Pulling at the Harp strings

1. With each passing week, Trump’s presidency looks more and more like a home improvement show aimed at a niche audience of rich retirees congregated mainly in Boca Raton and other Florida sunspots. He is, after all, the main tenant of America’s ultimate gated community. This week he showed off the refurbished Thomas Jefferson columns, a newly-laid granite driveway and a helipad on the South Lawn of the White House. Not since he described the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City as “the eighth wonder of the world” has he seemed so proud of his handiwork. The new driveway, though, is hardly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

2. All this as the U.S. national debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time. Ronald Reagan used to quip that he wasn’t worried about the debt because it was big enough to look after itself. But at the end of Reagan’s presidency, gross federal debt was about 50% of GDP. Now it is about 125% of GDP.

   Rather than the soaring debt and a nervy bond market, Trump was fixated with his towering new flag pole. “I’m very good at flag poles,” he declared, with a pride reminiscent of the day back in his first term when he aced that cognitive test which required him to recall and recite five words in sequence - “person, woman, man, camera, TV.”

3. “Camera” and “TV” are actually watchwords for a former reality TV star who serves as the executive producer of his own presidency. Through his diatribes on Truth Social, he tries to act as the screenwriter as well. His problem since the launch of Operation Epic Fury is that he has lost control of the plot-lines. He can post all the memes he likes claiming the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory…..

   

   ….but a dwindling number of Americans believe him. This week Trump’s approval rating, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, sank to its lowest level yet of 33%. Even for his most sycophantic Cabinet officials, that’s a hard one to run up the flag pole and salute.

4. This week we witnessed a spectacular example of his failure to control the news agenda, with the attention lavished on his 35-year-old aide, Natalie Harp - or “the human printer” as she is evidently known in the West Wing because she prints out hard copies of favourable coverage for the president’s delectation and delight. The former anchor at One America News Network became the subject of profiles from all the major news organisations. Writing under the headline, ‘With All My Heart, Natalie.’ Trump’s Most Devoted Aide Emerges, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Shawn McCreesh described her as “a platinum blond geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough.” Recalling the days back in the Clinton administration when the New York Times White House team included Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman - both of whom could lay on the snark - Haberman and McCreesh had fun with the lede as well…..

   “She never takes a day off, not even on Sunday. She works out of the Oval Office and she’s got a regular seat on Marine One. She texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf. She stays up late with him drafting social media posts.

   She rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.”

   Headline writers were having a field day as well. How about this from CNN, which is hardly known for its cheekiness. “Meet Natalie Harp, the aide so close to Trump she once rode in an SUV trunk to accompany him.” Apparently, when every seat in Trump’s car was full ahead of a New York court appearance in 2023, Harp jumped in the boot for the journey from Trump Tower in Midtown to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Good training, no doubt, for hiding in a catering container, as she did in Ankara while switching from “Air Force One” to a waiting decoy plane.

   The BBC described this California native, who grew up in a conservative Christian household, as “both a ‘gatekeeper’ and a ‘comfort blanket’.” In an attempt maybe to dial down the innuendo, I noticed it has since changed its original headline about her being a constant presence at his side.

   

5. Natalie Harp, who has been the subject of Beltway gossip for months, is in the news largely because a Democrat put her there. The Democrat in question, of course, is Senator Jon Ossoff, who is fighting for re-election in Georgia. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar,” he said, name-checking Harp during a campaign speech which instantly went viral.

   Long before the first caucus in Iowa and the first primary in New Hampshire, there is always a media primary, in which the press starts to pick favourites. In that early beauty content, the 39-year-old, who once interned for the Georgia congressman and civil rights great John Lewis, is fast making himself a frontrunner.

   

   On Capitol Hill, Ossoff has proved one of the party’s most incisive inquisitors when confronted in Senate hearings by leading lights in the Trump administration, such as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. On the stump, he’s not an Obama, but, tellingly, he has been likened to Obama. Politicians skilled at wordplay, whether on the page or in speeches, always impress the press pool. Obama wowed reporters with the eloquence of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. As a prose stylist, Ossoff is nowhere near that exalted level, but he can twirl a phrase. He also knows the power of three words. Not “yes we can,” but “travel with Natalie.” Ossoff is having “a moment”, but he can’t even think of being Iowa- or New Hampshire-bound unless he wins re-election in Georgia in the November midterms.

6. Ossoff will no doubt be delighted by the attention he got from the White House this week. “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama,” said White House spokesman Davis Ingle “Nobody gives a s–t what this lightweight loser says,” Ingle added. White House communications director Steven Cheung deriding “Jon Jerkoff” as “the biggest cuck loser in politics.”

   Ossoff also took some incoming from one-time senior Obama aide, David Axelrod. “The paragraph from his weekend speech that has gotten so much attention was a brutal takedown. But two words in it, ‘with Natalie’ seemed gratuitous and unnecessary,” Axelrod said on X. “They juiced the virality of it, I’m sure. Probably thrilled some in the base, who figured it was just giving Trump a taste of his own nasty medicine. But they distracted and detracted from the power of the message.” Do the Democrats go down the Gavin Newsom path and confront Trump with a Trump-like communication - the California Governor’s social media feeds mimic Trump’s Truth Social rants - or do they endeavour to take a higher road to the White House? Another Democratic dilemma.

7. As Washington is convulsed by the relationship between a president and a White House aide decades his junior, what a week for Bill Clinton to celebrate his 80th birthday. It is strange to think of “Slick Willie” as an octogenarian because youth was once his hallmark. Everything in life came early for Bill Clinton. He was just 32 when he became Governor of Arkansas. Aged 34, he then became an ex-governor after voters turfed him out of office. He was 46 when he became president.

   But he aged prematurely as well. A mega-wattage politician in his prime, he has become more of an ambient presence in his twilight years. On the electoral trail in 2016, this time speaking as a surrogate in support of his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, he was a shockingly lacklustre campaigner. The Clinton who vowed during the 1992 New Hampshire primary to fight for the working class “until the last dog dies” was strangely low energy.

8. For me, back in the Nineties, Clinton turned out to be something of a journalistic fairy godfather. I met him first as a student journalist while he was the Governor of Arkansas, which gave me my one of my first stories published by a national newspaper, a daft diary item about a bar in Little Rock. Covering what we then called the Lewinsky scandal, but which we should have called the Clinton scandal, landed me my first posting for the BBC in Washington back in 1998, the year of his impeachment. In a book I wrote about covering the period before and after 911, which I called Adventures in Correspondentland, I described encountering him all those years ago:

   “To meet him, of course, is to be exposed immediately to the Clinton Treatment: the mauling handshake; the empathetic nod; the piercing stare, fixed and admiring; the instant intimacy; a gravitational pull with the power to suck people into his orbit. Often is it said that Clinton not only comes with his own force field but also his own personal weather system, and that he’s so expert at the art of seduction that he can make even the most fleeting acquaintance feel as if he or she is the single most important person in the room. Still, when I first encountered him during the 1992 New Hampshire primary campaign, I came away thinking there was something much more transactional about his celebrated interpersonal skills. The feeling was of being the most important voter in the room, or, in my case, the most important journalist.”

   So important was Clinton to that era, and to my nascent career, that he ended up on the cover of the book. I actually think that, more so than most others, Clinton helped pave the wave for Donald Trump, but that’s a story for another day……

   

9. Clinton’s legacy was again mulled over this week. My favourite line about him came from his Labor Secretary Robert Reich, speaking to PBS’s Frontline programme in 2001 . The two first met on the ocean liner that ferried them across the Atlantic Ocean to Britain, where they were both Rhodes scholars at Oxford. “On Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays I say, ‘Thank God Bill Clinton was there,’ to hold back the right-wing Republican tide, to preserve things that we believed in, to make the right decisions on a lot of very important issues. And then on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, I say to myself, ‘What a waste. All that talent and all that ability, and he did not do what he intended to do and get accomplished. Maybe if he had been more disciplined, both in terms of his agenda, and also his personal life, more could have been done.’ And then on Sundays I don't think about it.”

10. Sunday is usually my day of rest when it comes to thinking about Donald Trump. But not this weekend. I’ll be appearing at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney……

    

    It is a strong line up, and strangely, over the past year, I have interviewed Maria Ressa, Peter Beinhart, and Glenn Loury. There are links to all the interviews.

11. I promise not to bombard you with memes, but, confessedly, these two raised a much-needed chuckle this week…..

    

Have a great weekend.