Mamdani's Demand to Arrest Netanyahu Is Pure Trump Kayfabe

Trump taught a generation that your enemies are your marketing department. Mamdani was paying attention.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. The architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.”

That was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday night, two minutes of direct-to-camera video about the International Criminal Court warrant and what his city intends to do about it when Netanyahu lands for the United Nations General Assembly in September.

The actual news was buried in the middle: nothing. The city’s lawyers reviewed every avenue and found none. New York cannot arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. And of course, this was never the point. Netanyahu is never going to get arrested on American soil and Mamdani absolutely knows it.

So why does the video exist at all? Well, Mamdani campaigned on making this arrest, then realized he couldn’t. So Mamdani took a page from the Trump kayfabe playbook and instead filmed the harshest language he has ever used about the man, demanded the federal government execute the warrant itself, and threw in that Netanyahu is not welcome in his city, “nor is any other war criminal at large.” Noteworthy that at the exact moment he retreated on the law, he escalated on the language.

It would be naive to call this a gaffe. Mamdani is a savvy politician who thus far has played his first seven months of offense to near perfection. And this Netanyahu gambit has been in the works for some time.

He told the New York Times two weeks ago that the Israeli prime minister “belongs in The Hague” and that the arrest question was “an active conversation with our legal department,” a quote he had to know would detonate on cue. It did. Donald Trump posted Monday that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.” Netanyahu’s office called the ICC a kangaroo court and told the mayor to go fix New York. Then came the video.

Now you will recall that this is the same mayor who spent last winter in bromance meetings with Trump about a housing development, meetings the president walked out of calling him “a very rational person.” Mamdani isn’t picking a fight here, he’s getting his political rivals to do his bidding for him.

Just look at the return. Think about who spent the past 24 hours promoting Mamdani’s video. Donald Trump. Benjamin Netanyahu. Fox News. Republican councilmembers lining up to invite Netanyahu to town as a dare. All of them had proverbial smoke coming out of their ears, and none of them wanted anyone persuaded. All of them portrayed Mamdani as the villain, and as a result, still made him the biggest politician in America for a day. And, curiously, it put him on the majority side of public opinion, given how badly Israel and Netanyahu are currently polling in this country.

Whether Netanyahu actually belongs in The Hague is a serious question, and that’s a different column. This one is about stomping all over the political third rail as a party trick, and where Mamdani learned that from.

For half a century the political consultant’s entire job was keeping clients away from moments like this. The third rail was for not touching. Trump’s insight, and it was an insight, whatever else you want to call it, was that your enemies are your marketing department. They repeat your message to people you could never reach, who might actually agree with you. Given the growing isolationist side of the MAGA base, this seems a reasonable bet.

I wrote in May that Mamdani’s defining instinct is noticing which political prohibitions still trigger the old reflexes but no longer carry the old costs. He consistently tests it with a Democratic Socialist label that resonates more with those deeply concerned about the cost of living. He tested it again with the Israel Day parade, which elicited predictable insults of being an anti-Semite from Fox News. This arrest warrant, which again is never going to happen, is just the latest test, which he ran expecting his inimical marketing department of Trump, GOP politicians, and Fox News would show up for work. They always do. And for once, it’s conservative media taking a politician’s bait, and not legacy media obsessing over the latest Truth Social post.

There was a time, and it wasn’t long ago, when a statement from the office of the Prime Minister of Israel attacking a New York City mayor by name meant a five-alarm crisis at City Hall. This week, somewhere in the mayor’s press shop, it got filed under earned media.