On Thursday, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani attended the White House to meet with President Donald Trump for a second time. Afterward, his administration posted an image so surreal it was hard to believe it wasn’t AI. In it, Mamdani stands behind Trump, who beams and holds up two newspaper covers. One, a real headline from the New York Daily News in 1975: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Another, a prospective headline the Mamdani team mocked up to show how Trump might be popularly received if he agrees to support Mamdani’s plans to build more housing for New York City, reads, “Trump to City: Let’s Build.”

Mayor Mamdani won his election last fall on a promise of affordability, not least of all in housing. Central to his platform is a plan to build two hundred thousand new units of publicly subsidized, union‑built, rent‑stabilized housing to increase supply and bring down costs. To accomplish this task, Mamdani needs cooperation from the Trump administration, which must authorize tens of billions in housing grants and financing reforms for large, new, affordable developments. Mamdani met with Trump on Thursday to discuss his proposed Sunnyside Yard project, which, at over twelve thousand units, would be the city’s largest build in half a century.

To get Trump on board, Mamdani opted to demonstrate what fruitful cooperation would do for Trump’s reputation and legacy. The original headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” refers to President Gerald Ford’s veto of a federal bailout for the struggling city government, a central piece of the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975 that soon led to brutal austerity across the city and became a blueprint for neoliberalism as a whole. If Ford is remembered for gutting New York, Mamdani implied, Trump can be remembered for revitalizing it.