Trump’s Blonde Companion Becomes Security Scandal

Good morning and welcome to the Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet on Substack, where we’re bringing you the stories you need to know now—and that we’re not afraid to publish.

For days since Jon Ossoff dared to mention what The Daily Beast readers have long known—that Donald Trump has Natalie Harp Krazy Glued to his side—those around Trump have shrieked in faux outrage. This morning we are getting closer to the heart of the scandal, and why the shrieks are so loud. We have two stunning developments that show the importance of Harp to Trump—and raise extremely serious questions about national security and whether a one-time far-right “news” anchor has unsupervised access to the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. Who has been shrillest and most voluble in the outrage? Scott Jennings, of course. The CNN pundit’s multi-platform defense of Harp’s presence is hardly disinterested. Instead, it is perfectly timed to polish his own credentials to take Karoline Leavitt’s job. This morning we have a delicious insight into his thirst for fame (and an unreal throwback photo to when he was twice the man), and we’ve got the moment he was shamed for his brazen hypocrisy. Also this morning, Leavitt is followed in the stampede to exit the White House; we’ll name who’s next. Lindsey Graham’s nepo-sister has quite the excuse for her epically bad debate performance. And is Trump physically capable of adultery? Astonishingly, CNN aired a possible answer.

Since the founding of the Republic, presidents have entrusted relations with foreign leaders to secretaries of state, ambassadors, and national security advisers whose names resound through history: Benjamin Franklin; Thomas Jefferson; Adlai Stevenson; Henry Kissinger; Colin Powell, and many more. This morning we are learning that to that list we must add Natalie Harp—with a jaw-dropping asterisk.

The 35-year-old blonde former anchor on One America News Network (a MAGA “news” channel) is a Liberty University graduate who has no foreign service experience, no military experience, and no known history of foreign travel. But this morning we have learned that she is the conduit by which foreign leaders access Donald Trump. Trump, it is worth emphasizing, is—by his own choice—a wartime president. But that foreign relations now come down to the “human printer”—a figure so singularly devoted to Trump that she had a screaming fit and jumped into an SUV’s trunk to be part of his entourage, and who feeds him a diet of AI slop that he posts on his Truth Social account—means Harp has gone from being an amusing summer scandal to a major question of national security.

But that’s not the only—or maybe even the worst—national security scandal emerging about Harp this morning. Harp, it turns out, went without any security clearance for a year. She was in the heart of the West Wing, right at the center of power and right beside a president known to be incontinent in his guarding of secrets, without the FBI, or the other national security agencies, being able to dig into her past to find out if she could be compromised.

How hungry and thirsty is Scott Jennings to be White House press secretary now that Karoline Leavitt is out? Hungry enough to shuttle between New York and Washington, D.C., for secret steakhouse talks with Susie Wiles. Thirsty enough to burn up CNN’s summer airwaves with endless attacks on Democrats for daring to name Natalie Harp. But Hot Scott Summer is hardly the start of Jennings’ pilgrimage of disgrace to the altar of Trump. This morning, Kaivan Shroff, a former student of Jennings when he taught at Harvard, reveals exactly how thirsty Jennings always was, because Jennings shared his pay-to-play secret for getting on television with him. And we’ve got an eye-popping photograph of the old Jennings, which shows a remarkable personal transformation.

Jennings’ naked lust to be Leavitt 2.0 came very publicly unglued, however, in an appearance late on Wednesday on CNN’s Newsnight with Abby Phillip. Jennings has honed his message about Harp to accuse Democrats of misogyny for daring to ask about the $150,000-a-year special assistant and executive assistant to the president, claiming that this very public servant is some sort of private person—and that Democrats and “the media” (which he was willing to pay to appear on) are women-haters. But then he was confronted with a supercut of the boss he wants saying the vilest things about women. Get your popcorn ready.

To lose the deputy press secretary, the press secretary, and the White House counsel, in the space of a few days looked like a suspicious pattern. This morning it was confirmed that the White House is in the grip of a full-scale stampede ahead of the midterms. Abigail Jackson, Karoline Leavitt, and David Warrington have been joined by James Braid, the director of legislative affairs. What exactly would have someone with this title heading for the (increasingly crowded) exits? Leigh Kimmins has the details.

Darline Graham, the inheritor of her brother Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat, had an historically shocking debate performance ahead of her runoff for the Republican nomination to run for the full six-year term. Frozen by a simple question about Taiwan and the South China Sea from Greta Van Susteren, the one-time CNN anchor who is now a MAGA TV anchor on Newsmax, Graham asked for it to be repeated. And then she unraveled. “I’m just going to be honest here... I’m not that informed on national security,” she eventually replied as the audience jeered. “National security is not my thing, not my area of expertise, but I support the military.” Now she is trying a desperate excuse, explaining