First Sadiq Khan, now Mamdani: How Trump rehashes his divisive politics playbook

"After last night's results, the decision facing all Americans could not be more clear. We have a choice between communism and common sense… I said they were voting last night, you could have a communist or a thug. A communist — and they took the communist."

That was the reaction of the US President Donald Trump after Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York city. It is certainly unusual to see the US president reacting so strongly against a mayor-elect , but here we are. And this is not a one-off case.

Let's wind back to 24 September this year, when he used a 55-minute incendiary speech to attack London's mayor, Sadiq Khan.

"I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it's been so changed, it's been so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law. But you are in a different country; you can't do that."

And this illustrates that Donald Trump's public denunciations of Zohran Mamdani — branding the freshly elected New York mayor a "communist" and a threat to American "sovereignty" — did not occur in a vacuum.

They are the latest iteration of a familiar strategy Trump has waged for years against Muslim politicians who symbolise liberal, multicultural urban power. Read side-by-side, the attacks on Mamdani and Khan reveal a consistent playbook — personalised, racialised and performative.

It goes beyond mere insult, instead amplifying Islamophobic tropes, chipping away at democratic norms, and recasting plural cities as cautionary dystopias for a national audience.

At the rhetorical level, the parallels are striking. Trump's language toward both men flattens complex political identities into simple, fear-laden labels. 

Mamdani — a 34-year-old democratic socialist and immigrant who campaigned on bread-and-butter municipal promises — is reduced to "communist", a shorthand designed to elicit Cold War panic and economic alarm among swing voters. 

Khan, by contrast, has been repeatedly dismissed by Trump as a "terrible" or "stone-cold loser", and even accused of wanting to impose Sharia law in London — an outlandish claim with no basis in reality but enormous potency as dog-whistle rhetoric. 

That both men's faith is repeatedly insinuated as a source of disloyalty or danger shows how language is being weaponised to turn religious identity into political disqualification.

In both cases, Trump couples personal insults with threats to institutional support: warning of cutting federal funds to New York after Mamdani's victory and publicly attempting to delegitimise Khan on the international stage — even claiming Khan should not have been invited to state occasions. 

These moves are not simply rhetorical theatrics; they are attempts to use institutional levers (funding, ceremonial exclusion, administrative pressure) to punish and deter political opponents. For Mamdani, the explicit threat to withhold federal resources is an immediate, material risk to municipal governance. 

But the echoes do not imply identity. There are crucial differences born of context and of the men's politics. Khan is a more established, centre-left figure with years in national politics and three successful mayoral campaigns; Mamdani is a youthful, insurgent democratic socialist whose appeal is younger and more explicitly anti-establishment. 

Khan's critiques of Trump date back to 2015 and have accumulated into a sustained transatlantic feud; Mamdani's confrontation is, necessarily, compressed and raw, intensified by his newcomer status and the immediacy of Trump's threats to New York's budget and federal cooperation. 

Reading these episodes together, one sees a pattern: the conflation of religion, race and political difference as a strategy to polarise. Trump's caricatures recast plural, prosperous cities as "woke" dystopias — London and New York become cautionary tales of multicultural failure. 

That framing resonates with a domestic audience predisposed to nativist anxieties: immigration, crime, and cultural change are reframed as the consequences of electing outsiders or non-white leaders. The rhetorical move is to substitute complex policy debates with identity-based fear, thereby narrowing democratic deliberation into a referendum on belonging rather than on competence or policy.

The targets — diverse, cosmopolitan mayors who govern wealthy, globally connected cities — serve as vivid, easily digestible symbols for grievances about elites and cultural change. That calculation helps explain why the attacks are repetitive and personalised; they are political theatre intended to energise supporters rather than to win policy debates.

There is also a performative, careerist element to Trump's approach. Attacking high-profile urban leaders allows him to mobilise a base by manufacturing crises that confirm a worldview of decay and conquest. 

The targets — diverse, cosmopolitan mayors who govern wealthy, globally connected cities — serve as vivid, easily digestible symbols for grievances about elites and cultural change. That calculation helps explain why the attacks are repetitive and personalised; they are political theatre intended to energise supporters rather than to win policy debates. 

In this sense the rhetoric is not a mistake but a feature: it stokes grievance politics and turns municipal governance into national spectacle.

Yet the attacks can backfire politically for Trump's opponents. 

The experience of Sadiq Khan shows how such assaults can sometimes burnish the resilience of a politician — turning outside vitriol into interior support, and converting accusations into proof of principled leadership. 

Khan became a symbol for Londoners of cosmopolitan resilience; Mamdani's victory, in the face of gubernatorial derision and presidential threats, similarly galvanised parts of New York's electorate that saw the mayor-elect as a counterweight to national hostility. 

But reassurance is not the same as insulation: robust majorities do not immunise mayors from the material consequences of a hostile federal executive.

Whether one reads these as episodes of culture war theatre or as a deliberate strategy of democratic erosion, the practical implications are the same: cities that are most diverse and globally connected become focal points for a politics that treats difference as disorder. 

As long as that political logic holds sway, the norms that sustain plural, functioning democracies — mutual legitimacy, institutional restraint, and inclusive citizenship — remain at risk.