If you live in Greenpoint, Williamsburg or anywhere along the western Queens and north Brooklyn stretch that Nydia Velázquez has represented for more than three decades, the people fighting to replace her just had their first real on-camera scrap, and it was not about rent or the subway. It was about whether the mayor you almost certainly voted for should ever be in the same room as Donald Trump.

At a Spectrum News NY1 debate on Wednesday, June 3, the three leading Democrats in the 7th Congressional District primary, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez and Queens City Councilwoman Julie Won, all said they would not do what Mayor Zohran Mamdani has now done twice: sit across from Trump in the Oval Office. Reynoso, who had already criticized Mamdani’s ICE response timeline last month, put the sharpest point on it. “I don’t think we should be visiting the White House and talking to Trump,” Reynoso said, per NY1. “This guy is terrorizing our neighbors. He’s committing crimes, war crimes. He’s somebody that we should be getting ready to impeach.”

Won, on the same stage, kept it shorter. “Neither Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani are kings of this city,” she said, according to NY1. They were reacting to one trip. Mamdani went to Washington on February 26 to pitch Trump, a man who spent decades as a New York real estate developer, on a plan to build more than 12,000 new homes in the city, his second White House sit-down with the president after a first meeting back in November.