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It may well have been the strangest sudden meeting in the history of the White House, or at least since the 1970 meeting when President Nixon hosted Elvis Presley. Observers were sure the hastily arranged meeting between President Trump and New York Mayor-elect Mamdani was bound to fail, yet both participants were cordial and polite. Ultimately, though, when all the posturing was done, did the Trump-Mamdani meeting benefit anybody? Political analyst J.C. Polanco broke down what he expected to see before the summit took place on Friday morning; he returned today 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to critique the two new frenemies and who won and lost in the Oval Office.
Polanco told host Larry Mendte that there was one very big winner that came out of the meeting- well, eight million winners, give or take: “The first winner is New York City. We need $10 billion from the federal government, and President Trump has been very clear that it appears that Mayor-elect Mamdani, during his campaign and before, has said some really crazy things that were going to jeopardize that. I think that was very clear from the President, and we’ve seen him do this before, and I think that Mayor-elect Mamdani went on a charm offensive in D.C., sat in the White House, and charmed the bedazzles out of President Trump, and that’s good for New York City.”
But Polanco pointed out that the biggest losers of the charm offensive may not have even been within a couple hundred miles of the White House at the time of the meeting: “I think a couple of losers here, though, have to be Congresswoman [Elise] Stefanik, [Nassau County] Executive [Bruce] Blalkeman, and a lot of the Republican operatives at the Republican National Committee… how do you launch an offensive against Democrats in purple districts, claiming that their team member is a jihadist, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, when the leader of your own party says, ‘Oh, no, he’s great, he’s going to be wonderful’… boy, did that hurt a lot of Republican operatives nationally.”
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