(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s approval ratings may be sliding, but one political super sense is as sharp as ever: picking a fight with an adversary he casts as the entire Democratic Party.
Step forward, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
It took just days for Trump to jump on Mamdani’s refusal to roll back a campaign pledge to arrest Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant, if he showed up in the city.
“Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” Trump announced on Monday on Truth Social, his preferred venue for igniting new culture war tussles.
The president’s response raised the possibility of a clash between federal power and the city he once called home.
But its real significance goes further.
This was also a classic example of Trump’s habit of seizing on an issue or a personality to ignite a wider political controversy. He wasn’t just defending an ally in Netanyahu — and perhaps creating a new sense of obligation with a leader with whom he’s recently had tense relations. Trump was also preparing the ground for his emerging midterm election narrative of a Democratic Pary that’s become too extreme.
Still, both Trump and Mamdani might embrace a fight over Netanyahu — which has deeper domestic ramifications than a foreign policy dispute over civilian deaths in the Israeli onslaught in Gaza after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks.
It’s therefore not really important whether Mamdani can arrest Netanyahu. (This is a murky question because the US has not ratified the Rome Statute, which requires member states to arrest those under warrant from the International Criminal Court. And Washington has long allowed even enemy leaders — from places like Iran and Cuba – to visit New York for the United Nations General Assembly.)
Instead, this is one of those occasions when having the fight is more important than winning it.
It’s also a snapshot of how American politics is moving away from historical and near-universal support for Israel and it’s a moment that exemplifies the Democratic Party’s own broader evolution.
How Democrats now view Israel differently
Mamdani is among a new generation of Democrats who’ve adopted sharply anti-Israel rhetoric that delights grassroots liberals. Declining to drop his campaign vow to arrest Netanyahu shows Mamdani curating the political capital he won during his campaign, which is critical to enacting his progressive program as he transitions from insurgent outsider to government insider.
Mamdani’s views on Israel have become an article of faith among many progressive and younger Democrats who believe that Netanyahu perpetrated genocide against tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. The prime minister “belongs in The Hague. He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” an opinion “held by many,” Mamdani said in the same New York Times podcast interview in which he said he was consulting his legal advisers over Netanyahu.
Israel strongly rejects claims that it perpetrated genocide and says it is acting in legitimate self-defense following the terror attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas, a radical Palestinian organization based in Gaza. It blames Palestinian casualties on Hamas for embedding military targets in civilian areas. Both the Biden and Trump administrations argued Israel’s actions did not equate to genocide.
But some key Democrats are now building an anti-Israel argument that goes beyond Gaza into the top midterm election question — the affordability of middle-class life. “I want my tax dollars spent here in Michigan to provide schools in Michigan, to build health care in Michigan, to invest in Michigan rather than to be sent abroad to kill Palestinian people due to genocides and apartheid,” Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on July 2.
How a bromance could sour
A full-on feud over Netanyahu would be the latest twist in Trump’s relationship with Mamdani. They had something of a bromance during an Oval Office meeting last year. “I get along very well with him. We had some good meetings, some good talks and he’s the way he is,” Trump told conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg in January.
The New York mayor showed up in the Oval Office again in February — bringing visual props to make his pitch to the former real estate developer for a massive federal housing investment in the city.
Starkly different in age, ideology and temperament, Trump and Mamdani share key traits. Both try to keep their base happy with populist policies and have highly developed political communications skills.
It suits Mamdani to engage with Trump because it underscores his influence as a national figure. The president, meanwhile, is always searching for an angle.
Trump’s exploration of a showdown with Mamdani over Netanyahu was fairly mild among the overall tenor of his Truth Social posts. But it opens the possibility that New York’s starring role in the Democratic Party’s shift against Israel may soon become a data point in the wider White House case that the party is too extreme for many Americans.
Mamdani could become, for Trump, a metaphor for the wider Democratic Party in the run-up to the midterms.
Trump has done this before. He portrayed New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s also a democratic socialist, as the epitome of her party. He’s called Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, a former Democratic presidential primary candidate, “crazy.”
Democrats have a significant opening against the president’s party in November, since polls show that the country’s lost faith in his economic management and faults his failure to largely live up to promises to bring prices down.
But if Trump can create ideological or cultural clashes, he may stop Democrats from peeling away more conservative, White working-class voters away from his 2024 coalition. Two years ago, Trump successfully leveraged issues like immigration, transgender athletes in sports, and crime to portray Democrats as out of touch. Israel may be next. And bringing Israel into this campaign helps Trump build enthusiasm among evangelical conservatives who back Israel, establishment Republicans who might have soured on his message and swing voters who may feel more comfortable with traditional US foreign policies.
The Democrats are already heading for a huge split over Israel, as more moderate members warn that some anti-Netanyahu rhetoric veers into antisemitism. Trump may even feel he could woo some Jewish voters who’ve traditionally voted Democrat.
Centrist Democrats worry that their party is endangering a critical ally. “Look at the kinds of people that we’ve elected in the primaries, not just pro-Palestinian, just intensely, intensely anti-Israel,” Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman told CNN’s Manu Raju last week.
Exemplifying the split, El-Sayed’s Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, is acknowledging the fury of many Democratic voters towards Netanyahu while adopting a position that might be more mainstream in a general election clash with a Republican rival.
“I can say that Israel has a right to peacefully exist alongside the people of Palestine and in Gaza. It is very clear that Mr. Netanyahu has not made us safer, has not brought us closer to peace, and he’s endangered Jews here in America and around the world,” Stevens said in a debate earlier this month.
The divisions laid bare in her confrontation with El-Sayed are unfolding far beyond Michigan. Support for Israel is also weakening among the most nationalist fringes of the Republican Party. The issue is likely to prefigure a critical dynamic in both parties’ looming 2028 presidential primaries.
For now, however, the clearest splits over the war in Gaza are within the Democratic Party. And Trump has every reason to try to use a figure like Mamdani to try to tear them wide open.
The-CNN-Wire
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