New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch hold a press conference at the scene where a car slammed into the entrance of the headquarters of a Jewish religious order, the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, U.S., January 28, 2026. REUTERS/Madison Swart
An influencer in President Donald Trump's MAGA movement floated a weird new theory about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after the latest Jeffrey Epstein files were released.
Included in the thousands of pages of new documents was a picture of Mamdani's mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, who used to work for Epstein in New York, alongside Epstein and former President Bill Clinton. Nair is holding a toddler Mamdani in the photo, which sparked rumors among the MAGA faithful that the New York City mayor is actually Epstein's son.
MAGA influencer Benny Johnson said in a recent video that the latest tranche of Epstein files raised questions about Mamdani's family, whom he described as "one of the most powerful communists on Earth."
"Mamdani was installed, and was one of those test-tube babies that were bred out exactly for this moment," Johnson said.
Trump's MAGA movement thrives on conspiracy theories like the new one about Mamdani because they are narratives designed to capture anger at certain establishments, according to The New York Times. Those establishments just so happen to be the ones that Trump has made a political career out of fighting against.
Trump climbed the political ladder using the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in America, a theory that forced Obama to publicly release his birth certificate. That narrative, among others, were seemingly designed to capture the resentment of many white Americans who felt the country was no longer recognizable to them.