A horde of a few dozen reporters, cable news anchors, and camera crews sprinted across Lafayette Square, before forming a roiling mosh under the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson, impatiently waiting for the arrival of Zohran Mamdani .

He never came. After a considerable wait, an aide for Mamdani came out and informed the ravenous scrum of journalists that the whole throng-on-the-park situation was “unsafe” (fair enough). Your correspondent monitored the chaos from a safe distance. One frazzled reporter, after extricating himself from the pack, described the scene as “mob conditions.” Kaitlan Collins was nearly decked in the head by a large camera.

President Donald Trump , who moments earlier had hosted Mamdani for an extraordinary press conference in the Oval Office, joked that no

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