The political world has been consumed over the past few days with a Republican meltdown about Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.
The story began when Democratic Georgia senator Jon Ossoff said at an event for his reelection campaign on Sunday that Trump does not appear to want to do the job of the presidency. Ossoff added: “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” That was it. That was all he said.
On Monday, CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump to respond to Ossoff’s comment. Trump first referred to Ossoff as Pee-wee Herman, a child-man film character created by late actor Paul Reubens, then defended the ballroom and attacked the reporter. Later, as Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported, the White House rapid response team took to social media to call Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”
Then, in an unusual escalation, the account targeted Holmes’s children, posting: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
You could almost feel the palpable relief that the White House might be able to gin up a controversy that could rally the base, one that, for the first time in a long time, didn’t automatically show the president or the administration in a bad light. Undermining Ossoff, whose speeches have been a particularly sharp thorn in the administration’s side lately, appeared to be icing on the cake.
Certainly the call went out to right-wing media figures to pile on to the idea that Ossoff was making a sexist attack on Harp. Megyn Kelly posted that Ossoff “was clearly implying that Trump is having an affair w/his staffer,” and Michael Knowles wrote: “Every time I see a woman at work, I just know she’s sleeping with her boss! Am I right? Anyway, am I the new Obama yet?” White House spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote: “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” and Newt Gingrich posted: “Jon Ossoff owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her.”
Matt Royer of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council noted: “The word “affair” was never uttered, and yet apparently every single conservative talking head in the world heard it anyway, so what does that tell you?” He added: “Never have I seen a more exquisite example of the Streisand Effect where someone’s supporters fall over themselves to basically accuse them of adultery when it wasn’t even brought up.”
Commandeering the news cycle with manufactured outrage distracted attention from other issues Ossoff did call attention to in the same sentence. Ossoff called out Trump’s apparent stock manipulation, an issue Trump highlighted recently when he sold early access to his Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 a month. It has been widely reported that investors appear to be making a killing by anticipating Trump’s posts as they make markets go up or down.
An investigation by Casey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman of CNN published on July 16 found that Trump himself “made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week before he posted a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives or their products.”
“He’s selling faster access to his tweets, and then you can bet on the markets,” comedian Shane Gillis recently told popular podcaster Joe Rogan, “It’s literally insider trading.” Rogan, whose support for Trump in 2024 was important to his victory, responded: “Wait a minute, is that real? How is that legal? Who’s telling him this is a good idea? $100K to get early tweets? That’s literally crazy. He’s just on a grab.”
As Matthew Chapman of RawStory reported, the two went on to discuss Trump’s involvement with cryptocurrency. “This government has done some (expletive) that no government has ever done before and one of them is the crypto stuff,” Rogan said. “The crypto stuff is nuts. Trump has made billions in crypto. Then you got his sons and his sons are involved in these weird business deals, and there’s a lot of money flowing around that you could dig in and start arresting people.”
Attacking Ossoff for allegedly smearing Harp also shifted attention from Trump’s ballroom, which is enormously unpopular and which is in the news as Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court to override lower courts’ rulings that he does not have the authority to build such a structure without the permission of Congress. Even Republican members of Congress seem reluctant to grant such permission, as it highlights Trump’s grabs for luxury while Americans are hurting under high gas and grocery prices caused by Trump’s tariff wars and war on Iran.
Recently, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who with Jonathan Swan wrote about Trump’s second administration in Regime Change, has told podcasters Ezra Klein and Axios’s Mike Allen that Trump spends about “70%” of his time working on his Washington, D.C. projects. “He is spending a huge amount of energy, mental and otherwise, on these renovation projects, beautification projects around Washington, and then monuments to self,” Haberman told Allen.
She described a visit with Trump seventeen days into the Iran war in which “[i]t was very clear what his mind was on while we were there. And what it was not really on was the war.” “You would think that on the 17th day of the war that he would have maps of the Middle East or maps of troop deployments—who knows,” Haberman said. “He picks up these pictures, and [they’re] of maple trees. And he says: ‘I am choosing maple trees for the White House. I am good at picking trees.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but that is pretty much what he said.”
Recent news reports tie the lack of supplies on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to Iran’s damaging strike on the only U.S. naval base in the Middle East, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, in the first weeks of the war. Trump has downplayed the poor conditions aboard the vessel, infuriating the families of the sailors.
He continues to downplay the flailing of his administration in Iran, as well, as Iranian forces continue to control the Strait of Hormuz. When asked today about the strait, he told reporters: “Last night we had a lot of boats come through, we have possession, complete control of the strait, I mean, outside of nuisance value—and there is nuisance value when they shoot a drone every once in a while, but and not everybody’s going to go through. But they come through. And over the last couple of weeks, we had a lot of oil coming in, a lot of oil. It’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s a lot of oil coming in, a lot. In fact, people are amazed.”
Scott Waldman of Politico reported on Monday that while an average of almost 140 ships a day traversed the strait before the war, last Sunday only 3 did.
The Harp story also has taken oxygen from increasing pushback against the Trump administration. Yesterday ABC and its parent corporation, The Walt Disney Company, launched a federal lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), saying the Trump administration violated their free speech rights. The lawsuit claims that administration officials tried to do Trump’s bidding by launching investigations and challenging broadcast licenses because Trump didn’t like their talk show opinions, news coverage, and late-night comedians.
As David Folkenflik of NPR noted, the lawsuit began with the words: “Government censorship is deeply un-American.”
This is a one-eighty for ABC. In 2024 it agreed to donate $16 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit Trump brought over the assertion by George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. In fact, Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse, and the judge said that while what he did fell under the common definition of rape, New York state law had a very precise definition that his actions didn’t fit.
The settlement made ABC one of the first to settle with Trump. That money seems to have disappeared, and there is currently a congressional investigation into where it, along with almost $50 million more from similar settlements, has gone.
FCC chair Brendan Carr seemed to back away from previous threats, saying that ABC and Disney were acting too hastily and that the FCC has not yet decided whether to renew the licenses. “Ultimately,” he said, “they’re going to get a fair shake before the agency.”
Jeremy Barr of The Guardian shed light on the issue today when he reported on new documents obtained thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit from Democracy Forward showing that Carr has been working closely with the White House and right-wing media. In addition to talking and meeting with White House officials, Carr has been working with the Fox News Channel and the chair of the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that the national debt passed a record $40 trillion yesterday, much sooner than expected. The U.S. is currently spending more than a trillion dollars a year to pay interest on the national debt, more than it spends on defense.
As Steven Rattner noted in the New York Times yesterday, Trump said in his 2024 campaign, “We’re going to grow like nobody’s ever grown before,” but in fact, the economy is slowing. He promised to bring the cost of gasoline below $2 a gallon; it is now above $4 a gallon.
In 2025, Trump said he would balance the federal budget, but in fact, thanks largely to his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the deficit is growing. Also in 2025, Trump promised that his new tariffs would enable him both to cut taxes and to pay down the deficit; in fact, the national debt relative to gross domestic product (GDP) is about to break the record set during World War II.
Republican operatives appear to have thought that the Harp story could enable them to pivot to attack Ossoff and change the narrative, but it seems they miscalculated. Their attention to Ossoff’s statement that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” has brought attention to the relationship between the 80-year-old president and the 35-year-old aide, who was once a host on the right-wing OAN network.
Maggie Haberman told MS NOW that for Trump, Harp “is sort of his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket.” She is the main buffer between Trump and the outside world, filtering the information the president sees, setting up meetings and passing along messages, writing social media posts, and printing out articles praising Trump.
In their book, Haberman and Swan wrote that Harp leaves “adoring letters” to Trump in “private spaces,” saying things like: “you are all that matters to me.” CNN’s Holmes reported that Harp is “physically close to Trump at all hours of the day” and that Harp once jumped into the trunk of an SUV to stay close to Trump after being told there was no room for her in the vehicle.
The renewed scrutiny of Harp has turned up the story that for more than a year, she refused to get a routine security clearance to work at the White House. A national security official expressed concern to Jake Traylor and Jacqueline Alemany of MS NOW that Harp has more access to sensitive information than nearly all of the other White House officials.
When Trump left a decoy Air Force One airplane for a smaller plane in early July, he left behind cabinet secretaries but brought Harp with him.
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/16/us/trump-stock-sales-truth-social-invs-vis
https://www.rawstory.com/joe-rogan-2677703893/
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-us-naval-base-bahrain-e87bbca3
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/13/trump-haberman-legacy-projects-behind-the-curtain
https://www.theguardian.com/media/ng-interactive/2026/aug/19/brendan-carr-fcc-white-house-exclusive
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/19/economy/national-debt-hits-40-trillion-dollars-vis
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/18/opinion/trump-economy-campaign-promises.html
https://newrepublic.com/post/214510/hegseth-uss-lincoln-iran-war-base-destroyed
https://people.com/white-house-correspondent-says-natalie-harp-is-like-trump-binky-12061871
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/18/politics/natalie-harp-trump-aide
X:
ChristopherHale/status/2089877909120884945
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mtcboyspvj2u
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mtctzj7jb227
mattroyer.bsky.social/post/3mterf3jm4s2l
Manufactured outrage works because it forces everyone else to argue about the distraction while the real story keeps moving underneath it.
And there’s a lot they would rather we not look at: profiteering from the presidency, a war going badly, sailors without adequate supplies, attacks on a free press, a slowing economy, and a national debt that just passed $40 trillion.
The outrage isn’t the story. It’s the cover.
Let's not let this white house orange crap make us forget about the mistreatment of many thousands of people snatched off our streets without due process, the withheld Epstein Pedo-files, and the mistreatment of our service people on ships and elsewhere.