https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/22/wlna-s22.htmlMamdani hosts Trump at Gracie Mansion: The DSAโs alliance with the fascist presidentOn Monday afternoon, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the most prominent elected member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), welcomed Donald Trump to Gracie Mansion, the mayorโs official residence. After an hour behind closed doors, the two walked out together to a podium on the lawn.
What followed was a disgusting spectacle, with the โsocialistโ mayor playing host and prop to the fascist president.
This was Mamdaniโs third meeting with Trump in 10 months, following two at the White House. The regularity of these meetings, combined with what Mamdani himself acknowledges is an ongoing conversation with Trump โin personโ and โover the phone,โ makes clear that one is dealing with a definite orientation and program. The DSA, in the person of its leading public official, has formed a political alliance with Trump.
The meeting took place under conditions of record low approval ratings for Trumpโ36 percent, according to the latest NBC News poll, the lowest of his second term. In few cities is Trump as hated as in New York, where he cannot attend public events without being booed. Mamdani responds not by denouncing Trump, let alone calling for opposition to him but by lending him legitimacy. In return, Trump throws him a few crumbs.
Mamdani is doing political dirty work for the ruling class. He is attempting to rebrand the fascist war criminal Trump, whose administration is dedicated to giving to the oligarchs what it takes from workers, as a champion of โaffordability.โ In the process, he is seeking to drag the word โsocialismโ through the mud.
The mayor opened by declaring that each time he and the president speak, โIt is about the same topics: how to improve the lives of New Yorkers, and how to use the power of government to take on the cost of living crisisโฆโ
What a ridiculous absurdity. The man standing beside him has launched a criminal war against Iran that has driven gasoline prices up 27 percent in a year. Trumpโs budget law has thrown tens of thousands of city residents off SNAP benefits. The same law strips Medicaid coverage from an estimated 1.5 million people in New York state, just one front in the broader assault on social programs by a government of, by and for the oligarchy.
Asked what โtangible resultsโ his relationship with Trump has produced, Mamdani could only point to an agreement to โset up a new level of that conversationโ between City Hall and the White House on building over Sunnyside Yard in Queens. He commended Trump as โsomeone who has built quite a lot of housing here in our city,โ a polite reference to the real estate swindling and criminal operations that Trump specialized in before turning to politics.
The project, like Mamdaniโs โaffordability agendaโ as a whole, is subordinated to the interests of private developers (an Economist headline last week reads, โDevelopers are learning to love Zohran Mamdaniโ). On this, the DSA mayor and the real estate conman speak the same language.
More significant, however, was what Mamdani did not say. Mamdaniโs last meeting with Trump, on February 26, took place two days before the United States launched its war on Iran. Mondayโs meeting came on the eve of Trumpโs address to the UN General Assembly, which will be an occasion for threatening war on the world. On Sunday he told Fox News that he is choosing between โwiping Iran out,โ letting it โrot economicallyโ and making a deal, and asked: โIf and when do I blow the entire nation up?โ
At the podium, Trump returned to the subject unprompted. Iran is โnot going to have a nuclear weapon,โ he said. โTheyโre doing very poorly. In fact, I have meetings on it today.โ That is, Trump announced from the mayorโs lawn that he was planning the next stage of the war. He continued with a screed denouncing the media as โfake newsโ for articles on Iran and declaring that โthe press also has an obligationโ not to criticize him because he โwon in a landslide.โ
Mamdani, standing a few feet away, dutifully kept his mouth shut.
Trump is also preparing this week to impose sanctions against the International Criminal Court, aimed at forcing it to drop its arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. This comes days after a UN fact-finding mission found โreasonable grounds to believeโ that the United States itself committed a war crime on the first day of the Iran war. Neither the ICC nor Netanyahu was mentioned on the lawn of Gracie Mansion.
Netanyahu himself speaks at the UN on Thursday, and mass protests are planned. As a mayoral candidate, Mamdani pledged to have him arrested. Last week he told reporters: โI do not have any plans to attend any protest at the UN General Assembly.โ He added, โTo New Yorkers, I have never encouraged them to protest.โ
What sniveling cowardice and subservience! Mamdani owes his election victory to the mass opposition to the Gaza genocide. He now assures the ruling class that he had nothing to do with it.
Mamdani made that statement flanked by his police commissioner, the billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch, and Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Weiner. Days earlier, at Mamdaniโs side, Weiner listed the โfar leftโ among the terrorist threats facing the city.
On immigration, Mamdani said he had โshared my very strong opinionsโ on the importance of immigrant New Yorkers, โespecially Haitian New Yorkers,โ and said he โappreciate[d] the conversationโ with Trump on these issues.
Mamdani knows something about Haitian New Yorkers. On August 7, after the Trump administration stripped Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from some 350,000 Haitians, he announced that Haitian city employees, who had lost their work authorization, would be fired. He called no protest and mounted no challenge, declaring that the city was โforced by federal lawโ to act. By the cityโs own audit, moreover, ICE arrests in the New York area are up 71 percent.
After the first meeting, Jacobin, the house organ of the DSA, hailed Mamdaniโs โshrewd political instincts.โ After the second, it pronounced his flattery of Trump a savvy strategy and explained that โgoverning entails cooperation and compromise, even with a noxious authoritarian president.โ
No doubt the apologists at Jacobin, well wadded with stupidity and deceit, will have ample explanations for this latest meeting. Such people know exactly what they are doing. Every pragmatic justification of collaboration with Trump is itself an act of collaboration.
This is not merely a question of Mamdaniโs personal qualities or those of his apologists. He is the personification of what the DSA is: a faction of the Democratic Party, speaking for privileged layers of the upper middle class, brought forward to give a facelift to a political order detested by masses of people. Its real enemy is the working class and the left.
And these people have not reached the end of their journey. As the war expands and the crisis of the Trump administration deepens, the DSA and the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party will move further to the right.
The direction of travel was on display last week at the โPro-Human Assemblyโ in Washington. There, Senator Bernie Sanders thanked the organizers for bringing together โdifferent political perspectives,โ then yielded the stage to the fascist ideologue and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who praised Sanders and then called for the expulsion of all Chinese nationals. The WSWS wrote that the outlines of a new American โnational socialismโ were visible at that event. Gracie Mansion is the same process, in the person of the DSAโs most prominent elected official.
Poll after poll records growing support for socialism. A CNBC survey last month found that 46 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 view democratic socialism favorably, twice the share that views it unfavorably. The workers and young people moving to the left will collide with the right-wing politics of the DSA.
The development of political consciousness, however, is not automatic. Those who voted for Mamdani in the belief that he represented an alternative must draw conclusions. This requires a serious study of what the DSA is and where it comes from, why its evolution could be foreseen, and the central questions of the 20th century, above all the history of the Trotskyist movement.
The immense opposition to war, to the ICE raids and to the oligarchy cannot find expression through the DSA or any section of the Democratic Party. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally, on the basis of a socialist program. This is the perspective fought for by the Socialist Equality Party.
What is the historical and political origin of the DSA, and how did it come to operate as a wing of the Democratic Party rather than a genuine socialist party?The DSA is not a socialist organization that drifted into the Democratic Party; it is a pro-capitalist organization whose entire historical lineage and founding purpose have been to prevent the political independence of the working class. Its anti-communism and its integration into the Democratic Party are one and the same thing.
The DSA's direct predecessor was the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which emerged from a split in the Socialist Party of America in 1972. But the lineage runs deeper and is defined by successive betrayals of Marxism.
The historical origins
The decisive figure in the DSOC's founding was Michael Harrington, who had entered the Socialist Party in the early 1960s as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman. Shachtman had split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940, bending to bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact by refusing to defend the Soviet Union. This was the first step in a steady degeneration: by 1950 the Shachtmanites were defending American imperialism in the Korean War, and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The DSA's anti-communism is thus not incidental โ it is the organization's founding political content.
By 1972 Shachtman had effectively captured the rump of the moribund Socialist Party. Harrington, criticizing his mentor "from the left," drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy โ the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers. From the outset, in the DSA's own words, DSOC's orientation was toward "building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the 'new politics' left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats."
The DSOC fused in 1982 with a remnant of the 1960s student-protest generation to form the DSA. As the WSWS has explained, this fusion was itself a reflection of that generation's shift to the right and abandonment of its radical pretenses โ which is precisely what made the DSOC's anti-communist foundations attractive to them. The DSA was, from birth, an organization of the upper-middle-class left, not the working class. Through its membership in the Socialist International, it has always been affiliated with organizations like the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and the German Social Democrats โ all of which have carried out savage attacks on workers and participated in neo-colonial wars while in government.
Why it functions as a Democratic Party wing
The DSA's subordination to the Democratic Party follows directly from its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state. The DSA does not believe the state is an instrument of class rule that must be smashed and replaced by organs of workers' power. It substitutes a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as "radical democracy" โ the "democratization" of existing institutions, joint union-management boards, worker co-ops, and the like. Its own strategy documents openly state that the class antagonism of a "democratic socialist society" would not disappear โ that such a society would merely "arbitrate and mediate" conflict, rather than abolish exploitation.
This theoretical capitulation has a directly practical expression. The DSA's electoral strategy, as stated in its own documents, is to support candidates "usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections." In other words, the DSA's stated program is to operate as a faction of the Democratic Party.
This is not a recent deviation but the organization's half-century commitment. As the WSWS documented at the DSA's 2023 convention, delegates gathered to re-state that commitment to promoting the imperialist Democratic Party. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 in all but name; it endorsed Keith Ellison for DNC chair; its "socialist" candidates โ above all Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez โ have functioned as a "left" cover for the Democratic Party's sharp shift to the right on both domestic and foreign policy. When the war drive against Russia escalated, DSA-backed candidates lined up behind it and denounced the DSA from the right.
The fundamental point is this: the DSA's role is not to move the Democratic Party left, but to channel working-class opposition back into it. The mass radicalization that produced 13 million votes for Bernie Sanders was a genuine expression of anti-capitalist sentiment. The DSA's function โ together with the ISO, Socialist Alternative, Jacobin, and the rest of the pseudo-left โ was to divert that radicalization into a "political revolution" that is really an operation to refurbish the credibility of the Democratic Party and of capitalist politics as a whole. As the WSWS put it, nothing frightens the pseudo-left more than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, because that raises the specter of the working class breaking with bourgeois politics entirely and building its own party.
It is worth noting the DSA's own self-understanding here, which confirms the point. It cites Syriza in Greece โ the party that rose to power on the backs of workers' struggles and then imposed the austerity memorandum of the European banks โ as a model of the "left's" re-emergence. That is exactly what the DSA envisions for itself: being called upon by the American ruling class to carry out historic betrayals at a moment of crisis.
For a fuller treatment, see Tom Hall's "The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America" and Eric London's "After the convention: A balance sheet of the DSA, 2016-2023."
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