Donald Trump has always known that charm can be a weapon, and last Friday he unsheathed it with remarkable precision. When the newly elected far-left socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, arrived at the White House, the press braced for a cage fight.
Instead, they got a photo-op. Trump smiled, Mamdani smiled, and by the end of the afternoon, the new mayor who built his career denouncing American “imperialism” suddenly looked like a guest enjoying the politest ambush in Washington.
Trump had turned what should have been a sparring match into a strategic gesture — one that now forces Mamdani to explain to the hard Left why he willingly stood shoulder-to-shoulder for the camera with the President they despise.
But no one should misunderstand what that display of hospitality really meant.
One-on-one, Trump is gracious – I’ve met him personally, and he is charming.
A master negotiator, he can flatter, cajole, and even charm a potential adversary into a moment of co-operation. Yet there is one left-wing Muslim Mayor who will never receive even that tactical courtesy: London’s Sadiq Khan. The man who hid the existence and scale of grooming gangs in London.
The Mayor who presides over a capital city still plagued by knife violence, who has built his brand on sneering at Trump’s politics and insulting Trump personally for a decade, is the one figure Trump will never invite for even a symbolic handshake.
By embracing New York's new Socialist mayor, Donald Trump has Sadiq Khan over the barrel. Genius - Lee Cohen | Getty Images
Because to Trump, Khan isn’t just another political foe — he is the embodiment of everything that has gone wrong with Britain, a country Trump reveres.
Their mutual hostility is legendary, stretching back ten solid years. The feud began in 2015 when Khan denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim travel ban as “outrageous”. Trump called Khan “ignorant” and challenged him to an IQ test.
After the 2017 London Bridge terror attack, Khan said there was “no reason to be alarmed” about extra armed police; Trump accused him of weakness. Khan demanded that Trump’s state visit be cancelled.
In 2019, Khan personally approved the giant “Trump baby” blimp over Parliament Square. Trump retaliated by branding Khan a “stone-cold loser” and a “national disgrace”. Khan accused Trump of “fuelling far-right hatred”.
As recently as November 2025, Khan refused to congratulate Trump on his re-election, claiming his policies “go against everything London stands for”.
These two men genuinely loathe one another.
That history explains why Khan will never get the outward goodwill Trump gave Mamdani. With Mamdani, Trump sees a young rival who can still be played. With Khan, he sees a man who has spent a decade insulting him while failing to protect the city he is paid to protect.
The failure is glaring. London remains the knife-crime capital of England.
Even with a welcome seven per cent drop in the latest 2024–2025 figures, the capital still suffered over 14,600 knife offences in the past year, forty a day.
More than twenty teenagers were stabbed to death across 2024 and 2025 combined, many on Khan’s watch. Moped gangs still terrorise Oxford Street and Regent Street, snatching phones while police are told not to pursue. Acid attacks, once unthinkable, are now routine.
White Britons – descendants of the generation that beat Hitler – are down to 36.8 per cent of London’s population, according to the Census for England and Wales.
Khan calls it “super-diversity” and beams. He cut stop-and-search by more than half, turned officers into diversity trainers, and spent more energy fighting Trump’s visits than fighting the knife gangs that stalk London’s streets.
Trump lived through the same nightmare in 1970s New York and watched Rudy Giuliani fix it with zero tolerance. He knows a failed mayor when he sees one. Khan is the failure.
The contempt is personal and permanent. Khan has presided over nine years of managed decline in the British capital, Trump loves it more passionately than many born Britons do.
Britain is one election away from its own Giuliani moment – a mayor who will sack the woke police chiefs, bring back proper stop-and-search, jail the knife thugs, and make London safe and recognisably British again.
When that day comes, the stain of Sadiq Khan’s era will be scrubbed clean.
Mamdani can, at least for now, breathe a sigh of relief, having escaped Trump’s sting. But Khan remains forever radioactive at Mar-a Lago.
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