And joining me now is the mayor-elect of New York City, Zoran Mamdani, Mr. Mayor-elect.

Welcome back to meet the press.

And congratulations.

Thank you so much.

It's a pleasure to be back.

Well, it is wonderful to have you here in person fresh off of your first meeting with President Donald Trump.

He praised you.

He even said you could do a great job as mayor, despite months of a bitter back and forth.

Were you surprised by the warm welcome that you got?

You know, I was looking forward to having the meeting with the president to speak about the needs of the eight and a half million people who call the same city we love home.

And to speak, frankly frankly about the affordability

crisis that is pushing so many of them out of those five boroughs. And I found in the meeting that I

had with the president a productive one and a meeting that came back again and again to the central

themes of the campaign that we ran, the cost of housing, cost of childcare, the cost of groceries,

the cost of utilities. And it showed that the cost of groceries, the cost of utilities.

And it showed that this is an opportunity to now start to deliver so that people can do more than just aspire to struggle in New York City, but actually to be able to live there.

But did you expect it to be so chummy?

What was going through your head when you were standing there?

You know, I thought again and again about what it would mean for New Yorkers if we could establish a productive relationship that would focus on the issues that those New Yorkers stay up late at night thinking about. Because so often in our politics, we try and tell people what they should be worried about, what they should be concerned about. When you actually ask New Yorkers and you listen to them, you hear it come back to the issues that animated, not just the conversation the president and I had with the press after our meeting, but frankly, in the meeting itself, it was a conversation where we spoke about the need to deliver on this agenda.

And I appreciated that when the president, when we had that meeting, it wasn't just in the Oval Office.

He also took me into the cabinet room. And there we were looking at portraits of presidents of years gone by. And we admired a portrait of FDR. And in many ways, when I think about the candidacy that we've put forward, it looks to Fiora LaGuardia as the greatest mayor in New York City history. You can't tell the story of LaGuardia without telling the story of FDR and the story of a relationship with the federal government that finally delivered at the scale of the crisis it was facing.

Well, prior to your meeting, I don't have to tell you this, President Trump repeatedly threatened to cut off federal funding to New York if you won.

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