The cordial meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani wasn’t as strange as it looked; both reject the myth of a self-regulating market. The difference is that Trump uses the state to shore up wealth, Mamdani to expand rights and public provision.

“We agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” Donald Trump recently said after meeting with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Most commentators treated this as one more odd flourish in Trump’s never-ending performance or folded it into an easy story: two loud New Yorkers from Queens who love the city but who, beyond those biographical overlaps, still sit on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Take Trump’s comment seriously though, and a different picture emerges. On the basic questions of how the economy is organized, Trump is not all

See Full Page