Donald Trump has long claimed that he — and he alone — dictates the future of the MAGA movement. And a topsy-turvey Friday will put that to the test.
A weekend wellness check on the MAGA coalition: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who on Friday announced her resignation, is spurned by its leader. And incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, held up as a midterm Republican bogeyman, is now welcomed by him.
In the space of a whipsaw few hours from Friday and into Saturday morning, Trump — who has said he knows what “MAGA wants better than anybody else,” — celebrated the impending departure of “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown” on Truth Social (“Marjorie went BAD,” he said) and fangirled over Mamdani (“a Great Honor meeting Zohran Mamdani”).
“A world turned upside down,” Steve Bannon, the onetime White House aide and MAGA media booster, said in a text.
MAGA’s Friday trip to The Upside Down all unfolded in a week during which Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), another frequent intraparty Trump target, effectively cracked Trump’s hold on his congressional coalition with their Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Taken together, this week is the freshest reminder that the MAGA movement has always been defined more by id than ideology, the political shaped by the personal — presenting quite the challenge for whomever must hold the coalition together after Trump.
Trump and Mamdani’s Friday meeting ended worlds away from where most expected it to go. The get-together, which Fox News previewed as a “showdown with socialism,” ended as a friendly back-and-forth between the democratic socialist and president.
“We had a meeting today that actually surprised me,” Trump told reporters during the public portion of the get together.
For some of the president’s most ardent supporters, Trump’s praise of Mamdani — a man he previously warned would lead to ruin in New York City, and who some of Trump’s closest allies (like Elise Stefanik) spent months setting up as their personal campaign trail foil — was agonizing.
“What’s the purpose of people voting in 2026 if the Democrat policies are ‘rational?’” Trump whisperer Laura Loomer said in a interview, referencing Trump’s answer to an Oval question in which he said of Mamdani, “I met with a man who’s a very rational person.”
“I’m a little confused,” she continued, “because, like, I need to know for the sake of my own edification what the administration’s stance is on Mamdani.”
The White House dismissed any handwringing about the direction of the president’s movement.
“As the architect of the MAGA movement, President Trump will always put America First. He’s secured the border; tackled Biden’s inflation crisis; lowered drug prices; ended taxes on tips, overtime, and social security; deported criminal illegal aliens; implemented important reforms to put American workers first; and more,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
“The fact that President Trump met with the newly elected mayor of New York City shows he is willing to talk to anyone to Make America Great Again,” she continued. “Only Politico would try to spin bipartisanship as a bad thing.”
Political horseshoe moments in Trump’s Washington rarely last. But even some of Trump’s closest allies tried to separate themselves from Friday’s meeting. Stefanik — his onetime pick for United Nations ambassador who is now running for New York governor — has repeatedly called Mamdani a “jihadist,” a label Trump explicitly rejected on Friday.
“We all want NYC to succeed. But we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” Stefanik posted on social media on Friday, repeatedly invoking the pejorative despite Trump’s about-face.
Still, Democrats — particularly those close to the incoming mayor — were thrilled with how Friday went down. “Trump respects strength and winners,” said Rebecca Katz, founding partner at Fight Agency, whose firm made ads for Mamdani.
And some Democratic strategists focused on 2026 celebrated Trump undermining Republicans’ attempts to paint Mamdani as the midterm bogeyman he entered the day as. Did Speaker Mike Johnson’s entire 2026 strategy just crumble?
“Pour one out for the NRCC/NRSC staffers who saw their 2026 ads go up in smoke. Sad!” said the veteran Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson.
Still, many are convinced that it is only a matter of when — not if — Trump’s embrace of the New Yorker will evaporate.
“Plenty of time for that to come if it does,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye. “Either of them coming out of that meeting on the attack would have been a mistake, especially given they’ve both tapped into voters who feel systems are broken and things cost too much.”
And some Democrats — particularly Mamdani’s intraparty critics — are convinced it all fades, and GOP messaging continues apace. Alex Hoffman, the Democratic strategist and donor adviser, said: “He will become the bogeyman as soon as he starts implementing policy and saying ‘socialist’ as the sitting mayor.”
But for Democrats, Friday’s friendly confab presented a possible path forward for handling the president.
In a year when Democrats have struggled with how to engage Trump, in which at least one of them hid behind a folder in a White House meeting and left the base wondering about her 2028 sauce, Mamdani just put on a masterclass, Katz and other Democratic strategists said.
Their theory of the case: In his meeting, he offered a template for handling Trump and Trumpism. Trump thinks Democrats are weak; Mamdani projected strength. His body language was neither embarrassed nor defensive. He did not moderate any of his positions. He didn’t grandstand, nor was he pugilistic.
“Some Democrats made the decision that they had to reject Zohran completely if they didn’t agree with all of his policies,” Katz said. “That was a mistake. Zohran doesn’t have all the answers, but he does have a way at looking at situations that is different from typical Democrats in Washington. We need a lot of wins in 2026. Let’s work together to figure out how to get them.”
Andrew Howard, Nick Reisman and Joe Anuta contributed to this report.
Politics
