yorkers. He acknowledged the institutional weight of the presidency, yet made it clear he had not come to soften his agenda or bend his principles. He summarised the interaction by saying: “What I really appreciate about the President is that the meeting focused not on places of disagreement, which there are many, but on the shared purpose that we have in serving New Yorkers”.
Remarkably, Trump met that tone. Standing beside Mamdani, he said: “We agree on a lot more than I would have thought. We have one thing in common: we want this city of ours that we love to do very well”. The admission that he “would have thought” otherwise signalled a recalibration of his earlier assumptions about Mamdani. Trump rarely concedes misjudgement, which made that sentence especially notable.
Among the most striking moments that arose from this meeting, of which there were many, was that Mamdani took the opportunity to successfully call out the genocide of Gaza with a lack of pushback from President Trump. This was significant given how often Muslim politicians are dismissed or reframed when speaking about Palestine. And secondly, that the president of the United States allowed the Mayor-elect to call him a fascist, even stepping in to rescue him from the question aimed to trap by saying “That’s OK. You can just say yes. I don’t mind”. The interjection diffused potential tension and signalled that neither man was there to re-litigate past insults. Instead, the meeting pushed through the static of prior exchanges. When asked whether he would feel comfortable living in New York under Mamdani’s leadership, Trump answered: “Yeah, I would. I really would… especially after the meeting”.
The digital reaction was immediate. Analysts pointed to the relaxed body language and the unexpectedly warm tone, and many online users contrasted it sharply with the months of hostility that came before. Trump himself noted that the press showed more interest in this meeting than in some of his meetings with international heads of state, which speaks to how unusual and symbolically charged the encounter was.
Yet the media still worked to drag the conversation back into division. NBC News interviewed Mamdani on Sunday 23rd November and repeated the same provocation-driven questions that were used in the Oval Office. And once they got the soundbite they were fishing for, they framed the 17-minute interview with the predictable ragebait headline: “Zohran Mamdani says he still believes Trump is a fascist”.
Moments like these expose how much of a role the press has in fuelling hate and how fragile the narratives are that drive online hostility. Consider Anthony Hudson, the GOP candidate in Dearborn. He had prepared an “American Crusade” anti-Muslim march, only to have his perspective shift after spending time with Muslim families and touring mosques. His reflection, “…everything you’ve been told or taught about Dearborn is a complete fabrication”, was a rare public admission of how misinformation shapes fear. Even then, many of his supporters pushed ahead with the march and criticised him for “capitulating to Muslims”, showing how deeply political messaging can embed itself. The Oval Office meeting did something similar on a national scale: it placed two people in a room, stripped away the rhetoric, and allowed reality to speak for itself. Even so, pockets of online commentary remained distrustful, framing the interaction as nothing more than Trump “keeping his friends close but his enemies closer”.
The meeting doesn’t guarantee a new political era. But it does offer a glimpse of what politics could look like when confrontation is set aside long enough for leaders to engage on shared challenges. That matters in a climate where the Trump era accelerated divisive politics to an unprecedented degree, going beyond reshaping the United States and feeding far-right extremism in parallel across the UK, Europe and Australia. If anything, the meeting proved that humanisation remains the most effective antidote to Islamophobia.
