Zohran Mamdani joined a long and strange New York City mayoral tradition Wednesday afternoon: navigating official encounters with British royals. Well, sort of: He mostly dodged having much to do with King Charles III on his official state visit, which the monarch began Monday in Washington, D.C. before descending upon Manhattan earlier this morning.
Mamdani did appear alongside Charles and other officials for a wreath-laying at the 9/11 Memorial this afternoon, before the King decamped to feed some chickens at an urban farm in Harlem. But overall, the mayor displayed little apparent interest in further dealings with the man. Asked by a reporter at an unrelated event on Monday about his plans for the visit, Mamdani confirmed his attendance at the wreath-laying and added firmly: "That will be the extent of my meeting with the king and with others who are present." At another event, the mayor added that if he were to speak to Charles privately, he would "probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond."
The image of a monarch coming face to face with the city's democratic socialist mayor is a particularly funny one. But there's really never been an easy answer for what New York City mayors are supposed to do with these people. Royal state visits are carefully negotiated by the British Foreign Office and the US State Department; mayors are, to some degree, swept along for the ride, and often these meetings have a distinct aura of unreality and even bewilderment. In 1939, Fiorello LaGuardia escorted King George VI to the futuristic World's Fair; in 1976, Abe Beame made Queen Elizabeth II an honorary citizen of the city and squired her around the Financial District among enormous lunchtime crowds; in 1989, Ed Koch turned up to meet Princess Diana at a black-tie gala, wearing a business suit. (He explained that he'd been at a town hall meeting in the Bronx.)
But in 2026, it's gotten perhaps weirder than ever. The U.S. and the U.K. are both a mess; Charles can't turn around without a headline asking about his relationship with his wayward son Harry—or his brother Andrew's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And then, of course, there's Trump, whose unpopularity across the pond led a lot of Britons to suggest Charles cancel the trip entirely.
Nominally tied to America's 250th birthday, Charles's trip has been a clear mission to work a little royal soft-power magic on the fraying relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. Nowadays the British royal family has very little formal power, and they spend a good deal of their time at home unveiling plaques and touring very mundane places like new grocery stores. In a 2013 essay, the author Hilary Mantel painted the life of a modern working royal as, essentially, constantly catching sight of stacks of chairs, "a depressing, institutional, impersonal sight." But the royals are particularly useful to the British government as cultural ambassadors, hence the institution of the international royal tour.
New York, meanwhile, prides itself on taking pretty much anything in stride, a place where it's traditionally considered mortifying to make a big deal over spotting a celebrity. Emmanuel Macron had to call Trump on his cell because the NYPD wouldn't let him through to the UN General Assembly; a former Japanese princess lived in Manhattan for years and nobody really cared. (She eventually moved to the suburbs.) Some New Yorkers are offended on general principle. Curtis Sliwa, for instance, expressed outright contempt on his radio show: "I hate the royal family. They are the biggest deadbeat welfare cheats in the world."
But the very specific combination of New York City, our mayors, and royal visits often produce juxtapositions straight out of absurdist comedy.