Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This whole saga captures a lot about how Dems should be fighting the information wars right now. So we’re talking to Paul Waldman, who made a good argument along these lines at his Substack, The Cross Section. Paul, good to have you on.
Sargent: So here’s what Senator Jon Ossoff said about Natalie Harp, the very loyal aide to Trump. Listen.
Sargent: Note that Ossoff 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?
And she caught Trump’s attention and has now taken on this role as what is 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.
Sargent: 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?
And for somebody as kind of mercurial 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 untoward about the relationship? Who knows? But the truth is that she is serving a kind of emotional need for him.
Sargent: Natalie Harp has a tremendous amount of influence over global affairs. That’s what I think I hear you saying. And so the White House is in a rage over what Jon Ossoff did. Steven Cheung, assistant to the president, called him “Jon Jackoff” and the “biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman Davis Ingle called Ossoff cringeworthy and feminine and a lightweight loser. Richard Grenell, one of the most slavishly devoted propagandists Trump has ever had, called Ossoff a “fraud,” “scripted,” and “inauthentic.”
Waldman: Yeah. And you immediately saw this wave of conservative commentators, Republicans, White House figures, all taking to social media to condemn this and say 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 it’s not as though Ossoff 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 Ossoff 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.
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 than on Jon Ossoff, who, if you have looked at him lately, is looking pretty jacked. So I don’t think that stuff is going to land.
Now, yes, Natalie Harp suffered through some very challenging personal travails. No one would take that away from her. But why this makes bringing up Harp off-limits remains kind of unexplained.
Waldman: Yeah, and it’s absolutely legitimate. You know, the people who have the ear 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. So we’ve got to know what the nature of her influence is.
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.
There’s a passage in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, Regime Change, where he says to some other aides something like, 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 Harp wrote to Trump, that really—I call this a 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 don’t know, I’ve never said to any of my bosses.
Sargent: 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.
And 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, she doesn’t brook dissent at all. So she’s not going to let any of that information get to him. And that’s a problem for us.
And that’s the way they could get in front of the president, rather than, like, an Oval Office briefing. And it does make you wonder if people are now trying to determine, you know, 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, you know, whatever I think the next policy ought to be. It’s a whole new kind of backroom machination that we haven’t had to think about before.
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?
Waldman: The fact that there is that gossipy aspect to it no doubt made a lot of people want to retweet the story and things like that, because people just like that kind of stuff. If it has that kind of juicy element to it, it’s going to get more news coverage. Everybody likes gossip, right?
But I think that it was incredibly revealing, the way that the White House and basically the entire conservative movement 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.
Sargent: 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, over whether talking about Donald Trump is somehow a distraction from talking about costs. I just want to point out that Jon Ossoff goes after Trump constantly with really, really barbed rhetoric. And he really goes hard at Trump’s pathologies and his essentially scoundrel-like nature, the degree to which he’s just a piece of shit, really, right? Morally.
Waldman: Yeah, Ossoff 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 you know, oftentimes Democrats really, really overthink things. You know, they’re always talking about, we need to, like, figure out how to just put the focus on kitchen-table issues. You have a president who, in a couple of polls I’ve seen just recently, is at, like, 33 percent. The country is so angry at him—and they think, well, we have to offer a positive vision. Like, here’s the truth: you actually don’t.
And if you just keep reminding them that they don’t like him, that’s going to be enough to win a midterm election. Now, it may not be enough to govern once you have power again, as Democrats hope to in 2029. But for now, you know, they don’t actually need anything but to sort of really zero in on what’s wrong with this president, why people are mad at him and should be mad at him.
Sargent: 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.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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