Zohran Mamdani sat down with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and described his relationship with Donald Trump — a man who had called him a city destroyer on social media 24 hours earlier — as honest, direct and productive, with the unbothered delivery of someone who has decided that governing requires holding contradictions without flinching.

The mayor was marking 100 days in office. The president was marking his displeasure with a proposed tax on luxury Manhattan apartments whose wealthy owners sleep in them occasionally and nowhere else consistently. Both men, it turns out, were doing what they do.

The tax — a pied-à-terre levy targeting New York properties above $5 million owned by part-time residents — is Mamdani’s joint project with Governor Kathy Hochul. It would pull $500 million annually toward city priorities, starting with universal free childcare. Trump’s Truth Social response on Thursday was everything a Truth Social response tends to be. “Sadly, Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York! It has no chance! The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG. People are fleeing.”

Mamdani’s reply was four sentences. One of them was: “The president and I both want this city to succeed. This is how you do it.”

He is not performing equanimity. He genuinely appears to regard the relationship as functional, and he has evidence. During a White House meeting in February, he told Trump that ICE had that morning detained a Columbia University student named Elmina Aghayeva, and handed the president a list of five people detained in or around the university. Thirty minutes after he left the building, Trump called him back. Aghayeva was being released. “I think we see in those decisions the worth of a relationship that is both honest and direct,” Mamdani said Sunday.

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He explained the relationship’s unlikely warmth through geography. “New York City holds a very special place for him as well as for me. We’re both from the same city.” He added that their conversations go granular — zoning changes in midtown, the specific texture of a city Trump has known for decades as a developer and a resident. It is, Mamdani suggested, a different quality of engagement than the standard presidential-to-mayor interaction, and it produces different results.

The first hundred days have produced results on other fronts too. On day eight, Mamdani and Hochul signed a $1.2 billion agreement to put the city on a pathway toward universal childcare. By March, free care had launched for up to 2,000 two-year-olds, extending a programme that previously stopped at age three. The goal is every two-year-old in all five boroughs before his first term ends.

Last week his administration announced the first city-run grocery store, opening in East Harlem. At least four more are planned across the remaining boroughs, each designed to sell essentials — bread, eggs, staples — at prices that reflect a city government’s ability to absorb margin rather than a private retailer’s need to extract it. “We’re talking about bread and eggs, the staples that have been skyrocketing,” he told Welker. He connected the broader cost-of-living pressure to the Iran war, arguing that the conflict had worsened a crisis that existed before he ever ran for office, and called for opposition to it “on political grounds, on moral grounds, but even just on economic grounds.”

The free bus promise is moving slower. A $5.4 billion budget deficit has made the timeline harder to hold. One route is currently free. Negotiations with Albany are ongoing. Mamdani expressed confidence without specifying dates — the language of a politician who knows the gap between a campaign promise and a balanced budget but is not yet ready to convert confidence into qualification.

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On the national Democratic Party, he declined the invitation to pontificate. “I think that New Yorkers are tired of politicians pontificating about other politicians. What they want to see are results, and that’s why my focus has been more on potholes than on politics.”

He said he is hoping for two terms. He said he will deliver everything with whatever time he gets. He said the pied-à-terre tax is taxing the rich, and that he has always believed in taxing the rich, and that this is exactly what he said he would do.

The president disagrees. The mayor is apparently fine with that.