“We agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” Donald Trump recently said after meeting with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Most commentators treated this as one more odd flourish in Trump’s never-ending performance or folded it into an easy story: two loud New Yorkers from Queens who love the city but who, beyond those biographical overlaps, still sit on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Take Trump’s comment seriously though, and a different picture emerges. On the basic questions of how the economy is organized, Trump is not all that different from Mamdani. In fact, when Donald Trump sneers that Zohran Mamdani is a “socialist,” he’s projecting. Strip away the culture-war varnish and Trump’s record is unmistakable: he uses public power to manufacture private profits for favored firms and asset owners. He champions tax cuts for the rich, deregulation in oil and gas, and generous aid for industries he chooses. This isn’t “socialism for the rich” — a misleading phrase that implies something like socialism without democracy. It’s simply state-engineered upward redistribution.

While their rhetoric sounds worlds apart, in practice, both Trump and Mamdani accept what economists sometimes try to forget: markets are not natural phenomena nor “free,” as many assert. Both reject the laissez-faire fable and so believe in strong state intervention in the economy.