New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani described his working relationship with President Trump as productive in an NBC interview released Saturday, days after the president accused him on Truth Social of destroying the city over a proposed tax on luxury second homes. Mamdani told NBC's Meet the Press his contacts with Trump are "honest and direct," and said he remained committed to a pied-a-terre levy on New York properties worth more than $5 million that Gov. Kathy Hochul has folded into her budget plan.

The exchange is the first extended public account from Mamdani of a back-channel that has defied the two men's opposing politics, and it comes as the mayor tries to close a $5.4 billion budget gap without abandoning campaign promises to freeze rents on roughly one million apartments, make city buses free and fund universal child care.

What Mamdani said

"I would say that it’s honest, it’s direct, and it’s productive," Mamdani said of his conversations with Trump, according to Fox News. He declined to detail the substance, saying the exchanges return to "one of the few things that we have in common, which is our love for New York City." Mamdani said he has told the president directly that he considers federal immigration raids in the city "cruel" and "inhumane."

The mayor credited a February Oval Office meeting with securing the release of Elmina "Ellie" Aghayeva, a Columbia University student detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mamdani told NBC he handed Trump a list of five students detained in or around the Columbia campus, and that the president called him three minutes after the meeting to say he had ordered Aghayeva's release, according to the Washington Examiner.

The tax fight

Mamdani used the interview to defend Hochul's proposed surcharge on non-primary residences valued above $5 million, which he said would raise about half a billion dollars a year. "We’re so excited to be working with her on exactly that because it will raise half a billion dollars for New York City," Mamdani said, per the Washington Examiner. He said the administration had already shaved an inherited $12 billion deficit down to $5.4 billion through savings, reserves and state aid.

Trump, in the Truth Social post that prompted the NBC questions, wrote that "Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York" and that the city's "TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG," Fox News reported. The president has met with Mamdani at least twice since the mayor's November election, and Fox said the two speak and text semi-regularly.

Pressed on whether fiscal reality had tempered his politics, Mamdani told NBC he believes in socialism "even more than I did the day before" the election, the Washington Examiner reported. He said he expected to deliver on each pledge "by the time that I’m done being the mayor."

What is missing

Mamdani's office and left-leaning outlets were not represented in today's reporting on this angle; the sources here are lean-right and right publications covering the NBC interview. The White House, which Fox News said it had contacted, had not publicly responded by press time.

Hochul's second-home tax still requires approval in Albany, where the legislative session runs through early June. Mamdani is scheduled to present his executive budget to the City Council next month.