There are few spectacles in American politics more exquisitely fucking ridiculous than watching the Republican Party, after spending DECADES feeding women’s dignity and bodily autonomy through an industrial wood chipper, suddenly appoint itself the emergency custodian of female honor because Jon Ossoff said the name Natalie Harp.
Apparently MAGA has discovered women.
WOMEN!
Who knew?
Somebody call Guinness World Records, wake up the night curator at the American Museum of Natural History, get National Geographic on a three-way call with the ghost of Jane Goodall, and tell everybody to bring binoculars and one of those khaki vests with seventeen pockets, because we are witnessing something previously believed impossible outside extremely controlled laboratory conditions:
The spontaneous emergence of Republican feminism.
There it is.
Crouched beneath the fluorescent lights of cable television, blinking nervously, sniffing the air, clutching a strand of costume pearls in one tiny trembling paw and trying to figure out which end of the suffragette banner goes up.
Nobody fucking startle it.
We may never see this shit again.
Because THAT is the magnificent fraud underneath this whole pantomime of piety.
Republicans aren’t merely complaining that Ossoff took a cheap shot. They’re scolding DEMOCRATS because Democrats claim to support women, respect women, defend women’s rights, and therefore, according to these suddenly corseted custodians of feminine virtue, Ossoff saying Trump wants to build his ballroom and “travel with Natalie” proves the whole Democratic commitment to women was bullshit all along.
Excuse me while my frontal lobe packs a Samsonite, leaves a forwarding address, and applies for fucking asylum in Luxembourg.
The “locker-room talk,” “fuck your feelings” folks do not get to spend half a century treating women’s equality like an administrative error and then appoint themselves hall monitors of misogyny because Jon Ossoff uttered one woman’s first name.
These motherfuckers helped destroy Roe, stripping millions of women of a constitutional protection over their own bodies and replacing it with a geographical roulette wheel in which your reproductive freedom can depend upon which side of a state line your uterus happens to be occupying when something goes catastrophically wrong.
They have politicians, pastors, pundits, activists, and assorted reactionary crotch-sniffers in their broader political ecosystem openly entertaining the idea that maybe giving women the vote was where America took a wrong fucking turn.
And NOW they’re concerned about respect for women?
Please.
They don’t want women autonomous, powerful, medically sovereign, politically independent, sexually self-determining, or inconveniently capable of telling some puffed-up patriarch with a flag pin to go fuck himself. They want women “protected” in precisely the way a collector protects a porcelain doll: owned, arranged, controlled, displayed, occasionally dusted, and expected to remain exactly where somebody else fucking put her.
That is not protection.
That is possession wearing a church hat.
And spare me the rest of the pageantry.
Republicans have been hawking “protect women,” “protect children,” “protect life,” “family values,” “thoughts and prayers,” “Christian morality,” and every other shrink-wrapped morsel of sanctimonious horseshit from the same squeaking evangelical medicine wagon for decades, rolling that gaudy little hypocrisy cart into town whenever somebody needs a birth forced, a book banned, a school shooting metabolized into six solemn tweets and a flag emoji, or another Republican politician caught with his pants around his ankles quietly shoved through the emergency rectory hatch before Sunday services.
It is not a moral code.
It is fucking wardrobe.
They pull “women’s dignity” off the hanger when a Democrat can be beaten with it, “protect life” when somebody needs jurisdiction over a stranger’s uterus, “protect children” when there’s a marginalized kid available for torment, “thoughts and prayers” when actual children are dead, and “family values” whenever Donald Trump is temporarily between adultery stories and Epstein files.
Different costume.
Same carnival.
And right now they’ve pulled the EMERGENCY FEMINISM costume out of mothballs because Jon Ossoff mentioned Natalie Harp.
Natalie.
That was apparently the fucking femicide.
Not “mistress.”
Not “lover.”
Not “concubine.”
Not an accusation of sex, romance, adultery, clandestine canoodling, presidential dry-humping, geriatric slap-and-tickle with a sentient sack of liverwurst, executive-branch knob gobbling, or any other carnal fucking activity requiring Republicans to contact Susan B. Anthony through a Ouija board and apologize for what has become of the franchise.
He said her NAME.
And suddenly Scott Jennings is clutching his imaginary pearls so hard they’re becoming geological, Laura Ingraham has developed the constitution of a consumptive duchess, Megyn Kelly has appointed herself fucking Eleanor Roosevelt of the Natalie Harp Protection League, and Newt Gingrich, whom I genuinely thought was fucking DEAD and whose face frankly does very little to rebut the assumption, has somehow materialized to explain that JON OSSOFF HAS DISRESPECTED A WOMAN.
As an aside, didn’t that leprechaun-looking, aspic-filled fuck seek a divorce from his first wife while she was undergoing cancer treatment? Perhaps Professor Gingrich can schedule his seminar on Chivalry and the Proper Treatment of Women immediately after lunch.
Are these people fucking serious?
I have expired Bed Bath & Beyond coupons with more moral authority.
A gas-station bathroom key attached to a cinder block is a more convincing guardian of womanhood.
A Hooters employment handbook retrieved from a grease trap has a stronger claim to feminist jurisprudence.
Because we fucking remember Trump bragging about grabbing women by the pussy.
We remember the civil jury that found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.
We remember him being asked what he and his own daughter had in common and beginning his answer with “sex,” a combination of syllables no father should ever produce unless the next six are “education is important for young adults.”
We watched him repeatedly launch personal and sexually degrading attacks against Kamala Harris. We watched him stand across from her during a presidential debate and utter the words “she put out.”
And the Republican Party somehow staggered onward.
Nobody summoned Florence Nightingale.
Nobody loosened Ted Cruz’s whalebone corset.
Nobody dispatched a horse-drawn ambulance to Fox headquarters carrying laudanum, smelling salts, a concerned physician named Percival, and one of those little silver bells you ring when your humors have become dangerously unbalanced.
But Jon Ossoff says Natalie and suddenly these motherfuckers are Jane Austen characters with dangerously low blood pressure.
The especially preposterous part is that Ossoff didn’t actually accuse Natalie Harp of doing anything sexual.
He referenced something observable to anyone possessing functional retinas.
She is around Donald Trump.
A LOT.
This woman has achieved a degree of presidential proximity normally reserved for Secret Service agents, the nuclear football, his diaper valet, and whichever terrified staffer has been assigned custodial responsibility for the emergency ketchup.
When there wasn’t room for Harp inside a motorcade SUV, she climbed into the fucking trunk so she could remain with Trump.
Read that again.
This wasn’t the last helicopter leaving Saigon.
Nobody had released the velociraptors.
Mount Vesuvius was not erupting behind the motorcade while Natalie clung desperately to a piece of luggage screaming, “SAVE YOURSELVES!”
There was insufficient seating in a CAR.
Most grown adults encountering this particular transportation calamity wait for another fucking car.
Natalie Harp apparently selected luggage.
And we fucking PAY HER.
That matters.
Because if some taxpayer-funded presidential barnacle is riding in trunks, shadowing Donald Trump across continents, materializing beside him with the regularity of a Victorian ghost with a printer cartridge, and occupying enough physical and political space around the president that half the Republican Party develops a stress rash when somebody says her first name, then YES, I would like to know what the fuck she does, why she is always there, how much access she has, what influence she wields, and why apparently everybody in Washington is supposed to pretend not to notice any of it.
So forgive me if I refuse to accept lectures about the impropriety of NOTICING.
And Megyn Kelly’s role in this little passion play of porcelain indignation deserves its own fucking diorama.
Donald Trump responded to Kelly asking difficult questions by announcing to the entire world that there was “blood coming out of her wherever.” He spent years attacking her because she committed the unforgivable offense of being a woman who challenged him publicly without immediately folding herself into a decorative napkin and apologizing for inconveniencing his ego.
And now SHE is scandalized on behalf of women?
Megyn.
Girl.
There are abandoned shopping carts careening diagonally across ShopRite parking lots with better directional awareness.
Even Jesse Watters couldn’t convincingly keep the lace handkerchief pressed to his forehead. He acknowledged that Trump has said far sleazier things and that he has defended them anyway, which may be the closest Fox News has come to achieving spontaneous intellectual consistency without adult supervision.
And while the entire Republican outrage orchestra is sawing away at this one fucking note, there is a MUCH bigger reason they would love everybody staring at Natalie Harp until their retinas detach.
Because listen, I ALSO WANT TO STARE AT THE WEIRD ALBINO HORSE-TEETH LADY IN THE TRUNK.
I am only human.
Natalie Harp is fascinating in the way the cops showing up across the street because the owner died two weeks ago and the dogs got hungry is fascinating.
You don’t necessarily WANT to know what happened.
But good fucking luck looking away.
I have QUESTIONS.
But Natalie Harp is not the fucking story.
WE ARE.
The American people.
We are six months into an illegal, interminable fucking war Donald Trump continuously insists he “won on day one,” while American servicemembers remain in danger, billions keep disappearing into the bottomless maw of this belligerent, bungling, blood-and-bullshit boondoggle, and nobody in this swaggering clown-car junta can tell us what victory looks like, when this ends, or how many more lives and dollars have to get fed into the geopolitical meat grinder before somebody finally admits DAY ONE was six fucking months ago.
Meanwhile, everything at home costs more.
Gas is up 30 percent, diesel 48, jet fuel 73, healthcare more than 7, meat and eggs 19, juice and food 22, housing 6.5, a grim little arithmetic colonoscopy of American life in which practically everything required to move, eat, live, heal, or keep a roof over your fucking head has become more expensive.
And thanks in part to the special fucking circus act of the brain-worm shit swimmer and the Hitler-saluting chainsaw juggler gutting our food-safety infrastructure, Americans aren’t just paying more for the privilege of fucking EATING, the grocery store has started resembling a low-budget episode of Fear Factor where you need an FDA recall alert, a barcode scanner, and the situational awareness of a bomb technician just to pack a goddamn lunch.
But look who’s thriving.
Wall Street profits: UP 19 PERCENT.
Donald Trump’s wealth: UP SIX FUCKING BILLION DOLLARS.
His sons: UP 200 PERCENT.
His Cabinet: UP 10 PERCENT.
Well butter my ass and call me a biscuit.
Working Americans are standing beneath the migraine lights at ShopRite deciding which basic necessity gets voted off the fucking island while the people running the country are being launched through the stratosphere aboard a diamond-encrusted wealth rocket.
THAT is what Jon Ossoff was talking about.
The war.
The prices.
The bills.
The self-dealing.
The grotesque spectacle of a government selling itself as the champion of working people while the people at the top gorge, glisten, and grow richer and everybody underneath them gets squeezed like the last fucking tube of toothpaste in a Motel 6 bathroom.
And Republicans do not want you looking at ANY OF IT.
So:
LOOK OVER HERE!
NATALIE!
JON OSSOFF SAID NATALIE!
HE SAID A LADY’S NAME!
FETCH THE CHAISE LONGUE BEFORE NEWT BECOMES LIGHTHEADED!
And Ossoff managed to turn their own operatic hysteria against them.
He said one name.
They supplied the amplification.
They put him on television. They put him in headlines. They pumped him through podcasts, radio, social media, cable panels, newsletters, and every other available orifice of the conservative outrage digestive tract until millions of Americans who may barely have registered him before were suddenly asking:
Who the fuck is Jon Ossoff?
He tossed one marble onto the kitchen floor and every twitchy, thin-skinned, crisis-conjuring Republican reprobate in the building arrived wearing roller skates.
Beautiful.
So yes, by all means, let’s talk about Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded toner troll, his trunk-riding, printer-toting presidential poltergeist, his alabaster little access apparition rattling around the executive branch like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction if the rabbit were a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet and Michael Douglas had been replaced by a lacquered casino ham with a motorcade.
I certainly fucking will.
But Natalie Harp is not the fucking scandal.
She is the weird little porcelain figurine perched on top of the cake while the bakery is on fire, the accountant has fled to Belize, the flour is contaminated, the staff is looting the register, and somebody in the parking lot is still insisting the grand opening went beautifully.
The scandal is the illegal war, the prices, the corruption, the grotesque enrichment, and a government that keeps handing working Americans the fucking bill while the people running it are upstairs licking frosting off the chandelier.
Natalie Harp is one weird fucking branch on this rancid, root-rotted tree.
But the rot is the entire goddamn regime.
And starting this November, we need to rip it out by the fucking roots.
And with that, today’s song:
I just want to thank you for the response to my Rosie O’Donnell essay. Every comment, share, and message meant so much to me. I really do think of this community as my extended family, and I’m so grateful for all of you.
I love you guys!
Stay safe out there, stay strong and stay connected to each other!
💙 Jo
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