Mamdani’s Top Aide Falsely Accuses Trump of “Raping Underage Girls”

Plus, Harvard bans some travel to Israel; and more

In today’s newsletter:

A Mamdani’s aide’s reckless and evidence-free accusation;

Fed Chairman Powell’s don’t-blame-me routine;

another trade deal, this one with South Korea, that includes a presidential slush fund that’s probably unconstitutional;

“massive” new U.S. sanctions on Iran;

regulating Nancy Pelosi’s stock-trading;

Brown’s University’s settlement deal with the government;

Harvard bans travel to Israel;

and the “comment of the day,” about Senator Tim Scott’s bipartisan “Halleluiah” housing deal.

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Also: tomorrow (Thursday July 31) at about 10:30 am eastern we’ll be going “Live” with

Mark Oppenheimer

of the Oppenheimer Substack, the founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative and a former lecturer in English at Yale, to talk about his stunning recent piece headlined “Is Yale teaching Jewish writers?” To tune in it’ll help to have the Substack mobile app installed. If you can’t catch it on short notice, don’t stress—I’m hoping to post a recording of it later—but it should be fun, so if you can join us, we’d love to have you. There should be an alert when it starts with info on how to join.

Mamdani speaking at a May 11, 2021 rally to boycott, divest and sanction Israel.

A top aide to the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is publicly and falsely accusing President Trump of “raping underage girls.”

Much of Mamdani’s press conference on his first day back in New York after a trip to Uganda for his wedding was devoted to the 33-year-old Israel-hating socialist answering questions about the candidate’s own years-old defund-the-police social media posts.

In the course of answering questions about how he first heard about a shooting at a Midtown office building that killed 4 people, including a police officer, Mamdani said he had been woken up in Uganda at 4 a.m. by a campaign aide, Morris Katz.

Who is Morris Katz? Katz’s own X account on July 25, 2025, asked, “Why don’t we just say what we mean? “The President of the United States was raping underage girls and is using his power to cover it up, protecting himself and his shitty billionaire friends.”

It’s an apparent reference to far-left and far-right conspiracy theories about President Trump and sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, for which there is not any evidence. ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos agreed to a $16 million settlement in December 2024 after Stephanopoulos falsely said Trump was found liable for rape in a different case.

Katz did not immediately respond to a message sent to his company, an advertising agency called “Fight,” asking about the social media post.

The episode is likely to fuel the feeling that Mamdani is not only hostile to financially successful New Yorkers but also lacks the experience, discipline, and focus needed to manage New York City.

As mayor, Mamdani would have to work with President Trump. Having a top aide publicly falsely accuse Trump of sex crimes makes that more difficult.

It’s also a distraction at a moment when Mamdani might want to focus on the “affordability” issues that worked for him in the primary election, not a conspiracy theory.

It’s also hypocritical. Mamdani has been complaining about Cuomo making an issue of Mamdani’s defund-the-police social media posts from 2020. But any interactions between Epstein and Trump are more than 20 years old—much older than the things Mamdani is trying to dismiss as old news. Katz’s erratic social media post is less than a week old.

In a certain way, though, Morris Katz and Zohran Mamdani deserve each other. Mamdani’s campaign foreign policy is all about false, baseless, scurrilous accusations—that Israel is a genocidal apartheid settler colonialist state. Now Katz has added a false accusation against Trump. One hesitates to fuel the false accusations by reporting on them, but there are three months for the New York City electorate to take a hard look at this guy and ask whether they really want him and his reckless crowd of conspiracy theorists running the largest city in America.