The two had called each other “fascist” and “communist,” but when President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani faced reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, they were just two iconoclastic New York politicians who were all smiles.

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The much-anticipated face-to-face showed how the politicians’ shared love of New York City — and no doubt some political calculus — could paper over months of insults. Both men used a plainspoken, wry approach tailor-made for the age of social media to make their points, and each left the meeting with something he needed.

Here are some takeaways from the appearance.

Republicans lose their punching bag — at least for now

Trump’s party had been queueing up a 2026 campaign warning that the Democratic Party is getting taken over by people like Mamdani, a 34-year-old Muslim and self-described democratic socialist who may not play as well west of the Hudson River. But Trump swatted all that down.

“The better he does, the happier I am,” Trump, a native New Yorker, said of Mamdani.

Trump denied a charge by Elise Stefanik, the Republican candidate for New York governor and one of his political allies, that Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel, is a “jihadist,” saying, “I just met with a man who’s a very rational person” and adding that they both wanted peace in the Middle East.

Trump said he’d happily live in Mamdani’s New York, countering conservative suggestions that rich New Yorkers should flee the city. He praised Mamdani’s decision to keep New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, noting she was a friend of the president’s daughter Ivanka. And he demurred when asked about Mamdani’s democratic socialism, saying instead that the two had many similar ideas. He noted — and Mamdani emphasized repeatedly — that they’d both run for office on affordability.

It was an inconvenient defense of democratic socialism on the very day that House Republicans muscled through a resolution condemning socialism with the express intent of embarassing their rivals over the mayor-elect. Trump even threw in some praise of another Republican punching bag, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, also a democratic socialist.

“Bernie Sanders and I agreed on much more than people thought,” Trump said. He added proudly that Mamdani was wowed by a painting of iconic Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — yet another GOP bugbear — in the Oval Office.

Trump, struggling amid mounting dissatisfaction in his first year back in office, may see an advantage in lashing his star to that of the latest avatar of affordability.

Of course, both Trump and Mamdani are experts at the 21st century art of political brawling and Trump is notoriously mercurial, so the detente may be short-lived. But it’s notable while it’s here.

Mamdani’s visit lets Trump talk about affordability

For the past few weeks, Trump has struggled to address voters’ concerns about inflation, suggesting that prices are already down and any claims otherwise are a “con job by the Democrats.” But Mamdani stomped his competition in the mayoral election by focusing relentlessly on the cost of rent, groceries and other basic needs — a successful strategy that White House officials noticed as they think about next year’s midterms.

The president leaned into that message in their White House meeting, saying he sees his efforts as complementary. He said that just like Mamdani, he too wants to build more housing. The president didn’t lay out any new policies as he repeated his claims that inflation has dropped under his watch.

“Anything I do is going to be good for New York if I can get prices down,” Trump said. “The new word is affordability. Another word is just groceries. You know, it’s sort of an old-fashioned word, but it’s very accurate. And they’re coming down. They’re coming down.”

The challenge for Trump is whether voters trust that he’s genuinely addressing inflation. The consumer price index has jumped to an annual rate of 3% compared to 2.3% in April, when the president rolled out his “Liberation Day” import taxes.

A confidence boost for Mamdani — with implications for his agenda

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani’s opponents claimed his far-left politics and relative inexperience would make him an easy target for Trump. Friday’s meeting will likely quiet those concerns — at least for now. Trump seemed thoroughly impressed with Mamdani, describing him as “a very rational man” who “wants to see New York be great again.”

“We had some interesting conversations and some of his ideas are the same that I have,” Trump added.

For his part, Mamdani struck a delicate balance: flattering Trump in broad terms, while avoiding sensitive subjects or concessions that could enrage his base. He noted repeatedly that many of his own voters were former Democrats who switched over to Trump in the previous election — a line the president seemed to like.

The backing of the president could help the mayor-elect avoid a National Guard deployment in New York, which Trump previously threatened as a likely outcome of his election victory. Trump also indicated that federal funding cuts could be off the table — a move that would give Mamdani a much better shot at achieving his ambitious agenda, which requires raising revenue for programs like universal free childcare.

“I want him to do a great job and will help him do a great job,” Trump said.

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By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Texas on Friday asked the Supreme Court for an emergency order to be allowed to use a congressional redistricting plan pushed by President Donald Trump that is favorable to Republicans in the 2026 elections despite a lower court ruling that it likely discriminates on the basis of race.

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The state is calling on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump’s efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year’s elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle. The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.

If the ruling holds for now, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana which could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.

BOSTON (AP) — The information needed to decipher the last remaining unsolved secret message embedded within a sculpture at CIA headquarters in Virginia sold at auction for nearly $1 million, the auction house announced Friday.

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The winner will get a private meeting with the 80-year-old artist to go over the codes and charts in hopes of continuing what he’s been doing for decades: interacting with would-be cryptanalyst sleuths.

The archive owned by the artist who created Kryptos, Jim Sanborn, was sold to an anonymous bidder for $963,000, according to RR Auction of Boston. The archive includes documents and coding charts for the sculpture, dedicated in 1990.

Three of the messages on the 10-foot-tall sculpture — known as K1, K2 and K3 — have been solved, but a solution for the fourth, K-4, has frustrated the experts and enthusiasts who have tried to decipher the S-shaped copper screen.

The artwork resembles a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side has a series of staggered alphabets that are key to decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side.

One person has contacted Sanborn regularly for the past two decades in an effort to solve K4, and Sanborn received so many inquiries he started charging $50 per submission. Sanborn decided to sell off the solution to K4, putting it in the hands of someone he hopes will keep its secrets and continue interacting with followers.

Artist Jim Sanborn sits behind a proof of concept piece for the Kryptos sculpture during a press conference at the International Spy Museum, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

RR Auction said the winner will get a private meeting with Sanborn to go over the codes, charts and artistic intent behind K4 and an alternate paragraph he called K5.

The purchaser’s “long-term stewardship plan” is being developed, according to the auction house.

Sanborn’s roughly 50 public sculptures include a memorial for a 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas.

The archive auction was almost derailed in September when two Kryptos sleuths found Sanborn’s original scrambled texts in the artist’s papers in the Smithsonian.

The sale went ahead but was changed from offering only the secrets to K4 to selling his entire archive.

“The important distinction is that they discovered it. They did not decipher it,” Sanborn told The Associated Press. “They do not have the key. They don’t have the method with which it’s deciphered.”

The Palace Theatre in downtown St. Paul is suing Wrecktangle Pizza over the short-lived Wrestaurant at the Palace, claiming that the Detroit-style pizza makers still owe the theater upwards of $1.6 million more than a year after their joint restaurant venture shut down.

Wrestaurant opened in early fall 2023 in the spot formerly home to Wild Tymes but quietly closed about a year later amid extensive water damage to its building, which had been purchased in early 2023 by now-troubled Madison Equities while restaurant plans were in the works.

First Avenue, which co-manages the Palace Theatre, opened a new restaurant called the Palace Pub in the location this summer. Unlike Wrestaurant, the Palace Pub is fully operated by First Avenue, operations director Marc Dickhut said at the time.

Wrestaurant earned plaudits when it opened for its creative menu and modern, redesigned interior. The Palace Pub, for its part, looks quite similar to its predecessor in decor and now offers a more casual bar-fare menu and a selection of arcade games.

In a lawsuit filed in Hennepin County Court last week, the operators of the Palace Theatre — which owned 51 percent of the restaurant, to Wrecktangle’s 49 percent — claim that they agreed in 2023 to front money for both their own and Wrecktangle’s portions of startup and operating costs, a total investment the theater estimates at around $3.3 million. That loan for Wrecktangle’s portion was fully guaranteed by Wrecktangle co-owner Alex Rogers, according to court filings.

However, the lawsuit claims, none of that loan has been repaid. With interest and other fees attached, the Palace claims in their lawsuit that Wrecktangle owes “an amount to be proved at trial but reasonably believed to be in excess of $1,650,000.00.”

Neither Rogers nor a representative of First Avenue responded to requests for additional information Friday.

For its part, in a response to the lawsuit filed in court this week, Wrecktangle appears to admit to not having made payments on the loan but countered that it is the Palace, in fact, that has failed to uphold part of the deal.

In its own filing, Wrecktangle says that the Palace never properly dissolved the joint LLC behind the restaurant nor took over Wrecktangle’s 49 percent ownership interest, and has continued to use equipment purchased by the joint LLC to now operate the Palace Pub. The theater, Wrecktangle says in its filing, has not financially credited the pizza company for profits and losses made using equipment in which it still has an ownership stake — which Wrecktangle characterized as a bad-faith move that calls into question the validity of the Palace lawsuit.

In response, the Palace denied these allegations, reiterated its claims of Wrecktangle’s own wrongdoing and noted that the Palace Pub has yet to turn a profit.

From here, unless they reach a settlement in the meantime, both Wrecktangle and the Palace have tentatively agreed to go to trial in November 2026.

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