I am reproducing this Substack I found analysing the Mamdani interview with Trump in November last year.
It is a ‘a case study in how a bully behaves when he can’t rely on fear, and how a principled politician behaves when he refuses the role of the victim.’
May we all learn from this and be guided by it.
JJ’s Scribblings
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Thirty Minutes in the Lion’s Den: The Interview Trump Thought He Controlled
White Rose USA — November
Nov 22, 2025
Source (Bruce Fanger): https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fbruce.fanger%2Fposts%2Fpfbid09ZbM8CQmPK2t3grm7RGY385psrJvMeakPfsAacv1B1zj3pBW4yrNRRwGk5ndnwpsl
There’s a strange thing that happens when you watch the full thirty-minute interview instead of the clipped version the internet tosses around. The edges soften. The masks slip. And you start to see the actual geometry of the interaction — where power sits, where insecurity leaks, where the tone changes, where the truth speaks by accident. The viral clip makes it look like a moment. The full meeting reveals a dynamic.
This wasn’t a showdown. It wasn’t a humiliation. It wasn’t a triumph for either man. It was something far more revealing: a case study in how a bully behaves when he can’t rely on fear, and how a principled politician behaves when he refuses the role of the victim.
The meeting begins as all Trump meetings do — with noise.
The first five minutes are pure Trump: monologues disguised as greetings, numbers inflated beyond physics, scattered recollections of the 1980s like the era froze and preserved him in amber. You can practically hear his brain flipping through its greatest hits, trying to set the tone: This is my room. My chair. My story.
But Mamdani doesn’t react to any of it.
And that is the first hinge of the meeting.
A man like Trump needs emotional feedback to function. Fear works. Flattery works. Even anger works. Mamdani gives him nothing. He sits there with the calm of someone who refuses to let the other person set the emotional tempo. It’s a small thing, but with Trump, it’s enough to break the cycle.
Then comes the shift — the “gracious Trump” phase.
People mistake this for maturity or diplomacy. It’s not. It’s a reflex Trump only deploys when he can’t dominate the room. The tone goes soft, the eyebrows lift, the compliments come out in forced, syrupy bursts.
“You’re doing great work.”
“New York is lucky to have you.”
“You’re a very smart guy.”
It sounds statesmanlike until you remember the same man called him a communist threat two weeks earlier. What’s happening here isn’t respect — it’s adaptation. A chameleon trying to match the color of the wall.
Trump is gracious when graciousness benefits Trump.
As Mamdani shifts to policy, Trump drifts into autobiography.
This is the most telling stretch — minutes twelve to eighteen. Mamdani tries to talk like a mayor-elect:
transit
housing
Rikers
federal cooperation
immigrant protections
Real issues, real stakes, real governance.
Trump responds by vanishing into his own mythology. Crime statistics from memory that don’t exist. Grievances about prosecutors. Stories from “the old days.” Complaints about how unfairly he’s been treated.
It’s not sabotage — it’s incapacity.
Mamdani is speaking a civic language Trump’s brain can’t decode.
They aren’t having the same conversation.
They aren’t even on the same continent.
Then comes the moment everyone’s dissecting — the “fascistic tendencies” line.
And yes, it happened in the room, not after. Mamdani doesn’t weaponize the word. He doesn’t turn it into a headline. He does something more dangerous: he analytically names the pattern.
Immigrant raids.
Political retribution.
Targeting dissent.
Erosion of checks and balances.
Threats against the judiciary.
He lays out the evidence and names the behavior: fascistic tendencies.
Trump nods and smiles like someone being told he has an excellent golf swing.
It’s not bravado. It’s not denial.
It’s something almost sadder: he doesn’t understand the language of critique unless it’s blunt and emotional. Mamdani moved the discussion into the realm of political analysis, and Trump’s instincts don’t live there. So he simply… accepts it. Not because he agrees, but because he can’t absorb what the words actually mean.
The last ten minutes are the clearest portrait of Trump’s psyche.
Once Mamdani refuses to bend, Trump compensates by overcorrecting into flattery:
“You’re going to surprise people.”
“I feel very comfortable with you.”
“We’re going to get along great.”
It’s dominance disguised as benevolence. When Trump can’t conquer, he tries to adopt. He folds the other person into his narrative: You and I are the same. We’re allies. You approve of me. I approve of you.
It’s a kind of political camouflage — digest the threat by complimenting it.
Mamdani doesn’t take the bait.
He doesn’t fight.
He doesn’t flatter.
He just continues speaking plainly.
Which leaves Trump in the one position he hates most:
performing civility for an audience that isn’t fooled.
What the meeting really showed
The full interview isn’t about Mamdani calling Trump a fascist.
It’s not about Trump pretending to be gracious.
It’s not about a progressive mayor meeting an authoritarian president.
What the meeting showed is simpler and more damning:
Trump is only powerful when the room fears him.
Take the fear away, and he becomes oddly gentle, strangely polite, and completely unable to dominate the conversation.
People think tyrants rage because they’re strong.
But the truth is they only rage when they know the room will absorb it.
Mamdani didn’t absorb it.
So Trump didn’t rage.
He folded.
Nicely. Neatly.
Like a man who knows the cameras are watching and doesn’t want the world to see what he looks like when the mask cracks.
And if there’s a lesson here for the rest of the country, it’s this:
Fear is the oxygen of authoritarianism.
Take it away, and even a strongman starts to sound like a man.
© 2026 JJ · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
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27th January, 2026 – returning to current news……
Bring in the thugs thug….
Now we have Homan in Minneapolis, Charlie Sykes on Substack describes the man:
Homan is a blister of a man who relishes and celebrates brutality. His rhetoric frequently frames all undocumented individuals as criminals and threats; and he is notorious for “promoting cruelty as deterrence” and normalizing abusive practices like ripping children from their parents. Indeed, he has been a voluble supporter of family separation.
“I’m sick and tired of hearing about the family separation,” he declared in 2023. “I’m still being sued over that…
“I don’t give a s***, right? Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”
Homan is also widely regarded as the architect of Trump’s campaign of “shock and awe,” and the creation of mass detention camps like “Alligator Alcatraz” to warehouse migrants in detention.
Last year Senator Chris Hollen (D-MD) described Homan as “the Trump thug who wants to deny due process rights to migrants and brag about tearing families apart.”
And now we learn Alex Pretti was already on the database (Palantir/Oracle) of federal immigration authorities:
Slain ICU Nurse Broke Rib in ICE Encounter Days Before Death
NOT THE FIRST TIME
Vic Verbalaitis Breaking News Intern
Updated Jan. 27 2026 3:53PM EST Published Jan. 27 2026 3:33PM EST
The ICU nurse who was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents on Saturday reportedly broke his rib during a prior interaction with federal officers about a week before his death.
Sources told CNN that federal immigration authorities had documented information about Alex Pretti, 37, before he was killed on Saturday, as part of an effort to collect personal and identifying details about anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/slain-icu-nurse-alex-pretti-broke-rib-in-earlier-encounter-with-ice/
And Aaron Parnas, Substack today reported:
The Guardian has confirmed that ICE is increasingly using a smartphone app called Mobile Fortify to scan faces in Minnesota and nationwide, allowing agents to instantly pull biometric data from multiple databases, a practice critics warn risks misidentification, racial bias, and privacy violations, has sparked lawsuits and protests, and prompted Democratic lawmakers to push legislation restricting or banning its use outside ports of entry.
Wired has confirmed that Meta blocked users on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads from sharing links to a database listing names and photos of ICE agents, citing privacy violations, as tensions rose in Minneapolis after aggressive ICE operations, with critics calling the move censorship and the Trump administration arguing the site endangers officers by effectively doxing them
A UC Berkeley analysis found that in the first nine months of the Trump administration, ICE street arrests and internal deportations surged—driven by an 11-fold increase in street arrests—resulting in a sevenfold rise in arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions as enforcement shifted away from prioritizing criminal history and detention capacity expanded.
404 Media/ Podcast research on Palantir tool tailored for ICE – ELITE:
‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid
·Jan 15, 2026 at 9:03 AM
Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground.
https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/
Dave Aronberg, Substack 28th Jan 2026 on important Trump regime rebukes by Judge Schiltz:
First, we look at the case of Juan Hugo Tobay Robles, an Ecuadorian man wrongfully detained for weeks despite a court order. When Judge Schiltz threatened to hold Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in contempt, the administration finally blinked and released Robles.
Then, there is the stunning attempt to arrest journalist Don Lemon for covering an anti-ICE protest inside of a Minneapolis church. Judge Schiltz and the 8th Circuit recently rejected the DOJ’s emergency bid for arrest warrants,. It’s a vital reminder that even in a aggressive ICE crackdown, the rule of law must prevail.
borderslynn 
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