It's Queens, Jake
The Trump/Mamdani lovefest showed that distraction is Trump's real superpower
If you were surprised by the love fest between Mamdani and Trump, you probably aren’t from New York.
My first lesson about New York Rules came right after my parents’ divorce. My mother reconnected with a boyfriend she’d had in college. Jack was a real New York character, a spry, prematurely white-haired cartoonist who had worked at the Waldorf-Astoria back in my mom’s college days, and by that time, worked for real estate moguls and city agencies.
I liked him. He taught me the Lindy hop and introduced me to artists. And he was a member of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, these crazy people who went swimming in the winter.
Married, of course, but whatever. Those were the days.
When my mother was strapped and putting all of her cash into her new business, Jack got her moved to the top of the list in a brand-new federally funded Tribeca housing development, where she could pay about $400 in rent instead of the whopping nearly $800 she was paying on the Upper East Side. (Yeah, it was the 70s.)
Jack got Mom’s housekeeper an apartment in the same complex. Both single mothers who worked their asses off, they certainly deserved a break. But I don’t remember a single qualm about using Jack’s political pull to jump the line.
New York Rules, babe. My mother knew Roy Cohn, too, but that’s another story. As I grew older, I noticed that my mother never believed that doing things the straightforward way would actually work. It was all connections and if you had to hide something, maybe bend the truth, c’est la guerre, as she used to say.
Three-card monte
Around this time, guys were running a game called three-card monte on sidewalks all over the city. It’s a scam and too complicated for me to go into, a sleight of hand where one card is substituted for another. Shills in the crowd pretend to be passersby, there’s a lookout for police. The marks never, ever win.
What Trump did with Mamdani on Friday was pure three-card monte. Things are not going well for the president. As we all know, Democrats swept the Nov. 4 election, winning governships in two key swing states, not to mention the Commie Jihadist himself. Inflation is up. The economic effects, generally, of Trump’s bullying of trade partners and allies, are starting to be felt.
Even the vaunted Mideast peace is looking more like a ceasefire than anything lasting. Hamas is running the show in Gaza, the Netanyahu government is not on board. Credit where due, Trump’s hard talk and the real estate duo of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff did pull off a win by getting Hamas to release the remaining living hostages. There’s that. I guess.
But Trump has a kind of genius for playing to a crowd, as his one-time communications director and campaign finance guy Anthony Scaramucci has repeatedly said. He’s got an instinct.
It was time for the card trick.
On Tuesday, Trump had not acquitted himself well in a press conference with Saudi Arabian ruler Mohammed bin Salman, jauntily referred to as MBS. Remember, the CIA, during the first Trump administration, found that MBS had either approved or ordered the hacking to death of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Khashoggi’s commentary was critical and widely read enough to pose a threat to the young prince’s still-new grasp of power. Not long afterward, MBS held his rivals captive, including members of the royal family, at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, and was credibly accused of torturing them there, as reported by NBC and The New York Times.
The detainees were deprived of sleep, beaten and interrogated with their heads covered. Seventeen were hospitalized, according to the New York Times.
One detainee, a Saudi military officer, Maj. Gen. Ali al-Qahtani, died in custody.
That was then. Political realists recognize that Saudi Arabia is a critical partner for the U.S. In the “people are complicated” department, Mohammed bin Salman is modernizing and transforming the country. Talking to Gavin Newsom on the governor’s podcast recently, foreign policy and economic analyst Ian Bremmer noted that MBS is modernizing and diversifying the Saudi economy. Thirty-six percent of women are now in the workforce. 11 percent ten years ago. “It’s like a reverse Iranian revolution,” Bremmer said.
Saudi would be on anyone’s list of forward-looking countries to develop a relationship with, Bremmer said. But many have criticized Trump for feting MBS, a change from previous administrations who dealt with the Saudis but did not treat them like allies.
When ABC reporter Mary Bruce questioned Trump about his family’s business dealings with Saudi Arabia and, turning to the prince, told him that that there was resistance to him appearing in the Oval Office, Trump should have dodged. Instead he recited a refrain we’ve learned to recognize whenever he himself is criticized, first insulting the reporter and calling NBC fake news, and then acting as if he was entertaining at Mar-a-Lago rather than conducting a White House press conference.
He described Khashoggi as “extremely controversial” and said “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman.
“Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” Trump said. “But (Prince Mohammed) knew nothing about it. And we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”
The most striking thing was the Mohammed bin Salman jumped in, answering like, well, a head of state. Without directly acknowledging responsibility for Khashoggi’s death, he said “It’s been painful for us in Saudi Arabia. We’ve done all the right steps and (done an investigation) we are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again.”
Not bad for a despot. A real one. For what it’s worth, bin Salman studied law, and he’s obviously survived, however brutally, in the snakepit of Saudi royal family politics. Trump’s relationship with MBS goes back to his first administration. Maryland congressmen Eugene Vindman, who blew the whistle on the phone call urging Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on Biden in exchange for weapons that got Trump impeached once, along with Rep. Jamie Raskin, say they have heard a phone call between Trump and MBS after Khashoggi’s murder that was even worse than the Ukrainian pay-to-play.
Ian Bremmer described Trump’s response on the reporter’s question on Khashoggi’s murder this way: “It’s almost as if he takes pleasure in undermining the values that America has at least tried to stand for, for much of its recent history.”
At least.
I couldn’t find a copy of it, but one of the funnier memes that emerged from the next day’s meeting with Mamdani, was the one that showed an addled-looking Trump gazing at Mamdani, saying “Eric, you’ve gotten so much smarter.”
In fact, both meetings had a father-son air about them. It was a quaint irony that both Trump and Mamdani are from Queens, Mamdani by adoption after growing up on the Upper West Side, and Trump, a serious bridge and tunnel guy. They both talk New York. But the Mamdani lovefest was really about politics: part-genuine, part-maneuvering, as the best grandstanding always is. For Mamdani, dealing with Trump was a necessity to make sure that his administration wasn’t strangled in the cradle.
For Trump, it was a continuation of his post-Nov. 4 posture. It started with his response to the Democrats making health care the rallying cry of the government shutdown. Now Trump, Man of the People, is going to cut out those greedy insurance companies! He’ll hand out cash to Americans so they can - what? - pay the same exorbitant insurance premiums? Whatever. Think Evita, handing out toys and clothing to desperate moms in Argentina as her husband looted the treasury and threw their husbands and sons out of helicopters.
Now Trump, playing by New York rules, rakes off more than $3 billion in what are essentially bribes from crypto alone, according to no less than the Wall Street Journal. Back to MBS, the Trumps have has profited mightily from Saudi investments. The most widely reported was a $2 billion stake from the Saudi Public Investment Fund headed by MBS in Jared Kushner’s newly hatched investment firm. The Trump Organization has received $20 million in licensing fees from a development corporation linked to the Saudi royal family, with more projects in the pipeline. It’s been a good investment for the Saudi prince. The net result of this week’s meeting was the Saudis getting a pledge for F-35 fighter jets, which would change the Mideast balance of power, military and economic privileges accorded to the country by the new non-NATO ally status granted by Trump, and a crucial technology transfer to help build the country’s AI profile, with no assurances that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t share the technology with China.
The U.S. got, well, payoffs.
New York Rules
Steve Witkoff, the real estate developer who is the point man for Trump’s foreign policy, along with Kushner, is also suspected of mixing the personal with the political, engaging in private tête-à-têtes not only with Vladimir Putin but also with Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s top economic negotiator and, as the Kyiv Independent put it in a Nov. 22 article, “an operator in Moscow’s efforts to influence Washington.”
Witkoff, as reported earlier by the Journal, has significant financial ties to Leonard Blavatnik, the richest, and arguably, the most urbane of the Russian businessmen who became billionaires in the so-called “aluminum wars,” of the 1990s, a resource grab that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. While Blavatnik denies that he has ongoing contact with Putin, he is regarded as a prime purveyor of Russia’s soft power, making massive contributions to universities, think tanks, and cultural institutions. A few years ago, he became involved in multi-billion real estate deals with Witkoff. Real estate had not been Blavatnik’s business, but it seems likely that the relatively obscure real estate developer caught the oligarch’s attention because of Witkoff’s long friendship with Trump.
Whatever his motives, according to the Independent, Witkoff has successfully sidelined the foreign policy professionals that remained in the Trump White House. Most prominent among them is Keith Kellogg, the career diplomat and special envoy to Ukraine, who announced recently that he will be leaving his post.
So far, the result of Witkoff’s private meetings was a proposal that has been criticized as a Russian template - one that includes ceding territory that Russia does not currently control, giving up the hope of NATO membership, slashing the Ukrainian military, and dividing Ukraine into Russian and Ukrainian-controlled territory with a high-security, 21st century Berlin Wall.
“Witkoff has spent the past month quietly shaping the framework, working directly with Dmitriev, a source familiar with the matter said,” according to the Independent.
“Multiple sources noted that European allies were excluded from drafting the plan — and Ukraine was cut out as well.”
Yet Donald Trump seems to have had enough of the war on Ukraine. He issued an ultimatum today, saying that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “can agree to peace plan or ‘fight his little heart out’” without U.S. weaponry.
In a bizarre twist, there were dueling narratives about the proposal late tonight, about whether it is merely a Russian wishlist or a draft being promulgated by the U.S., as insane as that sounds.
Perhaps the administration’s incompetence will save us all.
Whether it happens today or tomorrow or a month from now, Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff are selling out Ukraine, as everyone knew they would. Yet as European Union nations reeled in shock, trying to come up with a way to save the global order in the face of this backroom deal between sleazy real estate developers and a mass-murdering dictator, all eyes were on Trump’s grip and grin with cheerful Zohran Mamdani. Nobody can blame Mamdani, who stood his ground on the “he’s a fascist” thing when questioned by a reporter - with help from the president himself, full of humor and bonhomie, who interrupted, telling the mayor-elect: “You can just say yes. It’s easier than explaining.”
Mamdani was just doing his job, and his job is to make New York a better place to live. The 34-year-old political rising star is playing a long game, and he has the time to do it. Trump, on the other hand, is cashing in while he can.
It seems so long ago, but Trump made it to the White House (not to mention the commercial Valhalla of mail-order steaks and fake universities) propelled by the working-class people he cons, panders to, and, as his own words reveal, despises. Under pressure from economic hits and cratering polls, he’s smart enough to go back to the well.
I have long believed that Trump is the apotheosis of New York, a place I view with mild nostalgia, but mostly horror and contempt at the city’s longstanding culture of ruthless venality.
Trump knew exactly game he was playing with his avuncular embrace of New York’s Democratic Socialist mayor. My mother would have recognized it in a heartbeat.
Three-card monte. All the way.
Good catch. He scams first, doesn't even take questions later me
Bravo Susan. I often marveled at the rubes in the three card game when I lived in NYC. Now I suppose they are all Trump voters.