Trump must avoid the mistake of turning Mamdani into a martyr

Zohran Mamdani, who was crowned the first-round Democratic nominee in the New York mayoral election, went from being a complete unknown to becoming a political figure of national weight in just a half-year. There is no doubt that he is talented.He knows how to speak, he is eloquent, he entertains, he is 'cool' and he handles social networks perfectly. All this, added to his extremist ideas, makes him a lethal cocktail.

Mamdani did not vote for the poor, Hispanic or black neighborhoods. Paradoxically, the New York elite - concentrated in Manhattan or western Brooklyn - voted for him. It was the young, well-educated whites, probably from other states in the country, who moved to New York to ratify it as the most progressive city in the United States.

Mamdani's win in the Democratic primary - which virtually makes him the mayor of New York unless a miracle happens - has terrified the entire country. What's scarier is that Mamdani was underestimated and many thought his extremist ideas - such as freezing the price of rent, creating social housing and public supermarkets, emulating what Maduro has done in Venezuela or Castro in Cuba - would scare away most voters. But it didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened: Mamdani is a phenomenon on the rise, who won the nomination in the first round - while the incumbent mayor, the moderate Adams, won it in the eighth.

The Mamdani phenomenon, finally, attracted Donald Trump's attention this week. The president, after learning of his primary win, called him a "lunatic" and a "communist." And, a few days later, threatened to arrest him if Mamdani should, once mayor of New York, resist ICE operations in the city-as the candidate himself suggested during the campaign.

For the far left, which has unfortunately become the Democratic Party's base-a recent Reuters poll shows this-,the attack by Trump is a badge of honor. The radical base of the Democratic Party, poisoned by the elites' bellicose rhetoric, considers Trump the worst threat to America. If Zohran Mamdani is their great enemy, then Mamdani is their leader.

In that sense, Trump makes the mistake of targeting Mamdani when the candidate hasn't even won the election. Trump's attacks give Mamdani a relevance that until recently he did not have and turn him into a national adversary of the one who today is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party and the most relevant politician in the entire United States. And, even worse, Trump raises the possibility of turning Mamdani, with an eventual arrest, into a martyr. 

For someone like Mamdani, unknown, immigrant and American for barely eight years, a confrontation with the president of the United States is a triumph. Even more so, if he can transform that confrontation into a political persecution for the purposes of public opinion. That would make him a Democratic martyr and catapult his popularity. That's just what he's after with his far-left screeching.

When Mamdani makes such crazy proposals as freezing rent prices and transforming city buildings into public ones, his grand purpose is to provoke the right and generate reactions. Mamdani profiles himself, fearlessly, as an extremist, because he knows that this is the way to become truly popular. Saying openly that the city's billionaires must be done away with and that capitalism is a problem has the sole purpose of arousing the ire of those whom Mamdani considers as adversaries. Then, proposals such as stripping him of his citizenship or - in this case - sending him to prison appear, which in the end are gifts for Mamdani: it is his moment to match Donald Trump and say that he is the real political persecuted one.

President Trump should let right-wing influencers, media, journalists and politicians expose the danger Zohran Mamdani poses to a city as important as New York. But by engaging him, he is not only giving him a prominence he doesn't deserve but also providing him with the argument he needs to profile himself as a political persecutee. There is no doubt that Mamdani's greatest aspiration is to become a martyr in front of the Trump Administration.