New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s secretly organized meeting with Donald Trump in the White House, where he posed alongside the fascist president in the Oval Office, is an act of treachery aimed at forging an alliance with the far-right.

The self-proclaimed democratic socialist stood side-by-side with the would-be dictator who has the blood of thousands on his hands, and may soon have the blood of millions, as his war fleet assembles off the coast of Iran. Trump beamed as the Democratic mayor of the nation’s largest city paid him tribute—treating Mamdani as a useful prop he considers valuable, at least for the moment.

Mamdani did not stumble into this meeting. He sought it. He proposed the photo-op. It is a calculated effort by the New York City mayor and leading figure of the Democratic Socialists of America to establish close relations with a fascistic president who is escalating ICE terror, building a network of detention camps, preparing to rig the 2026 elections and driving the United States toward a catastrophic war. 

Had Mamdani told the tens of thousands of young people and workers mobilized to elect him last year that his “strategy” was to form an alliance with Trump, he would not have been elected dogcatcher. His election was secured through a massive political fraud: the claim that placing a DSA mayor in office would be a step toward opposing dictatorship, defending immigrants and resisting austerity.

The second Trump-Mamdani meeting—after the love fest last November before Mamdani even took office—is all the more revealing because it took place less than 48 hours after Trump delivered his State of the Union address to Congress, ranting that the Democratic Party consisted of traitors, cheaters and people who hate America. 

In a social media post Wednesday, Trump singled out Mamdani’s fellow DSA member, Representative Rashida Tlaib, for vilification, claiming that Tlaib and Representative Ilhan Omar had “bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized.” Trump went on to say that the US government “should send them back from [sic] where they came—as fast as possible.” Tlaib was born in Detroit, in the district she now represents in Congress, the child of a Palestinian immigrant father who worked at Ford’s Flat Rock assembly plant.

In comments on Wednesday, Mamdani went out of his way to publicly welcome selected lines of Trump’s fascistic address, such as the president’s cynical praise for New York City’s snow shoveling program for requiring identification—without mentioning the context: Trump’s campaign to impose voter ID requirements, disenfranchise millions of voters, and hold the midterm elections under the barrel of a gun. 

Mamdani’s collaboration with Trump expresses the class character of his politics. And it must be stated plainly: these are the politics of the Democratic Socialists of America as a whole. Mamdani is not a rogue actor. He is the DSA’s most prominent elected official, hailed by them as their greatest political success story. What Mamdani does in the Oval Office, the DSA does. His handshake with Trump is the DSA’s handshake with Trump. 

What is the content of Mamdani’s collaboration? He seeks $21 billion in federal funds for a housing project that will enrich real estate developers and construction firms while doing little or nothing to address the social crisis confronting millions of working-class New Yorkers. 

The argument that Mamdani is “getting results”—that he secured the release of a detained student—is the most pernicious form of apologetics. It is precisely the argument advanced by Pierre Laval—the socialist turned Nazi collaborator leading Vichy France. But every such transaction strengthens the political authority of the far right. Trump releases one student and detains a hundred more. He smiles for a photograph with the “communist mayor” and uses the image to demonstrate that even his nominal opponents submit to his authority.

A recent article in Jacobin, the main publication associated with the DSA, gave a potted history of the “Popular Front,” the period in the 1930s in which the Stalinist-led Communist parties collaborated openly with bourgeois liberal and social-democratic parties, supposedly in the name of waging a common struggle against fascism. The account covered up both the treacherous purpose of the Popular Front—to defend capitalism by suppressing the proletarian revolution—and the murderous methods of the Stalinist regime. It was for this reason that Trotsky denounced the Popular Front as “democracy in alliance with the GPU.”

The operative framework of Mamdani’s politics, however, is what followed from the Popular Front, namely the Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939. The “non-aggression treaty” with Nazi Germany—which invaded the USSR less than two years later—was the most infamous act of political treachery in the 20th century. Stalin, who had framed up and murdered the old Bolsheviks on fabricated charges that they were agents of Hitler, now toasted the Nazi leader, declaring, “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”

In his groveling appearance at the White House, Mamdani might as well be saying: “I know how much the American people love their commander-in-chief.” This under conditions where the majority of the American people are vehemently opposed to Trump and where the authoritarian in the White House is desperately devising measures to rig the 2026 elections, just as he sought to overturn his electoral defeat in 2020 through the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The entire policy of Mamdani and the DSA is directed at disorienting and demobilizing the working class. Mamdani postured as the most militant opponent of Trump and everything he represented. He won votes and recruited members on the basis of these claims. Now, by pursuing backroom collaboration and accommodation, he is working to turn that mobilized anger into demoralization—encouraging the conclusion that “everyone is the same” and that opposition is futile. 

For years, the DSA and its ideological allies have justified their politics—their subordination to the Democratic Party, their elevation of identity politics over class struggle, their hostility to revolutionary Marxism—by denouncing Trotskyists as “sectarians.” This epithet has served as their all-purpose answer to principled political criticism. When the Socialist Equality Party insisted that no progressive outcome could emerge from working within the Democratic Party, the DSA responded with anti-Trotskyist ice-pick memes in the best traditions of Stalinism.

Now the world can see what the real content of this accusation has always been. “Sectarianism,” in the vocabulary of the DSA, means the fight for socialist principles. It means the refusal to make one’s peace with the capitalist system and its political representatives. It means the insistence on telling the working class the truth.

The DSA can denounce us as sectarians until they are blue in the face. The Socialist Equality Party will never enter into political alliances with bourgeois parties. The SEP will never meet with, shake hands with, or provide political cover for fascists and aspiring dictators. We will never peddle the lie that the interests of the working class can be advanced through backroom deals with the leaders of American imperialism. That is not sectarianism. It is the most basic requirement of socialist principle.

We address ourselves now to those rank-and-file members of the DSA who joined that organization in good faith—who believed they were joining a movement for socialism, who wanted to fight against inequality, war and the assault on democratic rights. Look at what your organization has produced. Look at the photograph from the Oval Office. This is the culmination of the DSA’s perspective, not a deviation from it. 

Those genuinely committed to socialism must draw the necessary conclusions. The DSA is not a vehicle for social transformation. Mamdani’s collaboration is a lesson in the political bankruptcy of the DSA’s pseudo-left politics, which expresses the class interests of privileged layers of the upper-middle class—social strata that have no independence from the capitalist state and seek above all to secure a place within it. It is, moreover, part of an international tendency, from Syriza in Greece to the Left Party in Germany to Corbynism in Britain. 

The fight against inequality, against war, against the growing danger of dictatorship in the United States and internationally, requires a complete break with the DSA and with the Democratic Party to which it is umbilically attached. It requires a turn to the genuine political traditions and principles of socialism—to the heritage of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, as fought for today by the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.