Let me start with something simple. I called this. Not in some vague, wishy-washy, “well anything could happen” kind of way. I called this specifically, and clearly, and the people who told me I was being too cynical, too harsh, too uncharitable toward a promising young progressive politician can now sit with what happened on February 26th, 2026, when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani walked into a meeting with Donald Trump, behind closed doors, unannounced, to discuss housing. We are not even two months into this man’s tenure as mayor of the greatest city in the world, and already, already, he is showing every single sign of being exactly what I said he was from the beginning. A fraud. A liar. A con artist who cares far more about his own political career than he does about the people of New York City who actually believed in him, who actually went out and voted for him, who actually thought this time was going to be different.
It is not different. It is never different. And the sooner people understand that, the better off we will all be.
Let us talk about what actually happened here, because the framing matters enormously. This was not a scheduled, publicly announced diplomatic meeting between the mayor of New York City and the President of the United States. This was not something his constituents were told about in advance. This was not something that came with a press briefing ahead of time, a clear agenda released to the public, a statement of purpose that New Yorkers could evaluate and debate. No. This was an unannounced visit. Behind closed doors. Which means that whatever was discussed in that room, whatever was negotiated, whatever was offered and whatever was conceded, the public was not supposed to know about it until after the fact, if at all. And anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to how Donald Trump operates, to how his administration functions, to how every single deal he has ever made in his entire life has played out, knows exactly what an unannounced, behind-closed-doors meeting means. It means something was worked out. It means something was given up. It means that the person walking into that room who is not Donald Trump walked out having surrendered something, and we just do not know yet what that something is.
That is the thing about Trump. He is not subtle about this. He has never been subtle about this. He does not do favors. He does not engage in good-faith negotiations. He does not sit across from someone and genuinely try to find a mutually beneficial solution to a shared problem. He extracts. He leverages. He takes. And every politician, every business leader, every foreign dignitary who has sat down with him thinking they were going to outmaneuver him, thinking they had a plan, thinking they understood the terrain better than he did, has walked out of that room having given up more than they got. Every single time. Without exception. So what, exactly, did Zohran Mamdani give up? What does the secret deal look like? Does ICE get to maintain a presence in New York City, just at slightly reduced levels, whatever that vague and meaningless phrase is supposed to signify? Does New York keep most of its federal funding, but loses a chunk of it, and we are supposed to be grateful for that? Does the city agree to look the other way on certain enforcement priorities in exchange for some promise of housing dollars that may or may not ever actually materialize? We do not know. And that is the point. We are not supposed to know. We are just supposed to trust Zohran, and smile, and clap, and say wow, he is really out there working hard for us.
No. Absolutely not. I am not doing that.
And neither should you, except that a disturbingly large number of people are doing exactly that, which brings me to the thing that is almost more infuriating than the meeting itself. The stans. The Zohran stans who have descended upon every comment section, every reply thread, every conversation about this meeting with the same tired, recycled, intellectually embarrassing defense: he is playing four-dimensional chess with Trump. He is outmaneuvering him. He has a plan. You just do not understand the strategy. Trust the process. This is political jiu-jitsu and you are too simple to see it.
I need you to hear me when I say this: no. No, he is not. No, this is not four-dimensional chess. No, there is no secret genius strategy unfolding behind the scenes that we will all eventually understand and appreciate. That argument, that specific rhetorical move of claiming that a politician’s obvious capitulation is actually brilliant strategic maneuvering that only the truly enlightened can perceive, is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It is the thing people say when they have invested so much emotional energy into a political figure that they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the evidence in front of their own faces. It is cope. Pure, simple, unadorned cope. And it is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps bad politicians in power and good movements stagnant, because as long as you are busy convincing yourself that your guy is playing chess, you are not holding him accountable, you are not pressuring him, you are not doing the actual work of keeping a politician honest.
Let us talk about the four-dimensional chess argument, because I have been seeing it everywhere since this meeting became public, and I need to address it directly and completely, because it is one of the most intellectually dishonest, emotionally driven, politically useless arguments I have ever seen deployed in defense of a politician, and the fact that it is being deployed by people who call themselves progressives makes it roughly ten times more infuriating than it would otherwise be.
The argument, for those who have somehow avoided it, goes like this: Zohran Mamdani did not capitulate to Trump. He did not make a backroom deal that compromised the people of New York City. He did not prioritize his own career over his stated values. No, no, no. What he actually did was something far more sophisticated than your simple mind can comprehend. He is playing four-dimensional chess. He is making a calculated, strategic move that will pay off down the line in ways that are not yet visible to the naked eye. He is getting close to Trump in order to outmaneuver him. He is building a relationship in order to exploit it. He knows exactly what he is doing, and the fact that you cannot see it only proves how much smarter he is than you, and how much more faith you should have in him, and how you really just need to sit down and trust the process and wait and see how brilliantly this all unfolds.
Stop. Just stop. Stop right now.
This argument is cope. That is the clinical term for it. It is a psychological defense mechanism deployed by people who have invested so much of their identity into a political figure that they have lost the ability to evaluate that figure’s actions objectively. It is what happens when politics stops being about policy and accountability and starts being about fandom, about tribal loyalty, about the desperate need to believe that your guy is the good guy no matter what your guy actually does. And I want to be very clear about something: this is not a compliment to Zohran Mamdani’s supporters. This is not me saying they are passionate or dedicated or committed. This is me saying they have abandoned critical thinking in service of a politician who is not worth that sacrifice, and that abandonment is actively harmful to the political project they claim to care about.
Here is the thing that really gets me. The same people making this four-dimensional chess argument are the same people who would never, not in a million years, extend the same charitable interpretation to a centrist Democrat. Think about that for a second. Seriously think about it. If Eric Adams had taken an unannounced secret trip to Washington to meet with Trump behind closed doors less than two months into his term, these exact same people would have been absolutely merciless. They would have torched him. They would have called him a sellout, a collaborator, a Trump enabler, a fraud. They would have organized rallies. They would have demanded his resignation. They would have produced seventeen-thread Twitter essays about how this proved everything they always said about corporate Democrats and their willingness to kneel before power. And they would have been right to do all of that. That response would have been correct.
But because it is Zohran, because he has the right aesthetic, the right rhetoric, the right demographic profile, the right endorsements from the right progressive organizations, suddenly the exact same behavior gets reinterpreted as genius strategy. Suddenly the secret backroom deal with the fascist is actually a chess move. Suddenly the capitulation is actually infiltration. The logic is not just inconsistent, it is embarrassing, and it reveals something deeply uncomfortable about how a significant portion of the progressive left actually operates, which is to say that their stated commitment to accountability and principle is entirely conditional on whether or not the person being held accountable is someone they like.
And let us extend this further, because it gets worse. Would these same defenders say this about a Republican? If a Republican mayor of a major city made an unannounced trip to meet secretly with a Democratic president, if the meeting was behind closed doors, if no agenda was published in advance, if the details of what was discussed were not released to the public, would the response from these Zohran defenders be, well, maybe he is playing four-dimensional chess? Would they say, give him time, trust the process, you just do not understand the strategy? Absolutely not. They would call it what it is. They would say this politician is making deals that benefit himself at the expense of his constituents, and he is hiding it from the public because he knows it cannot withstand scrutiny. They would be correct. And they would apply that same standard consistently, without hesitation, because when the politician in question is someone they already distrust, the critical faculties function just fine.
It is only when the politician is someone they have decided to believe in that the critical faculties shut off and the cope machine kicks into overdrive.
This is the rot at the center of a certain kind of progressive politics, and it has been there for a long time, and Mamdani is just the latest and most vivid example of it. The rot is this: the movement has, in too many corners, stopped being about building power for working people and started being about identifying and worshipping the right kind of political celebrity. It has stopped being about holding the powerful accountable regardless of their branding and started being about protecting your preferred powerful person from accountability by constructing increasingly elaborate justifications for whatever they do. And when you point this out, when you say hey, your guy just did the exact thing you said you were against, the response is not reflection or honest engagement. The response is that you do not understand, that you are being naive, that you are playing into the hands of the right by criticizing the left, that you should direct your energy elsewhere, that you are helping Trump by holding Mamdani accountable.
No. Holding Mamdani accountable is not helping Trump. Holding Mamdani accountable is the job. It is the whole job. It is what political engagement is supposed to look like. The moment you decide that your preferred politician is beyond accountability, the moment you start constructing four-dimensional chess theories to explain away behavior that would be disqualifying in anyone else, you have stopped being a political actor and started being a fan. And fans are useless. Fans do not build movements. Fans do not create lasting political change. Fans enable mediocre and dishonest politicians to coast on borrowed credibility while doing whatever they want, because they know their base will rationalize it for them.
And the cringe of it, the sheer, profound cringe of watching adults, grown people who present themselves as politically sophisticated, as progressive thinkers, as people who understand power, watching them line up to explain why the secret Trump meeting is actually brilliant, is something I genuinely cannot get past. It is cringe in the most complete and total sense of the word. It is embarrassing to witness. Because these are the same people who spent years, correctly, talking about how Democratic establishment figures were too deferential to power, too willing to make backroom deals, too compromised by their own ambition to truly represent their constituents. They were right about all of that. And now they are doing the exact same thing they criticized, just with better branding on the politician they are defending.
The four-dimensional chess argument also fails on its own terms, by the way, which is worth pointing out even though it should not need to be said. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Mamdani did go to Washington with some brilliant strategic plan. Let us say he had a seventeen-step play mapped out that was going to result in some enormous win for New York City. Even if that were true, which it is not, but even if it were, the execution of that plan required a secret, unannounced meeting with no public accountability and no transparency about what was actually discussed. Which means that even in the most charitable possible interpretation of events, Mamdani decided that the right move was to hide his strategy from the people who elected him. He decided that New Yorkers did not deserve to know what their mayor was doing on their behalf. He decided that the ends justified the means, and that the means included deceiving the public about the nature of his relationship with the Trump administration. That is not chess. That is not strategy. That is a politician deciding that he knows better than his constituents and that they do not need to be involved in decisions that directly affect their lives. That is the opposite of what he said he stood for.
So no. No more four-dimensional chess. No more trust the process. No more he has a plan and you just cannot see it. What we can see is what happened. What we can see is a mayor who was in office for less than two months before making a secret deal with a fascist president. What we can see is a group of supporters who are more committed to defending that mayor than to holding him accountable. What we can see is a movement that is consuming itself with loyalty to a person instead of loyalty to principles. And what we can see, clearly and without any ambiguity whatsoever, is exactly what I said we would see. I called it. The chess players can keep playing. I will be over here in reality, where politicians are judged by what they do and not by what their fans imagine they might secretly be planning.
Donald Trump is not someone you play chess with. Donald Trump is not someone who gets outmaneuvered by a first-term mayor who has been in office for less than sixty days. Donald Trump has been running this particular game his entire adult life. He is a predator in a specific kind of political ecosystem, and he is extraordinarily good at identifying and exploiting the ambitions of people who think they are smarter than him. And Zohran Mamdani, whatever you may think of his politics or his rhetoric or his vision statements, is a deeply ambitious man. He did not run for mayor of New York City because he wanted to spend the rest of his life managing garbage collection contracts and negotiating with the city council. He ran for mayor because he sees it as a stepping stone, as a platform, as a launching pad. And Trump, who understands ambition the way a shark understands blood in the water, sees that too. And Trump is using it. And Mamdani is letting him, because what Mamdani gets out of this deal, whatever the deal actually is, is the thing he wants most: the appearance of being a player, of being someone who can get things done, of being a serious political operator who knows how to work across the aisle and get results. Even if the results are garbage. Even if the results actively harm the people he claimed to represent.
Here is what I want people to really sit with. Donald Trump is a fascist. I do not use that word loosely or hyperbolically. I use it because it is the accurate and correct description of what he is and what his administration represents. He has systematically dismantled democratic norms, weaponized federal agencies against political opponents, used immigration enforcement as a tool of terror against vulnerable communities, and made it abundantly clear that his governing philosophy centers entirely on the consolidation of his own power and the punishment of anyone who stands in his way. Look at what ICE is doing right now. Look at what is happening in communities across this city, across this country, where families are being torn apart, where people are afraid to leave their homes, where the basic dignity of human beings is being ground up in the machinery of authoritarian enforcement. Does anyone, anyone with eyes and a brain and a conscience, genuinely believe that Donald Trump sat down with Zohran Mamdani because he cares about housing affordability in New York City? Does anyone believe that this administration, which has been openly hostile to everything New York City represents, suddenly wants to be a constructive partner in solving one of the most complex urban policy challenges in American history? Come on. Come on.
Trump does not care about housing. Trump cares about Trump. Full stop. And any meeting framed around housing is not actually about housing. It is about something else. It is about leverage, and positioning, and what each party can extract from the other. And when one of those parties is the President of the United States with the full machinery of federal government behind him, and the other is a brand-new mayor who has not even figured out his own transition team yet, the leverage is not equal. It has never been equal. It will never be equal. And anyone who pretends otherwise is either lying to you or lying to themselves.
I said from the beginning that Mamdani was not who his supporters claimed he was. I said that the progressive packaging was just that, packaging, and that underneath it was a politician who would do what politicians do, which is to say he would prioritize his own advancement over his stated principles the moment those two things came into conflict. And people pushed back on me. Hard. They said I was being cynical. They said I was not giving him a chance. They said I needed to wait and see, that he had not even taken office yet, that it was unfair to judge someone before they had the opportunity to govern. Fine. I waited. I gave it less than two months, because that is all it took. Less than two months for Zohran Mamdani to walk into a secret meeting with an authoritarian president, behind closed doors, unannounced, for reasons that have not been fully explained to the public that elected him. Less than two months. That is how long the mask stayed on.
And here is the thing I really cannot get past. He had no reason to go. That is the part that people keep glossing over, but it is the most important part of this entire story. There was no compelling reason for the mayor of New York City to travel to Washington, unannounced, for a private meeting with Donald Trump. There was no crisis that required it. There was no emergency that demanded it. Housing policy is not something that gets resolved in a single secret meeting between two politicians, and anyone who has spent five minutes studying urban policy knows that. So why did he go? There is only one answer that makes sense. He went because he wants something from Trump. Not for the city. For himself. He wants to be in Trump’s good graces. He wants to be seen as someone Trump will deal with, someone Trump respects, someone Trump acknowledges as a legitimate political force. Because in the current landscape of American politics, having Trump’s grudging acknowledgment is a form of currency, and Mamdani is investing in it. He is building his brand on the back of a secret deal with a fascist, and he is hoping that his supporters are so thoroughly convinced of his genius that they will rationalize it for him. And based on what I am seeing from the stan accounts, a lot of them are doing exactly that.
But I am not. And I think more people need to start being honest about what they are watching here. This is not complicated. This is not nuanced. This is not some multi-layered strategic masterstroke that requires special knowledge to decode. A politician who ran on a platform of standing up to Trump, of protecting immigrants, of fighting for working-class New Yorkers, took a secret trip to Washington less than two months into his term to make a deal with the man he claimed to oppose. That is betrayal. That is the thing. That is the whole thing. No amount of four-dimensional chess rhetoric changes what it is. No amount of “wait and see” patience changes what it is. No amount of “you just do not understand the strategy” condescension changes what it is.
Mamdani is a liar. He lied to the people who voted for him. He lied about who he is and what he stands for. He went to Washington not because New York needed him to, but because he needed to. Because his career needed him to. Because the version of Zohran Mamdani that exists in his own head, the version that is destined for bigger things, for national relevance, for a seat at the table with the most powerful figures in American politics, required this meeting. Required this deal. Required this surrender. And he made it. And now we are sitting here watching his supporters tie themselves in knots trying to explain why it was actually a genius move, and I am watching all of it, and I am saying, clearly, loudly, without apology: I told you so. I told you exactly who this man was. I told you that the progressive branding was a performance. I told you that the moment his own ambition and his stated values came into conflict, his own ambition would win. And it did. In less than two months. I told you so.
There is a scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the original, the 2009 one, not the garbage reboot, where Captain Price and Soap MacTavish are reeling from General Shepherd’s betrayal of Task Force 141. Shepherd, the man who was supposed to be on their side, who commanded them, who they bled for and fought for and trusted with their lives, turned around and murdered Ghost and Roach in cold blood, lit their bodies on fire with a cigar, and revealed himself to be the villain of the entire story. And Soap, processing the shock and the rage and the grief of it, is grappling with the feeling that so many people grapple with when someone they believed in shows their true face. The feeling of having been fooled. The feeling of having extended trust to someone who weaponized that trust against you. And Price, being Price, cuts right through it with one of the most quietly devastating lines in the history of video game writing. “To be betrayed, you have to trust someone. And I never did.”
I think about that line a lot right now. I think about it specifically in the context of Zohran Mamdani and the people who are devastated by what he did, who are processing his secret Trump meeting as a betrayal, who are asking how he could do this, who believed in him and feel the specific kind of pain that comes from believing in someone and watching them reveal themselves to be exactly what the cynics always said they were. I hear those people. I understand that feeling. And I also have to be honest with them the same way Price was honest with Soap, which is to say: to be betrayed, you have to trust someone. And I never did.
I never trusted Zohran Mamdani. Not for a single second. And I want to be very clear about what I mean by that, because there is a difference between not trusting someone and being against everything they claim to represent. I believe in affordable housing. I believe in protecting immigrant communities. I believe in holding the line against authoritarian encroachment on the rights of working-class people in this city. I believe in all of those things deeply and without reservation. What I never believed was that Zohran Mamdani was genuinely committed to any of them in a way that would survive contact with his own ambition. What I never believed was that the packaging matched the product. What I never believed was that a politician who rose as fast as he did, who accumulated the kind of institutional support he accumulated, who ran the kind of campaign he ran, was going to walk into the mayor’s office and suddenly become the selfless, principled, power-to-the-people champion his supporters imagined him to be. I never believed that. And because I never believed it, I am not sitting here feeling betrayed. I am sitting here feeling something much simpler and much less painful, which is confirmed.
But I understand why other people feel betrayed, and I want to sit with that for a moment, because their pain is real and it matters, even if the source of it is a politician who never deserved the trust they extended to him. There are people in this city, real people, who voted for Mamdani not because he was their favorite celebrity politician or because he had the right aesthetic or because supporting him made them feel like they were part of something cool and progressive and important. They voted for him because they are terrified. Because they have family members who are undocumented and are afraid every single day that ICE is going to show up at their door. Because they are paying sixty, seventy, eighty percent of their income on rent and do not know how much longer they can hold on. Because they looked at this city and this country and the direction everything is moving and they thought, for once, that someone was actually on their side. Those people trusted him. And what he did in that room in Washington, in that secret meeting with the man whose administration is terrorizing their communities, is something they have every right to feel devastated about. Their betrayal is real. Their pain is legitimate. And the fact that some of us saw it coming does not diminish what they are going through.
What I want those people to take from Price’s line, though, is not cynicism. I do not want them to walk away from this thinking that trust itself is the mistake, that believing in things is foolish, that the correct response to being let down by Mamdani is to stop caring about politics and stop fighting for the things they believe in. That would be the worst possible outcome, and it would be exactly what every powerful person in this city and this country would want from them. The lesson is not that trust is bad. The lesson is that trust has to be earned, and it has to be earned through demonstrated action over time, not through the right rhetoric delivered to the right crowd at the right moment. Shepherd had all the right rhetoric. He sounded like a leader. He looked like a hero. He talked about sacrifice and duty and protecting the men under his command. And the moment it stopped serving his interests, he lit Ghost and Roach on fire and walked away. Mamdani had all the right rhetoric. He talked about housing justice and immigrant dignity and fighting Trump and standing up for working-class New York. And less than two months into his term, he walked into a secret room with Trump and made a deal that nobody is allowed to know the details of.
The structure of the betrayal is identical. The only difference is the scale and the stakes, and in Mamdani’s case the stakes are the lives and safety of millions of real people in a real city, which means the betrayal is actually worse. Shepherd was a fictional general in a video game. Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and the people he is dealing away pieces of in his backroom negotiations are not pixels on a screen. They are human beings. They are the immigrant families in Jackson Heights and the Bronx and Sunset Park who are already living in fear, who need their mayor to be a wall between them and the administration that wants to deport them, not a dealmaker who is cozying up to that administration in exchange for political advancement. They are the renters in Brooklyn and Queens and upper Manhattan who needed someone to actually fight for them, not someone to perform fighting for them while quietly cutting arrangements with the most powerful landlord-friendly administration in modern American history.
Price never trusted Shepherd because Price understood something fundamental about power and the people who seek it. He understood that the ones who talk the loudest about sacrifice are often the ones least willing to actually sacrifice anything. He understood that loyalty is demonstrated through action in hard moments, not through speeches in easy ones. He understood that the test of a person’s character is not who they claim to be when everything is going well, but who they reveal themselves to be when their interests and their stated values come into conflict. Shepherd failed that test catastrophically. Mamdani failed that test in less than sixty days. And the people who trusted him, who extended faith to him, who believed that this time was different, deserved a leader who would pass that test. They deserved a Price, not a Shepherd. What they got, unfortunately, was exactly what the cynics among us always said they would get. And I take no pleasure in being right about that. I genuinely wish I had been wrong. But I was not wrong. I was not wrong about any of it. And when the full shape of this deal becomes clear, when we eventually find out what exactly was surrendered in that room in Washington, the people who feel betrayed now are going to feel it even more deeply. And I will be here, like Price always was, having never trusted him in the first place, watching it all unfold exactly the way I said it would.
The saddest part of all of this is not Mamdani. Politicians lie. That is not new information. The saddest part is the people of New York City who believed him, who knocked on doors for him, who donated money they could not really afford to his campaign, who thought that this time, finally, they had found someone who was genuinely on their side. Those people deserved better. They deserved a mayor who would at minimum wait more than sixty days before running to cut secret deals with the man he promised to fight. They deserved honesty. They deserved someone who understood that you cannot oppose fascism from inside a backroom deal with the fascist. You cannot protect your city by giving away pieces of it in exchange for career advancement. You cannot claim to stand with immigrants while making unannounced visits to the administration that is terrorizing immigrant communities across the five boroughs. You cannot do both of those things. They are mutually exclusive. And Zohran Mamdani just showed us, definitively and beyond any reasonable doubt, which side of that equation he has chosen.
I called it. And I wish more than anything that I had been wrong.