“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.

Seen through that lens, the Trump–Mamdani contrast isn’t simply capitalism versus its supposed opposite: it’s which winners the government should pick, whose rules the economy should follow, and to whom we assign the rights to profit, to exclude, and to decide.

Consider a few concrete comparisons.

Trump isn’t against “socialism” when it benefits the rich. He lambasts big government while advancing policies that privatize gains and socialize risks. His 2017 corporate tax cuts, targeted regulatory forbearance, and tariff-driven protection combine to deliver state-manufactured scarcity and pricing power to favored firms. Trump is thereby trashing the Republican Party’s pretense of favoring small government.

Mamdani’s politics also deploy the state — but to strip away monopoly rents (e.g., curbing real estate speculation, ending blank-check corporate subsidies) and to expand public provisioning (of transit, housing, energy).

Both embrace intervention. They simply assign the benefits to different constituencies.

Markets vs. market power. The free-market fable says competition keeps powerful firms in check. But this fable just obscures that real markets are riddled with power. Trump’s approach discards the fable when it helps his coalition: subsidy, waiver, and shield on demand — a planned economy for insiders. Trump’s approach treats concentrated power as acceptable if it yields “wins” for his coalition: subsidies to well-connected projects, regulatory waivers for allied sectors like crypto.

Mamdani stresses competition for the public, not incumbents — curbing landlord power, reining in predatory lending, and using public options (e.g., social housing) to set quality and price benchmarks.

Both camps reject neutral, invisible hands. They differ on whether the “hand” should be a velvet glove for capital or a firm nudge toward public value.

Property as policy. In American capitalism, the crown jewels are not just factories and land but permissions — zoning entitlements, mineral leases, broadcast spectrum, pharmaceutical patents, rights to pollute, even algorithmic training data. Trump’s politics tends to expand or protect exclusion rights for asset owners — making it easier to enclose and monetize resources.

Mamdani’s proposals tighten the powers that allow asset owners to block access to essential goods, through stronger tenant protections and public claims on windfall gains, and widen the rights that let the public actually use them.

Once you recognize property as policy, the contrast stops looking like ideology and starts looking like a battle for whose claims count.

Populism from the Right and the Left. Both politicians speak “for the people” against an “elite.” Trump’s “people” are defined through national identity and cultural grievance; Mamdani’s by class position and material insecurity. Each frames legitimacy as proximity to “real” constituents and treats institutions (courts, civil service, universities, press) with suspicion when they obstruct. The overlap is tactical, not teleological: mobilize a base, delegitimize countervetoes, rewrite rules.

Once we stop treating capitalism or socialism as clichés and start recognizing the underlying issue as being economic governance, two clarifying conclusions follow.

First, there is no capitalism without a state. Even the most minimal system requires a sovereign to define and enforce property, adjudicate contracts, supply money, and police fraud. Modern capitalism goes much further: tax codes that favor debt over equity, intellectual property regimes that generate twenty-year monopolies, liability shields that socialize losses, and trade rules that lock in investor rights. Remove any of these supports and you don’t get “more free markets” — you get new winners and losers. “Get government out of the way” is merely a slogan, not a blueprint, and frequently an excuse for elite capture of the economy.

Second, the real argument is about the allocation of rights, risks, and rewards. When Trump rails against “socialists,” he’s not defending neutral markets; he’s defending a particular distribution of rights — one that prioritizes asset owners’ claims and uses public power to sustain them. When Mamdani advances democratic socialist policies, he’s not suggesting we abolish markets; he’s redrawing the boundary between private exclusion and public provision to include things like housing and transportation. Their methods both involve the state but toward starkly different visions of democratic accountability and economic rights.

Much of today’s “capitalism vs. socialism” shouting match treats capitalism as a positive American vibe rather than an actual economic system. But political economy is about material relations, not vibes. The real questions are the old ones: who owns, who pays, who decides, and ultimately who benefits.