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Bulwark Takes

Zohran Knows EXACTLY How to Play Trump

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Society & Culture, Politics, News Commentary

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2026

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tim Miller and Andrew Egger give their takes on the shocking and strangely stylish White House visit by Zohran Mamdani, who met with Trump to discuss housing plans. They break down Mamdani’s strategy of engaging Trump directly, the optics of the now-viral meeting photo, and whether Mamdani managed to “mog” the president or simply played to Trump’s ego. Is Mamdani’s approach political genius, dangerous flirtation with Trump’s brand, or just effective results-oriented dealmaking?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

All right. Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller with the Bullwork. Here's my buddy, Andrew Eger. He writes our morning shots newsletter. Check that out at the bulwark.com. We're here to discuss Zoran Mondani's triumphant visits to the Capitol and to the White House and analyze it. It's confusing visit. Andrew, I want to start here. Do you know this about me that I take like a eight minute nap most days? Do you know that about me? No, that's new lore. Yeah. It's my Mimi did it. And it's like a true power nap. Or some days it's even it's even like a minute and a half. Like I can just kind of do this. If you're the president, you can't do it. People start to call you Sleepy Tim or whatever. I can do it as a podcast.

0:37.7

I just kind of do this.

0:39.3

But like, I'd say once every three weeks, it doesn't work. And I doze off. And then I just wake up in like a stupor, like an hour later. And I looked down on my phone and I have a million messages. and I'm like, oh my God, what did I do?

0:52.5

And that happened to me today.

0:54.4

And I woke up and looked at my phone and I saw this picture. like, oh my God, what did I do? And that happened to me today.

1:01.0

And I woke up and looked at my phone and I saw this picture of Zorun with Trump.

1:02.8

Welcome back to Earth.

1:05.8

And I'm like, I was like, is this fake?

1:07.0

I was like, is this AI?

1:09.3

Is it Photoshopped?

1:27.5

Like, what is, is it real? And I thought initially initially, I was like, it's fake. And I, like, the cobwebs are shaking off. And then I watched it. You know, I scrolled more. And I saw, no, this is real. This is our real. This is our real. This is Earth one that we're on. It's a real picture of a fake newspaper.

1:45.7

So I can see where, in addition to being, you know, half asleep still, I can see where your confusion came in. But I don't know. We should probably take this from the top, right? I mean, what an afternoon for the mayor of New York. Yeah, I was confused about it. So basically, he comes down to New York in a secret trip, some of the news leaks out this morning to meet with Trump.

1:48.2

The gist of this meeting, I guess, is that

1:50.1

it's a follow-on from his

1:52.1

first trip, where Trump said to him,

1:54.0

hey, or he said to Trump, hey, I want to come with some ideas.

1:59.0

And he came back and they met again and the ideas are basically about building more

2:04.4

housing.

2:05.0

Plus he had a few other requests about people that have been wrongly jailed by our government.

2:09.2

Unlike Glass and we don't have like a rollicking Oval Office Press Conference video to

2:14.9

show you.

2:15.5

Like we just have that clip.

...

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