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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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.
Fed Chairman Powell’s don’t-blame-me routine: I spent 45 minutes of this afternoon watching Fed Chairman Powell’s press conference performance after the Fed Open Market Committee meeting. There’s plenty to parse but the most comical parts to me involved Powell’s efforts to evade responsibility for the consequences of the Fed’s policies.
“We don’t set mortgage rates at the Fed,” Powell said at one point. Well, for the many Americans with adjustable-rate mortgages, the Fed does indeed affect the rates. And even 30-year-fixed mortgage rates vary widely in a way tethered to the short-term rates that the Fed does fix.
The real whopper, though, came when a reporter asked about the weakness of the dollar. “The Treasury only speaks to the dollar,” Powell said. “It’s not something that’s been a topic of major focus at all at the Fed.”
One of the Fed’s legal mandates is price stability. All price stability is about is making sure a dollar buys about the same as it did a year ago—whether what is being bought is goods, services, other currencies, gold, commodities—it doesn’t really matter. If Powell doesn’t think the Fed is dealing with dollars, he’s even slower than President Trump thinks. The Constitution gives Congress, not Treasury, the power to coin money and regulate its value. One reason the dollar has been eroding in value may be that Congress has delegated that power to an institution, in the Federal Reserve, that has taken its eyes off the ball.
Another trade deal, this one with South Korea, that includes a presidential slush fund that’s probably unconstitutional: President Trump announced a trade deal with South Korea. Trump said, in part, “The deal is that South Korea will give to the United States $350 Billion Dollars for Investments owned and controlled by the United States, and selected by myself, as President.” This is on the same template, and suffers the same potential constitutional and economic problems, that I outlined in “$550 Billion Trump-Lutnick-Japan Slush Fund May Violate Constitution.” If the U.S. government is going to raise and spend $900 billion, Congress needs to be involved. It may decide it’s better to just put the revenue in the main budget rather than using it as a presidential discretionary fund. If a Democratic president were doing these sorts of deals and bypassing Congress, Republicans in Congress would be apoplectic.
“Massive” new sanctions on Iran: “Treasury Takes Massive Action Against High-Profile Iranian Network,” is the headline over a U.S. Treasury press release.
It begins, “Today, in its largest Iran-related action since 2018, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is designating more than 50 individuals and entities and identifying more than 50 vessels that are part of the vast shipping empire controlled by Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani (Hossein). Hossein—the son of Ali Shamkhani, a top political advisor to the Supreme Leader of Iran—leverages corruption through his father’s political influence at the highest levels of the Iranian regime to build and operate a massive fleet of tankers and containerships. This network transports oil and petroleum products from Iran and Russia, as well as other cargo, to buyers around the world, generating tens of billions of dollars in profit.”
It quotes the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent: “The Shamkhani family’s shipping empire highlights how the Iranian regime elites leverage their positions to accrue massive wealth and fund the regime’s dangerous behavior….The over 115 sanctions issued today are the largest to-date since the Trump Administration implemented our campaign of maximum pressure on Iran. These actions put America first by targeting regime elites that profit while Tehran threatens the safety of the United States.”
Encouraging, and one hopes just one step in a bigger U.S.-Israel strategy to follow-up the attack on Iran’s nuclear program with actions that weaken the Iranian regime to the point at which the Iranian people replace it with something better.
Regulating Nancy Pelosi’s stock-trading: President Trump made news twice today about Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s stock trading. First he responded to a reporter’s question about Senator Hawley’s legislation banning stock ownership by members of Congress by saying, “I like it conceptually” but would have to look at the details. Then, later in the day, he put out a social media post denouncing Hawley (“a second-tier Senator”) for blocking an investigation of Pelosi. Rather than banning stock ownership by senators or members of Congress, why not require immediate, same-day public disclosure of stock and options trades?
Brown’s University’s settlement deal with the government: Brown announced a settlement with the federal government, becoming the third Ivy, after Penn and Columbia, to make a deal. One aspect that caught my eye in the agreement was a commitment from Brown for “support for enhanced security at the Brown-RISD Hillel.”
Security expenses at Harvard Hillel and at Harvard Chabad have been a recurring issue. It’ll be interesting to see whether or how they are addressed in any deal that is reached between Harvard and the federal government.
One hopes that eventually things will calm down to the point that security is unnecessary and the Hillel is just another campus building with an open, unlocked door, as, in my recollection at least, it was at Harvard in the early 1990s.
I saw President Garber over the weekend and encouraged him to take a Columbia-style deal from the Trump administration if he could get one for Harvard. Trump was asked about Harvard today and said, “We’re negotiating with them. They would like to settle, so we’ll see what happens.”
Harvard bans travel to Israel: Harvard has been rolling out announcements of various moves designed to make the university look less hostile to Jews and Israel—naming a former Hillel campus rabbi, Getzel Davis, as “inaugural director of interfaith engagement,” announcing “two new initiatives that promise to bolster the University’s academic engagement with Israeli institutions,” including a collaboration with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev that Harvard says “will offer study abroad opportunities for undergraduates during the academic year and the summer.”
What the university has not been aggressively publicizing is that, according to Harvard’s Global Support Services website for Israel, most recently updated June 14, 2025, “Harvard sponsored travel by undergraduate students and post-baccalaureate fellows is prohibited.”
Harvard surely has some bureaucratic explanation for this related to the Iran war or its insurance or the like—a similar ban applies to Lebanon, though not to Qatar or Saudi Arabia. Qatar came under attack by Iran in the 12-Day War. But there surely exist other American universities—Yeshiva, for example—that are not currently prohibiting sponsored undergraduate travel to Israel. If Harvard’s leadership is as serious as it claims to be about creating a welcoming, nondiscriminatory environment for Jews and Israelis, lifting the ban on sponsored student travel to Israel might be something to tackle.
Comment of the Day: From yesterday’s post headlined, “‘Halleluiah,’ Senator Tim Scott gets a bipartisan win on housing supply,” a reader comments: “I spent 30 years in the affordable housing business. Government involvement is a mess which leads to ridiculously expensive production of ‘affordable housing.’ At the margin, there are some things in this bill that might help increase the supply of affordable housing. However, the bill appears to be as likely to materially increase the supply of affordable housing as the Biden era ‘infrastructure’ bill materially increased the supply and quality of our infrastructure…”
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Years ago I worked for a brilliant Irish engineer who introduced me to the phrase “too clever by half”- so much of this piece is precisely that.
You’re using the ABC settlement to imply that any accusation that Trump committed any kind of sexual assault is unfounded. It’s a clever sleight of hand, but it’s a sleight of hand.
And a politician’s political views evolving over a 5 year period is a very different thing than the question of whether or not someone had a close relationship with a pedophile.
To my mind, the real problem with relying on these kind of weak arguments is that they suggest that you don’t actually have a strong point to make.
Harvard's banning sponsored travel to Israel is primarily a liability issue. Students who want to go to Israel on their own dime or funded by non-Harvard agencies are not prohibited from doing so. Your statement is accurate as far as it goes, but the careless reader might think this is another manifestation of institutional anti-semitism. Harvard is also currently banning sponsored travel to Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Burma.