Giuliani Reveals What He Really Told Mamdani During Viral 9/11 Handshake

Breaking

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and current Mayor Zohran Mamdani shook hands at the 25th anniversary September 11 memorial ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday, a moment that quickly went viral given the bitter rhetoric Giuliani had leveled at Mamdani only days earlier. Aides to both men confirmed to The New York Times what Giuliani told the mayor during the brief exchange: “I’ll pray for you. It’s a really tough job.”

Giuliani later described the moment himself on his own livestream, saying that both he and Mamdani seemed to understand they could either turn the encounter into a distraction or handle it respectfully in front of the cameras. He said he told Mamdani, “I pray for you,” and that the mayor responded, “thank you.” Giuliani said he commended Mamdani simply for extending his hand.

Details and Background

The handshake came less than a week after Giuliani used a Newsmax appearance to argue that Mamdani should skip the ceremony entirely. “It offends me that he’s coming,” Giuliani said at the time, going on to argue that Islam sought to dominate the West: “They have every desire to take us over. This is not, ‘they want to be just another religion.’ They want to dominate us.” He added a sweeping accusation aimed directly at the mayor: “Mamdani is a clear — a clear — supporter of that. All of the Muslims he supports are murderers.”

Mamdani said at the time that he intended to attend regardless, effectively brushing aside Giuliani’s remarks, and his decision to show up set up the tense, closely watched encounter between the two men at the memorial just days later. Giuliani’s comments had landed amid a broader, separate controversy over Mamdani’s own faith, with some critics arguing in the days before the anniversary that Mamdani’s Muslim faith made his attendance at the ceremony inappropriate in the first place — a debate Mamdani rejected by attending anyway, alongside four former presidents and thousands of victims’ family members at the site.

Reactions

Not everyone accepted Giuliani’s own account of the handshake at face value. A UK-based lip-reading expert, Jeremy Freeman, told the New York Post that his read of the footage produced a slightly different exchange: “I prayed for you. Good job. OK.” Body language expert Traci Brown offered a more skeptical read of the moment’s warmth altogether, noting that “his frown grows the longer they shake hands. So he’s not happy about the connection.”

The competing interpretations turned what should have been a straightforward handshake into a small media story of its own, with some outlets emphasizing the seemingly gracious words Giuliani chose and others zeroing in on his visible body language. Neither Giuliani’s team nor Mamdani’s office disputed the substance of what was said, leaving the disagreement centered mainly on tone rather than the actual words exchanged.

Why This Matters to You

The exchange captures just how personal — and how public — New York’s political divisions have become even on a day meant for national unity. Giuliani’s own words just days earlier, questioning whether Mamdani should even be there, made the handshake itself newsworthy in a way it never would have been otherwise, turning a routine courtesy between officials into a moment scrutinized frame by frame.

Whatever was actually said, the moment is likely to be replayed and reinterpreted for weeks, a small but telling example of how thin the line has become between political theater and genuine reconciliation in New York’s fractured political landscape. It also underscores how difficult it can be, in an era of viral clips and professional lip-readers, to know with any confidence which one you’re actually watching, or whether a single handshake can really settle a dispute this personal and this public.