President meets the New York mayor-elect he called a communist Marxist socialist; calls him a rational person.

The mayor-elect of the City of New York walked into the Oval Office on Friday afternoon to meet the President of the United States for the first time. The President spent the summer calling the mayor-elect “a communist Marxist socialist.” The President spent the autumn threatening to revoke the mayor-elect’s citizenship and to cut off federal funding to the City of New York. The President had said, in writing, on Truth Social, that the mayor-elect was a danger.

The meeting lasted about thirty-five minutes. The President came out of it telling reporters the mayor-elect was “a rational person,” “really wants to see New York be great again,” and that “the better he does, the happier I am.”

Hon. He called him communist Marxist socialist on Tuesday. That was three days ago. The mayor-elect did not switch parties between Tuesday and Friday. He didn’t get a haircut. He didn’t change his name. The only thing that changed was that the man with the bigger title got into the room and discovered the man with the smaller title was, in the President’s own words, “a great guy.”

A reporter asked the mayor-elect, on camera, in the Oval Office, whether he believed the President was a fascist. Before the mayor-elect could answer, the President interrupted, looked at the mayor-elect, smiled, and said: “that’s okay, you can just say yes.” Then he gave the mayor-elect a friendly tap on the arm. He played it as a joke. The footage went around. It is a strange clip even by the standards of this administration’s strange clips, because the President is acknowledging the question in a way most presidents would not, in front of the man being asked, and turning it into a piece of patter.

There is a tell here, and it is the same tell from August about the Maryland governor saying nice things about him. The man at the head of the table reads the room. When the room is friendly to him, he is friendly back. When the room is not friendly to him, he reaches for the social network. The mayor-elect was a friendly room because the mayor-elect represents fifteen electoral votes’ worth of population and three percent of the United States gross domestic product, and the President is a transactional man.

You ever notice how the people he calls communist are also the people he posts a smile next to once they have actual power.

That ought to concern you.