Netanyahu Meets With Trump

Plus: Zohran Mamdani's creative race identification, catastrophic Hill Country flooding, and more...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Donald Trump today: It's the first meeting since the U.S. and Israel struck Iran, and the two leaders intend to talk through what sort of nuclear deal the U.S. should pursue with Iran, as well as what a possible ceasefire in Gaza could look like and how Trump could broker such a deal.

Israel and Hamas have agreed on short-term ceasefires in the past: a January–March ceasefire earlier this year, and a brief August 2024 pause in the fighting. Trump says he wants a more durable truce: a 60-day pause in the fighting during which a full stop to the war is negotiated.

"Hamas has insisted that any cease-fire plan must pave a path to a complete and lasting cessation of hostilities," reports The New York Times. But "Netanyahu…has insisted on a temporary cease-fire until Hamas's military wing and government are dismantled." 

"We will free our hostages," Netanyahu said just days ago, referring to the captives still held in Gaza, "and we will defeat Hamas." Current estimates say that, of the 251 hostages taken by the terrorists on that terrible day in October 2023, roughly 50 remain in Gaza, with at least 27 of those believed to be dead. Hamas has remained resistant to being dismantled (and to any occupation by Israeli soldiers to ensure the group is stamped out). But among the right wing in Israel, eradicating Hamas is a necessary precondition.

One thing to watch: Netanyahu's view of Trump's pursuit of a nuclear deal with Tehran. In the past, Netanyahu has resisted this idea. But Trump appears to be highly motivated to pursue diplomacy following the American strikes on nuclear sites in Iran, and the recent 12-day fighting between Iran and Israel.

Reports as to how much enriched uranium was actually destroyed vary; Trump has characteristically claimed huge success, but Iranian authorities have claimed that enriched uranium was actually moved to alternate sites prior to the attack. Regardless, there are still unanswered questions related to how much of a setback Tehran's nuclear program has been dealt, and Netanyahu and Trump will need to figure out what type of nuclear capabilities they will and will not tolerate from Tehran—and how to bring that about.

Move over, Eric Adams: We'll have another black mayor soon! Self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mamdani, when applying to Columbia University back in 2009 as a high school senior, claimed he was "Asian" as well as "Black or African American." It's true that Mamdani was born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent (a Punjabi Hindu mother and a Gujarati Muslim father), and that he was named after the Ghanaian socialist politician Kwame Nkrumah (for his middle name). But it pretty clearly looks like Mamdani was trying to use affirmative action to his advantage: He was born into a position of great privilege, to very wealthy parents, moving to South Africa when he was five and then to New York City when he was seven.

Mamdani, for his part, "said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process," reports The New York Times. Sure. "Most college applications don't have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background," said Mamdani, who says he then wrote in "Ugandan" when given the opportunity to provide more information. He claims he filled out all his college applications the same way.

Look, I'm not sure I buy this. Most well-off students who've been at academically competitive schools spend a fair bit of time thinking about how to put their absolute best foot forward to win the admissions game. In an affirmative action regime, this type of, uh, creativity is incentivized.

If Mamdani can claim he's African American, maybe Elon Musk should too. Maybe the category is meaningless, or can be made meaningless the more people claim it. All of this is, I think, a good argument in favor of universities scrapping race-conscious admissions processes: The rich-kid/third-culture kid ability to game the system could, in fact, convince proponents that the system doesn't actually work as intended, which would be a victory for those of us who think race-conscious processes are discriminatory and offensive.

The kicker: Even after all this, Columbia rejected him. (Racist!)

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Scenes from New York: 

I hope you all had a blessed Fourth! pic.twitter.com/eaJM5rsqGo

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) July 7, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• Early in the morning on July 4, Texas' Hill Country experienced a downpour of rain that made the Guadalupe River rise 26 feet in 45 minutes. The unexpected overnight flooding has killed at least 81 people—28 of them children, due to the flooding hitting a Christian girls' camp, Camp Mystic—with 41 still missing. Finger-pointing has already started: Texas officials say the National Weather Service failed to issue accurate warnings, while others have claimed the NWS is understaffed, in both the San Angelo and San Antonio offices, and thus incompetent. The Weather Service itself has said there was no real way to predict this level of rainfall and that the forecasts were the best they had available, but that the storm escalated beyond what they had imagined. Others have blamed the fact that Kerr County (where most of the deaths occurred) does not have a flood warning system, which taxpayers deemed too expensive to pay for. It's a terrible tragedy, and search-and-rescue missions are using helicopters, horses, and drones to try to find the missing.
• I'm sorry for the continue Zohran Mamdani hate, but the cherry on top of this picture is that he's wearing gloves (it was taken during the pandemic):

Perfect juxtaposition between the man bold enough to navigate the ocean on a wooden boat and pathetic behavior of the modern leftist, who can only take his wholly unearned moral superiority and destroy what greater men have built https://t.co/LsfeQ1wo5Y

— Inez Stepman ⚪️????⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) July 6, 2025

• For more spice from Stepman, check out this week's Just Asking Questions:

• European and American negotiators "worked over the weekend to hash out a preliminary deal that would avoid a massive tariff escalation. Ambassadors from the bloc's countries are on standby in the event the European Commission…makes headway in the talks," reports Bloomberg. Meanwhile, "Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff," said the president in a Truth Social post on Sunday night. "There will be no exceptions to this policy." So: a mixed bag on trade.
• "An Australian woman was on Monday convicted of murdering three elderly relatives of her estranged husband with a meal laced with poisonous mushrooms, and attempting to murder a fourth, in a case that gripped the country," reports Reuters.
• Thailand's pot "green rush" has been mostly put to a stop.