Newsom’s Warning To Mamdani: ‘i Know How This Love Story Ends, Zohran’

Gavin Newsom on Thursday cautioned Zohran Mamdani — who has developed a surprisingly amicable relationship with Donald Trump — against getting played by the president.

The California governor was promoting his new memoir at an event when he recalled Trump once giving him a tour of Air Force One, including its bedroom. Gen Z liberal influencer Jack Cocchiarella, who was interviewing him on stage, quipped to Newsom that Trump “has got a crush” on “you and Zohran.”

Newsom chuckled. “I’ve got to talk to Zohran,” he said. “I know how this love story ends, Zohran.”

His comments onstage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire were offhand and brief, but they underscored Newsom’s attitude about dealing with Trump. The governor repeatedly said just after Trump’s election to a second term that he would approach the president with “an open hand, not a closed fist,” and the two memorably embraced following deadly wildfires in Los Angeles early last year. But Newsom has since taken a markedly more combative posture and argued that the president only respects displays of strength after the Trump administration unleashed a siege of lawsuits, immigration raids and funding cuts on California.

Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York, has seemingly won Trump over — at least for now — by holding friendly meetings with him in the Oval Office. Last week, Mamdani gifted Trump fake newspaper front pages bearing the president’s last name to coax him into supporting housing construction.

“I think,” Trump said of Mamdani in November after an especially bromantic Oval Office meeting, “this mayor is going to be doing some things that are really great.”

Newsom and Mamdani talked for the first time on the day of the New York mayor’s election last fall.