In public, President Trump has spent weeks disparaging Zohran Mamdani as an extremist, a communist and a danger to New York City.
He has also insisted he is “much better looking” than the 34-year-old Mr. Mamdani.
But in private, Mr. Trump has described Mr. Mamdani, now the mayor-elect of New York City, as a talented politician, calling him slick and a good talker, according to two people who discussed the president’s comments on condition of anonymity.
Despite the grudging compliment, the two men appear to be headed for a showdown, pitting the young democratic socialist against a president who has already treated him as a useful foil. For Mr. Trump, the mayor-elect is the face of Democratic opposition; Just hours after Mr. Mamdani’s once-unlikely victory, the president said that Democrats were “crazy” and so was “Mamdani, or whatever the hell his name is.”
Mr. Trump’s aides and allies acknowledge that Mr. Mamdani and New York City are likely to be the next targets of the president’s attacks, even as some caution that Mr. Trump has a vested interest in New York’s financial success because of his multiple real estate holdings.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump even said he might “help him a little bit maybe” because he wanted New York City to succeed.
Still, the president has already threatened to withhold federal money “other than the very minimum as required” from the city, although he cannot legally hold back money that Congress has authorized, with narrow exceptions. (When the administration has tried to withhold federal funds from cities over immigration policy, it has consistently lost in court.)
There are dozens of different funding streams to New York City from the federal government including money for health care, transportation and law enforcement, and if the administration were to withhold expected funds for any of those, it would most likely result in a lawsuit.
Mr. Mamdani, for his part, seems ready for that fight. In his victory speech, he challenged Mr. Trump directly, vowing to fight back against federal efforts to meddle in New York.
(The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later confirmed that Mr. Trump was, indeed, watching.)
Mr. Mamdani said that he would not be cowed by the president’s threats and that New York City would provide the playbook for how to defeat Mr. Trump and his political movement.
“So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us,” he said.
Mr. Mamdani may have few, if any, levers to fight back against the Trump administration other than litigation. The mayor-elect has vowed to hire 200 additional lawyers to the city’s law department, partly to stand up to what his campaign described as “presidential excess.”
