Game recognise game

A little over three weeks ago I interviewed a guy named Ron Barba in Central Park.

I’d spotted Ron at a Zohran Mamdani rally the week before, wearing a bright red shirt reading ‘MAGA for Mamdani’ and a black cap saying the same.

When I posted a clip of our interview on Instagram, it drew over 2000 comments. From the sample I read, I’d say about 99.5% were confused. 

“The mythical centrist.” 

“There really is a guy for everything.” 

“Political compass glitch.” 

People couldn’t get their head around it. But after the Trump-Mamdani tete-a-tete in the White House this weekend (Australian time), they changed their tune. 

“Aged like fine wine.” 

“Omg he was right.”

“Everyone in the comments saying he’s confused must be really confused after today’s meeting lmao.”

Like the people in the comments, it’s worth going back to Ron’s interview now, because he was onto something.

“It's the ultimate clash, it's the ultimate battle these two,” Ron told me on camera. “It's the two great powers of different ideologies, getting together and making this country great again, making New York City great again.”

“I think that Mamdani’s going to reach out - he has a way of reaching out to people in the right way, and I think Trump is going to lend a hand.”

The reason I’d wanted to speak to Ron in the first place is because Mamdani’s speech at that rally in Queens, and indeed the tone of the whole event, had suggested he was willing and able to speak to the communities that liberal Democrats had either dismissed, given up on or been unable to reach for decades - the kinds of people that everyone suddenly wanted to speak to after they powered Trump to an impossible victory in 2016.

I was interested to see whether a socialist movement that could have contested the same ground as Trump and won in 2016, if the Democratic establishment hadn’t beaten Bernie first, was still willing to speak the language of left-populism and move people who see something in fascism that speaks to them more than the dead centre of liberal democracy.

A professional performer, Ron knew his part and reassured me over the phone before we met that of course he’d be wearing one of the shirts for our on-camera interview. After the interview, he sold me one for five bucks. It’s so cheap it’s see-through, and I can’t say I’ve been game enough to wear it out in Perth (the same goes for my Aussie Trump shirt, and the Clive Palmer one before that.) What can I say, I’m a sucker for novelty populism - turns out I’m not the only one.

The love-in at the Oval Office shocked a lot of people, but it’s no surprise to Ron.

“These are two very talented guys who I hope to get together after the election,” he told me days before Mamdani won.

“I think that they're very similar and they're magnetic with media, both of them.”

Mamdani came to fame thanks to short-form video, and the one widely credited with getting most people’s attention first was when he spoke to Trump voters a few days after the 2024 election. 

“They told us they supported Donald Trump because they felt disconnected from a Democratic party that had grown comfortable with mediocrity and gave its time only to those who gave millions,” he said at that rally in Queens.

Mamdani found common ground, and campaigned relentlessly and near faultlessly on the same economic terrain that Trump farmed so fruitfully in the old days.

There’s a lot of ways in which the two of them are similar. They’re both performers. On election night, Mamdani addressed Trump directly, live on TV, and he basically blew the roof off with the strongest speech I’ve seen him give.

It was a virtuoso demonstration of about the only two things Trump respects - power, and the power to pull a crowd.

Sitting at the Resolute Desk this weekend, with Mamdani standing beside him as so many tech oligarchs and Australian mining magnates have done before, Trump was basically cooing. It was the happiest he’s seemed in weeks of Epstein revelations.

At a basic level, of course, it’s just very funny - the idea that Trump loves Zohran is almost inevitable. The guy radiates charisma - take it from someone who’s stood two metres from him as he voted and had a softball question completely ignored at a press conference afterwards.

“The press has eaten this thing up,” Trump gushed to the crush of cameras inside the Oval Office. “I’ve had a lot of meetings with the heads of major countries, nobody cared. This meeting — you people have gone crazy.”

Trump was obviously dazzled by the star power. The president is losing supporters on his own side. Maybe he’s instinctively tying his popularity to the hottest guy in politics. And although some Republicans expressed alarm at the praise the President lavished on Zohran, it’s Mamdani who has to be more careful not to lose his supporters by being too effusive. As the response to my interview with Ron showed, most of them can’t get their heads around the two of them together.

Trump vs Mamdani was blown up as the title fight over recent months, but it’s actually the civil war inside the Democratic Party that is the much more interesting main event.

Andrew Cuomo articulated it pretty clearly to me on election day two weeks ago (he had all the time in the world). 

“You have an extreme radical left, that is run by the socialists, that is challenging what they would call moderate Democrats. That contest is what you're seeing here, but you're seeing it all across the country.”

Whether the Democrats learn from what happened later that day, when the former Democrat governor got blown out of the water by the Democratic Socialist, is the real story of the next few years.

How do the Democrats who ran a mile from Mamdani feel now? It turns out the ultimate deal-maker isn’t Chuck Schumer, who had his arse handed to him by Trump yet again to end the federal government shutdown, but the first term 34-year-old mayor-elect.

Do the DSA risk losing political capital by hewing too close to their political Satan? Possibly - but for people like Ron, who voted for Trump twice before backing Zohran, ideological distinctions are just more grist for the mill.

“Mamdani is just so naturally talented as a candidate and the way he speaks and - and and and - his spirit. Zohran is a socialist, but to me those differences - Trump used to be a Democrat,” he reflected. Force of personality clearly trumps ideology every time.

“By the way, being the mayor of New York City is a big deal,” the president of the United States said on Saturday. “I always said, you know, one of the things I would have loved to be some day is the mayor of New York City.”

This piece was co-published with Crikey.