The Daily Blast: Trump Aides Unnerved by Natalie Harp Mess as Ossoff Takedown Hits Home

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Make online, just a quick, quick, secure. With Visa Click to Pay, just check out the next checkout. This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent. Magga and the White House are in a fury at John Assoff.

That's because the Georgia Senator dared to point out that Donald Trump has a bizarrely close relationship with his young aide Natalie Harp. Yet it's now being reported that this relationship actually does unnerve some inside the White House.

And the truth is, Assoff succeeded.

There's now a national debate underway about the ways Harp controls Trump's access to information, which is a debate we really need to have. This whole saga captures a lot about how Dems should be fighting the information moors right now. So, we're talking to Paul Waldman, who made a good argument along these lines at his sub-stack, the cross-section. Paul, good to have you on.

Thanks. So, here's what Senator John Assoff said about Natalie Harp, the very loyal aide to Trump. Listen. While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. So he does not want to do a job.

He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Amir of Qatar. Note that Assoff said kind of out of nowhere that Trump wants to travel with Natalie on the plane that Qatar gifted to him. Paul, who is Natalie? Well, she is a young aide in the White House, and there is probably no one who spends as much time with the president of the United States as she does.

“Which is, I think, an important reason why she is certainly worthy of some examination.”

As she started off as a figure on the one America news network, a small, but perhaps somewhat influential far-right news network. And she caught Trump's attention. And has now taken on this role as what this sometimes referred to as the human printer, because Trump likes to look at things on paper rather than on a phone or a computer. She follows him around with a battery powered printer printing out, tweets that compliment him articles that make him look good. So she kind of constantly feeds him a steady diet of complimentary news and information.

And she is always at his side, wherever he goes, whether that's in the oval office at one of his clubs and foreign travel.

Natalie Harp controls the information that Donald Trump gets, and it kind of matters what information the president of the United States gets, especially one who's not curious about the world or about pretty much anything, other than himself, right? Yeah, and I think that is important because a lot of his decision making is driven by how he perceives the world is perceiving him. And, you know, when he's out there always saying like everybody loves what I'm doing, you know, my poles are through the roof.

And things like that, you can look at it as just his sort of ham-handed attempts at propaganda. But I think it also does reflect some of the bubble in which he is existing. And for somebody as kind of material and emotionally needy as he is, that is going to affect the decisions that he makes.

“And I think that's maybe the real function that she serves. You know, there's all this speculation about, you know, is there something on toward about the relationship? Who knows? But the truth is that she is serving a kind of emotional need for him.”

One of the things I say in that piece I wrote of cross section, you know, we've all seen those cabinet meetings where they go around the table and everybody has to say the most kind of over the top and embarrassingly complementary thing to Trump.

Natalie Harp has a tremendous amount of influence over global affairs. That's what I think I hear you saying.

So the White House is in a rage over what John Assoff did, Steven Chung, assistant to the president, called him John Jackoff and the biggest cuck loser in politics. White House spokesman Davis Engel called Assoff, cringe worthy and feminine and a lightweight loser. Richard Gernel, one of the most slavishly devoted propaganda. This Trump has ever had called Assoff a fraud, scripted and inauthentic. So Paul, this is all childish garbage. But what's interesting is that they all knew they needed to rush out there and be seen as fighting on behalf of the audience of one, which all but certainly means that a directly triggered Trump because that's how this works.

“If Trump gets angry about something, everybody's got to go out there and fight for him, right?”

And you immediately saw this wave of conservative commentators, Republicans, White House figures, all taking to social media to condemn this and see they're so angry.

And a lot of it was in this kind of fake feminist ally thing like how dare you talk this way about a professional woman and denigrate her accomplishments. And, you know, the funny thing about that is, is that if you look at what Assoff said, all it was is that rather than doing the work that he's supposed to be doing, Trump is, you know, traveling with Natalie, those those are the only words that reference to her. And immediately, all of the Republicans say, well, you're obviously saying they're having a affair.

Is he though? Why isn't that they are all jumping to that conclusion? And it's not as though, you know, Assoff is ignoring her important substantive contributions to American policymaking.

You know, her whole role there is to basically be his kind of security blanket.

“And I think that's how Assoff referred to her in a subsequent interview when he was asked to sort of elaborate on this that that really is what she is she's there to provide him kind of some emotional reassurance.”

But all of these Republicans are immediately going straight to the idea that she's being accused of having an affair with the president. And all of that rhetoric about how Assoff is a cuck and he's feminine, you know, this whole movement, but especially the people in the White House, like their entire worldview is colored by this kind of desperate sexual insecurity. And every time they have a disagreement with somebody, especially a man, they have to do this kind of like, you know, seventh grade insults that are all about, you know, really reflecting more, I think, on themselves and on John John Assoff.

Who, if you have looked at him lately, is looking pretty jacked. So I don't think that stuff is going to land. Yeah, I would think not. I want to flag another thing that some of these mega figures did hear to your point about their bad faith on bridge. People like Katie Pavlitch and Laura Loomer cited the fact that Natalie Harp survives bone cancer to paint Assoff's broad side as a cheap shot. Now, yes, Natalie Harp suffered through some intense and very challenging personal trails. And we would take that away from her, but why this makes bringing up Harp off limits remains kind of unexplained. As far as I can tell, Assoff's entire point, as you said, was to highlight the fact that he spends a great amount of time with this person who has a great amount of influence over the president and that this is completely ludicrous and terrible for our country.

“Assoff in the subsequent interview that you're talking about essentially said this woman is part of the information bubble around the president, that's 100% correct. I mean, of course we're going to talk about that, right?”

Yeah, and it's absolutely legitimate. You have the people who have the year of the most powerful person in the world are important to know about this is one of the most important people in the United States government. And we don't know what the nature for influence is. Right, and it's being reported by Semaphore that Trump's proximity to Harp or Harp's proximity to Trump has actually unnerved some of his aides. The people around Trump himself understand that there's something wrong here. And again, it doesn't have to do with sexual stuff or anything like that.

It has to do with the fact that the president of the United States has someone who's controlling information in a way that is actually bad for the country and leading Trump to make some very bad decisions. Yeah, and there have been some reports about that kind of unease among other Trump aides. Not just about their closeness, but about what it actually is that that she's feeding him, whether or not it's stuff that that he should be seeing.

And if she's giving Trump, you know, kind of crazy stuff from the kind of depths of the right-wing internet, then that's a real problem.

“But he obviously is is very devoted to her. There's a passage in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's book regime change.”

That where he says to his to to some other aides, something like you are, you all are going to go and try to make money, but Natalie's never going to leave me.

And there was a report in the New York Times in 2024 about some letters that the Times got that Natalie Harper wrote to Trump that really, you know, I call this kind of romantic. Not necessarily sexual, but just it's a kind of ecstatic devotion that she has to him. She writes in these letters, you're all that matters to me. I want to bring you joy, like stuff that I've never said to any of my bosses. So there is, there is something, you know, so worshipful obviously in that relationship that she has with him.

And it's okay maybe that she's not going to say no to him because that's not her job, but if she's feeding him just kind of the craziest stuff that she comes across on the internet.

And that is that influencing the decisions that he makes, then that makes things that are already problematic even worse.

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The K.E. Boutes and with only one click of life. Domain and sicheres hosting of European Surveillance Inclusive, now turn up 9-EuroPromonats start on the Jonas.de/app. Jonas, digital on your side. Well, and then there's the negative flip side to that as well. If she just wants to bring him joy at every turn, she's obviously not going to allow criticism of Donald Trump to get to him. And we're talking about criticism here that might be coming from members of his own party, or maybe leaks from inside the administration from people who are trying to alert the president to a policy thing that's going really wrong.

Right now we're in the middle of a major fiasco, a global fiasco in Iran, and you do see leaks coming out of the administration from people saying things like, "We've really lost this thing." And Donald Trump isn't kind of getting that message, and that's a real problem, and we've got to do something different here. So I don't really know exactly what the nature of their informational relationship is, but if she wants to bring him ecstatic joy all the time, we all know that Trump doesn't take criticism well, and you know, doesn't Brooke descent at all.

So she's not going to let any of that information get to him, and that's a problem for us. And I do wonder if people, even within the conservative movement, within the administration itself are trying to figure out what her daily media diet is, so they can channel their own views through her to him. We've heard about that before with Trump, we hear about it in his first term, how people even in his administration would try to get his ear, and they couldn't do it through kind of regular channels of going through the White House Chief of Staff, and so they would book themselves on Fox News to make an argument about whatever policy it was, because they knew that he's watching Fox News for hour after hour every day, and that's the way they could get in front of the president rather than like an oval office briefing.

“And I does make you wonder if people are now trying to determine exactly what is Natalie looking at every day. What websites is she visiting? Can I try to seed something and get it to him through her?”

And that's the way I'll make my case for whatever I think the next policy ought to be. It's a whole new kind of kind of back room machination that we haven't had to think about. Yeah, and I suspect that this has forced the discussion of what we're talking about here, and that's really why Maga squealed so loud, which brings us to the question of what Democrats can learn from this.

I have this sort of formula in my head where Democrats spend a little too much time denying the false things that are said about them, and not enough time kind of forcing Trump and Republicans to deny true things about themselves. Does that make sense, Paul?

“In other words, what we see here is what happens when a Democrat speaks plain truths about the president, it forces the discussion in a direction that puts Trump on the defensive and reveals things about Trump and the Maga movement.”

I think Democrats can learn from that.

I think that there is that gossipy aspect to it, no doubt made a lot of people you don't want to retweet the story and things like that, because people just like that kind of stuff, it's if it has that kind of juicy element to it, you know, it's going to get more news coverage. It's like gossip, right? So Democrats can certainly think about that as a way to frame, you know, even substantive things that they want to talk about. And too often Democrats are, you know, think that their 10 point plan for Medicaid reform is going to grab people's attention when it won't, even if it's great.

Also, as you say, that, you know, that that all too often they are defending themselves rather than going on the attack in ways that have some spice to them. And do, you know, you can do that at the same time as you're bringing up legitimate issues.

“But, you know, I think that it was incredibly revealing the way that they White House and the, basically the entire conservative movement just just kind of exploded in anger at this, that really shows that you've struck a nerve.”

And so I think Democrats should think about, you know, what other nerves they want to strike, you know, Republicans have always been really good at forcing issues onto the news agenda.

And part of that is because they have this structural advantage, they have all these tools that Democrats don't really have. A whole network of media organizations with big reach that can all sing in harmony and immediately get other mainstream news organizations to pick up on the stories that they're trying to push. You have that, that apparatus that Democrats don't really have in the same kind of way. But they also just have a real instinct for the jugular, the Democrats don't have. And maybe, you know, this is an example of how you can kind of cultivate that.

The other big context to this is the debate among Democrats over how hard to go at Donald Trump, over whether to talk about Donald Trump or not, or whether talking about Donald Trump is somehow a distraction from talking about costs. I just want to point out that John Assoff goes after Trump constantly with really, really barbed rhetoric and he really goes hard at Trump's pathologies and his, you know, his,

“essentially has scoundrel like nature, the degree to which he's just a piece of shit, really, right morally. And I think we should know here that John Assoff is running for reelection in a very difficult state, Georgia, and he significantly up.”

So I wouldn't want to say that the fact that that John Assoff goes after Trump so aggressively is the reason he's leading, but I do think that it's getting the base very energized and it's getting the base to pay attention to him, which is something that he's going to need to win reelection. And there's no sense in which constantly going after Donald Trump is holding him back politically. Can you talk about that Paul? I think we can learn from that too.

Yeah, Assoff talks a lot about corruption. He has a broad critique that is not just about Trump, but is always incorporating Trump.

And as you say, he is really aggressive in making these arguments is not afraid to speak the truth about who Trump is. And oftentimes Democrats really, really overthink things. You know, they're always talking about, oh, we need to figure out how to just put the focus on kitchen table issues. You know, you have a president who in a couple of polls I've seen just recently is that like 33%. Like the country is so angry at him. And you know, they think, oh, well, you know, we have to offer a positive vision like, here's the truth. You actually don't. This is a midterm election.

It's about the president of the United States. Republicans didn't have a positive vision when they were running against Bill Clinton in 1994 or Barack Obama in 2010.

But for now, you know, they don't actually need anything, but to sort of really clarify in on what's wrong with this president, why people are mad at him and should be mad at him. That is more than enough to get themselves over the finish line this year. And I think that someone like us off actually, you know, does a really good job of telling a story that makes people understand what's happening and why. And that's why I think his focus on corruption is really something that a lot of Democrats should be talking about because it really gets to the heart of what has people so angry about the whole system, not just what's going on right at this moment.

“You know, this stuff is often not as complicated as it seems. You know, they can also go after Republicans for essentially being a rubber stamp for this widely despised president as well. So it doesn't just have to be about Trump.”

It's about Trump and the fact that Republicans have completely rolled over and allowed him to gut our country. Paul Waldman, it's always great to talk to you. By the way, I should point out folks that when Paul said that Democrats don't have to have a positive vision in the midterms and that they can just go after Trump. Trump. That is pure heresy in Democratic circles, but on the daily blast, you get the real dope man. Paul, thanks for coming on. Thanks a lot, Greg. You've been listening to the Daily Blast with me, your host Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a new Republican podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler on the DSR network.

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