Fascinating to see Senator Jon Ossoff drop the H-word in his campaign speech last weekend. “[Trump] doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie.” Natalie is Natalie Harp, the leggy, blonde, 35-year-old MAGA mouth who follows Trump everywhere as his executive assistant, feeding him posts that are either flattering or targeted to rile him up for a Truth Social outburst. She has often been sighted trailing on foot behind Trump’s golf cart at Mar-a-Lago with a portable printer, since America’s most powerful social media voice always prefers the dish printed out. She was at his side at his Bedminster golf course in New Jersey last weekend, returning to Washington with the president on Marine One.
I have long pondered the Natalie question, wondering, as I’ve noted, if, like Unity Mitford, the posh sister of Nancy and Jessica who became obsessed with Hitler and hung around his dining haunts in Munich until they crossed paths, Natalie’s devotion to Trump had morphed into something deeper than being his so-called “human printer.” “I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work’” is a sample note she left for Trump, according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their bestseller Regime Change. Trump trusts Harp so much that he gave her control of his Truth Social account, and it was with her dedicated acumen that the AI-generated image depicting Trump as Jesus Christ was posted. Like Trump, Harp never seems to sleep. Those drop-offs of the latest conspiracy theories to Trump’s private quarters in the small hours – do they, like Monica Lewinsky’s pizza deliveries to Bill Clinton in 1995 during the government shutdown, come with any benefits? Or is it simply a star-struck groupie’s obsession with power? (Historians are still debating which it was with Unity and the Führer.)
Melania, these days, is nowhere to be seen. Not at Lindsey Graham’s funeral. Not at the dignified transfer ceremony in July of the service members killed in the Iran war. Not seen since the World Cup final in New Jersey on July 19th. Meanwhile, Karoline Leavitt’s maternity leave was clearly a punishing emotional absence for Trump, who once raved about his 28-year-old press secretary, “It’s that brain, it’s those lips—the way they move, they move like a machine gun.” He was so bereft without Leavitt’s fearless defense of his daily lies and presidential fantasies that he called her incessantly during her leave, asking when she was coming back. To a losing, dilapidated, lame-duck POTUS with an unassuageable ego, did Harp’s perky presence become a consolation prize? And was the irritation of her ascent another reason Leavitt, who quit weeks after her return to the job, “just [did] not feel it anymore,” as one source put it? To my tabloid scavenger’s eye, it was a tell that, while Sec. of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent were left behind on the “decoy plane” along with hapless members of the press corps, Harp was chosen to join Trump and War Sec Pete Hegseth to huddle in a swiftly deployed catering cart and board a back-up Air Force C-32A. That probably pissed off Leavitt too, though she herself wasn’t on the decoy plane (but could have been if she had been on the trip).
There is no such thing as a sex scandal for Trump, whose entire life has been priapic plunder from Jeffrey Epstein’s libidinous parties to sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf’s dressing room (SCOTUS declined to hear Trump’s appeal of her case for a second time on Monday — yet more kudos to EJ) to hotel assignations with Stormy Daniels soon after his wife gave birth, most of it greeted with a collective shrug by the American public. But the rise of Natalie Harp may represent something different. A last-days vulnerability. A dangerous and intimate exposure to slavish bad judgment, just when he needs pragmatic interventions. Harp was formerly a presenter for One America News Network, where she cemented Trump’s esteem by promoting false claims of fraud in the 2020 election and, according to The Bulwark, in 2024 reposted a video of faux newspaper front pages that included the headline “unified Reich.” What late-night madness might be unleashed by this fawning aide’s unquestioning channeling of Trump’s darkest caprices via his Truth Social id? Could Natalie Harp be the Delilah who brings Samson down?
I am still irritated by AOC’s lighthearted comment on ABC’s This Week that “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” attributing the circa seven years when Democrats lost their minds to “rhetoric that we would [not] use today,” like defund the police and empty the prisons. Great. I am glad she can laugh off that reign of totalitarian progressive terror, when the righteous beginnings of the #MeToo movement and George Floyd outrage turned into j’accuse fanaticism, and the trolls galloped away with a promising liberal awakening. Democrats still have not recovered from the cultural and political damage of turning umbrage into a national pastime and replacing policy debates with pronoun polemics. If the new left wants to win national elections, it can’t just scrub their venomous old Twitter accounts and shrug off Woke 1.0 as a passing aberration born of the Covid lockdown. It has to full-throatedly disavow the hysterical progressive groupthink and pinched purity tests that caused 3.1 million more voters than last time to put Donald Trump in the White House.
My hopes for more heart-racing Democrats are currently pinned on the aforementioned Jon Ossoff, who’s coming to the Hamptons next weekend as part of the Dems’ summer speed-dating jag, so I will eyeball him in person. We live in superficial times, and looks and charisma cannot be discounted. (I’m afraid I was rooting for leftie Abdul El-Sayed to win in Michigan on the basis of his buff forearms in that tight black T-shirt.) I am amazed how many times in intelligent company I have heard that the clear-thinking, forceful Illinois governor JB Pritzker can’t win because he’s “too fat.” I sincerely hope he doesn’t resort to taking GLP-1s, like everyone else, because, as the scion of a hotel fortune, his being “fat” takes the curse off him being so rich, which is pretty much the last thing you want to admit to being in the Mamdani age. Good-on-paper candidates are for a bygone time. Ossoff, who has a great fiery angle on Trump’s corruption and “Mar-a-Lago mafia,” has a kind of edgy but sane sex appeal that gives me hope, unless I can have the Dem virtuoso Rahm Emanuel, the only candidate who can fire off new ideas and look as if he thought them up himself. The current media trope is that there’s a “civil war” in the Democratic Party, but the rise of the new left can also be attributed to the fact that anyone with a pulse hates the milquetoast middle now. On Meet the Press on Sunday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries ducked and dithered his response to the question of whether he supported Medicare for all. Compare this to 84-year-old Bernie Sanders’ signature line: “Health care is a human right, not a privilege.” The granddaddy of the left still has mojo that can make you cheer.
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