What Trump and Mamdani Have in Common (and How They Are Different)

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The political history of the United States in 2025 is defined by a stark convergence of opposing forces. In the final months of the year, following a tumultuous election cycle, the American public witnessed two distinct visions for the future crystallize into confrontation.

On one side stood President Donald J. Trump, firmly in the first year of his second term, using executive power to dismantle the “administrative state” and enforce a rigid definition of American identity through “Liberation Day” economic policies and aggressive nativist immigration reforms.

On the other stood Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the newly elected Mayor of New York City, a democratic socialist whose historic victory on November 4, 2025, shattered conventional wisdom about Democratic party politics and established a resistance stronghold in the nation’s cultural and financial capital.

These two figures, the 79-year-old Republican populist from Queens and the 34-year-old Muslim socialist from Uganda (via Queens), represent more than a partisan clash. They embody the central friction of the post-2020 global order: the struggle between the reassertion of the traditional nation-state, defined by borders and blood, and the emergence of a cosmopolitan, decolonized politics that seeks to redefine belonging.

Hovering over this dynamic is the work of Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran’s father and a preeminent scholar of colonialism at Columbia University. His theoretical frameworks regarding the “making and unmaking of permanent minorities” and the colonial roots of the nation-state offer a lens through which to view Trump’s 2025 agenda.

The Protagonists

To understand the friction of November 2025, you first need to understand the disparate paths that brought these actors to the stage.

Donald Trump’s Second Term

By 2025, Donald Trump had transformed from a disruptive outsider into the architect of a systematic dismantling of the post-war American order. His second inauguration in January 2025 was not merely a return to office, but the start of a “retribution” tour aimed at the institutions he believed had wronged him.

The “Trump of 2025” is characterized by a hardened resolve to use the full machinery of the state to enforce his will. Unlike the chaotic improvisation of his first term, the second term, at least initially, was marked by more ruthless efficiency in targeting perceived enemies, both domestic (the “deep state”) and foreign (trade imbalances).

His identity remains rooted in a specific mid-20th-century New York outer-borough psychology: transactional, combative, and obsessed with hierarchy and dominance. He has positioned himself as the defender of the “native” American against the encroachments of the “globalist” and the “migrant.”

Zohran Mamdani’s Rise

Zohran Mamdani’s path to the mayoralty is a study in the evolution of the American Left. Born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991, Zohran is the son of Mahmood Mamdani and acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair. His upbringing was itinerant and cosmopolitan, moving from Kampala to Cape Town, South Africa, before settling in New York City at age seven.

Educated at Bronx High School of Science and later Bowdoin College, Zohran’s political consciousness was forged in the streets of activism. At Bowdoin, he majored in Africana studies, a discipline deeply influenced by his father’s work, and founded the college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Before entering electoral politics, Zohran worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor in Queens. This experience provided him with a visceral understanding of the precariousness of the American working class. He witnessed firsthand the violence of the housing market, where the abstract forces of capital manifested as sheriffs evicting families.

This “sewer socialism,” a focus on the material conditions of daily life (rent, heat, transit), became the bedrock of his political identity. He also dabbled in the cultural sphere as a rapper under the monikers “Young Cardamom” and “Mr. Cardamom,” displaying a flair for performance and media manipulation that would surprisingly mirror the 45th and 47th President’s own media savvy.

Mahmood Mamdani’s Framework

Mahmood Mamdani serves as the intellectual anchor of this analysis. A survivor of the 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin, Mahmood’s life’s work has been an interrogation of how political identities are constructed by state power.

His expulsion was a formative trauma that clarified the distinction between “cultural” and “political” belonging. As he noted in a 2025 interview reflecting on his son’s victory, the central question of his life has been: “Who belongs in a political community?”

His scholarship, particularly Citizen and Subject (1996) and Neither Settler nor Native (2020), argues that the modern nation-state is inherently a machine for producing “permanent minorities” by politicizing cultural differences.

In the context of 2025, Mahmood represents the theoretical diagnosis of the Trumpian symptom. While Trump enforces the boundary between “settler” and “native,” and Zohran attempts to dissolve it through socialist universalism, Mahmood provides the historical map explaining why these categories exist in the first place.

The Theoretical Framework

To understand the specific policy clashes of 2025: immigration raids, birthright citizenship, and trade wars, you need to apply the lens of Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native.

The Nation-State as Colonial Trap

Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state is not a neutral vessel for democracy but a specific political form exported by colonialism. Its defining feature is the fusion of “nation” (a cultural/ethnic category) with “state” (a political/territorial category). This fusion inevitably creates two classes of people:

• The National (Native): Those whose cultural identity aligns with the state
• The Subject (Settler/Migrant): Those who reside in the territory but are excluded from full political belonging because of their cultural difference

In 2025, President Trump’s policies can be read as an aggressive attempt to rigidify the “native” category. The administration’s rhetoric constantly distinguishes between “real Americans” (a coded racial and ideological category) and “invaders” or “enemies within.”

Trump’s Executive Order 14160 is the ultimate manifestation of this theory. By attempting to strip citizenship from those born on U.S. soil to non-citizen parents, Trump is shifting the definition of the “native” from jus soli (right of the soil—a territorial definition) to jus sanguinis (right of blood—a genealogical definition). Mahmood Mamdani would argue this is a regression to the colonial logic of “defining and ruling” based on origin rather than residence.

Creating Permanent Minorities

Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state creates “permanent minorities” who are tolerated but never fully accepted. These minorities are vulnerable to cycles of violence, expulsion, or disenfranchisement whenever the “majority” feels threatened.

The polarization of 2025, described in Brookings data as a rise in support for political violence (26% on the left, 17% on the right), reflects the extreme tension of this dynamic. The Trump administration’s rhetoric regarding “seditious behavior” among Democrats and the threat to deploy the military against “internal enemies” are attempts to cast political opposition as illegitimate, essentially turning political opponents into a “permanent minority” excluded from the nation.

Zohran’s Alternative

If Trump represents the nation-state’s exclusionary logic, Zohran Mamdani represents the attempt to construct a different form of political community. Mahmood Mamdani has spoken favorably of “federation” as a solution, a system where political rights are based on residence in a federal unit rather than ethnic belonging.

Zohran’s New York City operates on this logic. His victory speech declaration, “New York will remain a city of immigrants… led by an immigrant,” is a rejection of the “native/settler” binary. By extending municipal rights and protections to all residents regardless of federal status, Zohran is effectively operating a “decolonized” political unit within the colonial shell of the Trumpian nation-state.

The Citizenship Crisis

The theoretical clash manifested in brutal concrete reality in January 2025, with the issuance of Executive Order 14160. This policy directive became the flashpoint for the year’s most intense legal and social battles.

Executive Order 14160

On January 20, 2025, his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”

The order seeks to deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents who are unlawfully present. It reinterprets the 14th Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause to exclude children of undocumented immigrants. The order directed federal agencies (State Department, Social Security) to stop issuing passports and Social Security numbers to affected children born after February 19, 2025.

By November 2025, the order remained blocked by multiple federal courts. Injunctions in Barbara v. Trump and Washington v. Trump prevented enforcement.

This order represents the most significant challenge to the definition of American citizenship since the Reconstruction Era. It explicitly seeks to “unmake” the political community by creating a hereditary caste system. Mahmood Mamdani’s work illuminates the danger: by tying rights to ancestry, the state prepares the ground for the expulsion of those deemed “non-indigenous,” a pattern observed in post-colonial states across Africa and Asia.

Mass Deportation

Complementing the attack on birthright citizenship was the activation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. This archaic statute was used to bypass standard due process for deportations, allowing for the summary removal of non-citizens.

By May 2025, ICE reported nearly 158,000 removals, with a stated goal of 400,000 by September. The administration also touted a figure of 1.6 million “self-deportations,” a metric difficult to verify but indicative of the climate of fear created.

The dragnet was indiscriminate. In Los Angeles, U.S. citizens were detained during raids, leading to Congressional hearings where victims described being held without water or legal counsel. The IRS was weaponized to share taxpayer data with DHS, breaking decades of precedent regarding taxpayer privacy.

Municipal Resistance

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was fueled by the backlash to these federal policies. In his victory speech, he positioned New York City not just as a sanctuary, but as a combatant. “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us,” he declared.

Mamdani’s administration pledged to use city resources to obstruct ICE operations, provide legal defense funds for residents facing deportation under EO 14160, and maintain the “city of immigrants” identity as a literal shield against federal intrusion.

The Economic Battle

While the battle over citizenship defined the identity of the nation, the battle over the economy defined its livelihood. 2025 saw the imposition of two radically different economic philosophies: Trump’s protectionist nationalism and Mamdani’s redistributive socialism.

Liberation Day Tariffs

In April 2025, President Trump declared “Liberation Day,” invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose a blanket tariff regime designed to “decouple” the U.S. economy from its global entanglements.

A baseline 10% tariff was applied to almost all imports. Specific “reciprocal” tariffs were levied on countries with trade surpluses, reaching up to 50% for some and 125% for China. The stated aim was to revitalize American manufacturing and penalize “freeloading” trading partners.

By November 2025, the economic fallout was severe. The tariffs added an estimated 10.8 percentage points to the applied tariff rate, directly translating into higher consumer prices. The cost of food, mining products, and textiles surged by over 7%. Economic models projected a long-term GDP contraction of roughly 0.8% ($240 billion annual loss).

Inflation, which had been trending down in early 2025, spiked sharply after April, eroding real wage gains and souring consumer sentiment.

Mamdani’s Affordability Agenda

It was within this inflationary environment that Zohran Mamdani found his political opening. While Trump blamed foreigners for economic woes, Zohran blamed “billionaires” and “bad landlords,” framing the cost-of-living crisis as a result of domestic exploitation rather than international trade.

Mamdani’s platform, the “Affordability Agenda,” was a direct interventionist response to the market failures exacerbated by Trump’s policies:

• Rent Freeze: A total freeze on rents for regulated apartments, his most radical and popular proposal in a city where housing costs had skyrocketed
• Free Transit: A proposal for free bus service to alleviate costs for the working class
• Taxing the Rich: Aggressive municipal tax hikes on the wealthy, directly targeting the donor class that Trump’s 2017 and 2025 tax cuts had benefited
• Taxi Debt Relief: Debt relief for medallion owners, a specific grievance of the immigrant working class in NYC

DOGE’s Rise and Fall

Amidst these economic battles, the Trump administration launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an extra-governmental advisory body led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The mandate was to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget and “delete” bureaucracy.

The department operated with a “move fast and break things” mentality. It issued ultimatums to federal workers to report their daily output or resign.

By November 2025, DOGE was quietly disbanded. The reasons were manifold:

• Internal Conflict: A publicized feud between Musk and Trump over the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (a legislative package that failed to materialize)
• Ineffectiveness: The “savings” were largely illusory or overstated
• Damage: The cuts that did happen had catastrophic effects. The dismantling of USAID led to projected excess deaths abroad, and cuts to the Social Security Administration caused massive delays for American seniors

Zohran used DOGE as a foil. While Trump tried to fire civil servants, Zohran promised to empower them to deliver services. The failure of DOGE validated Zohran’s argument that “efficiency” was often code for cruelty and incompetence.

Operation Sindoor

The divergence between the Trumpian worldview and the Mamdani critique was perhaps most vividly illustrated by the geopolitical crisis in South Asia in May 2025. This event, known as “Operation Sindoor,” tested Trump’s transactional diplomacy against the deep-seated historical grievances analyzed by Mahmood Mamdani.

The Crisis Timeline

On April 22, 2025, a terror attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, killed 26 civilians. India blamed Pakistan-based groups.

On May 7, 2025, India launched “Operation Sindoor.” This involved missile and air strikes against alleged Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) camps in Bahawalpur and Muridke, Pakistan.

From May 8-10, 2025, Pakistan retaliated. An aerial dogfight ensued involving over 114 aircraft (72 Indian, 42 Pakistani). This was the largest engagement of its kind in decades. Disinformation ran rampant. Reports circulated that Pakistani J-35s (Chinese-made) shot down Indian Rafales (French-made), a narrative pushed by Chinese bot networks to hurt French arms sales.

On May 10, 2025, a ceasefire was announced.

Trump’s Claims

President Trump immediately inserted himself into the narrative. He claimed to have brokered the ceasefire through a “long night” of negotiations and threats.

Trump asserted he threatened to impose “350% tariffs” on both India and Pakistan if they did not stop fighting. He repeatedly boasted, “I did eight peace deals… including India and Pakistan,” and that Prime Minister Modi called him to say “we’re not going to go to war.”

The reality: India consistently denied any U.S. mediation, stating the ceasefire was arranged directly between the Directors General of Military Operations (DGMOs).

The Mamdani Framework

Mahmood Mamdani’s book Saviors and Survivors critiques the Western tendency to view non-Western conflicts as humanitarian disasters requiring a “savior” rather than political problems requiring political solutions.

Trump’s intervention (real or imagined) was purely transactional. It addressed the violence (via economic threats) but ignored the politics (the status of Kashmir). Mahmood would argue that the conflict persists because the political identities in the region (Hindu/Muslim) were politicized by the colonial state and never resolved. Trump’s “deal” is a superficial patch over a deep colonial wound.

Zohran Mamdani, who has criticized the Modi government’s actions in Kashmir and supported the rights of the Kashmiri people, aligns with the view that peace requires justice (self-determination), not just the cessation of fire commanded by an imperial president.

The Culture War

The ideological conflict between Trump and Mamdani culminated in the rhetorical battleground of the NYC mayoral election. This was not just a contest of policies but of cultural signaling.

Trump’s Attack

Throughout the campaign, Trump labeled Mamdani a “communist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” and a threat to the safety of New York. Trump-aligned Super PACs ran ads depicting Mamdani with an artificially darkened beard against the backdrop of the Twin Towers, a visceral use of the “Bad Muslim” trope Mahmood Mamdani described in his 2004 book.

Mamdani’s Response

Instead of retreating into the “Good Muslim” defensive crouch (apologetic, secular, moderate), Zohran embraced the conflict.

In his victory speech, Zohran addressed the President directly: “Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.” This phrase was a masterstroke of political theater: it signaled that he was not afraid of Trump’s noise; in fact, he invited the confrontation.

Zohran declared, “I am Muslim” and “New York is a city of immigrants.” He utilized his multi-lingual background, speaking Arabic (“ana minkom wa-ilaykom” for, I am from you and for you), Spanish, and Hindustani to mobilize the diverse “permanent minorities” of the city into a winning coalition.

The White House Meeting

Despite the vitriol, the two men met in the Oval Office on November 21, 2025.

Trump, ever the showman, respected Zohran’s ability to win. He called the meeting “great” and the discussion “productive.” Both men are creatures of New York media. They understand that politics is performance. Trump respected Zohran for toppling the “Cuomo dynasty” (a mutual enemy).

Even after the “cordial” meeting, Zohran publicly reiterated that Trump was a “fascist” and a “despot.” This refusal to soften his ideological critique, even while engaging in diplomatic niceties, marks a departure from standard political etiquette and aligns with a more radical, principled politics.

What They Share and Where They Differ

Common Ground

Both Trump and Zohran Mamdani rose to power by destroying the centrist establishments of their respective parties. Trump crushed the Bush/Romney GOP; Zohran crushed the Cuomo/Adams Democratic machine. They both position themselves as the voice of the “forgotten” (Trump’s white working class vs. Zohran’s multi-racial working class) against a corrupt elite.

Both understand the economy of attention. Trump’s tweets and Zohran’s rap background/viral speeches show a shared ability to command the news cycle.

Both possess a distinct outer-borough pugnacity (Queens). They frame their struggles in existential terms and are unafraid of conflict.

Both agree that the neoliberal order of the last 40 years has failed. They agree the system is “rigged”—Trump says by globalists and migrants; Zohran says by billionaires and landlords.

Fundamental Differences

Theory Into Practice

The synergy between Mahmood Mamdani’s theory and Zohran Mamdani’s practice offers a unique phenomenon in American politics: a mayoralty explicitly informed by post-colonial studies.

Mahmood’s critique of the “Good Muslim” vs. “Bad Muslim” dichotomy is operationalized in Zohran’s refusal to denounce BDS or moderate his socialism. Zohran is the “Bad Muslim” who wins not by becoming “Good” (compliant), but by building enough power to force the system to accommodate him.

Mahmood has argued that the solution to the crisis of the nation-state is “federation,” decoupling culture from politics. Zohran’s New York is an attempt to build this federation in microcosm. By creating a political unit where undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and queer people have equal claim to the city’s resources, he is attempting to “unmake” the permanent minorities created by Trump’s federal policies.

The Path Forward

As 2025 draws to a close, the stage is set for protracted conflict. Trump’s federal government, armed with the Alien Enemies Act and a protectionist trade policy, is on a collision course with Zohran Mamdani’s New York.

The collapse of DOGE suggests that Trump’s ability to dismantle the state is limited by incompetence and internal chaos. However, the “Liberation Day” tariffs and the citizenship orders show that his ability to inflict economic and social pain remains potent.

Zohran Mamdani’s challenge will be to translate his rhetorical victory (“Turn the volume up”) into governance that can withstand federal siege. If he succeeds, he validates his father’s theories: that a political community can be built on the future, not the past. If he fails, the Trumpian vision of the “native” nation-state may well consolidate its hold, turning New York City from a bastion of resistance into a besieged island of “permanent minorities.”

The question Mahmood Mamdani posed—”Who belongs?”—remains the defining question of the era. In November 2025, two powerful answers were given: one from the White House, demanding exclusion, and one from City Hall, demanding a volume that cannot be ignored.

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