Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The whole saga indicates something important about Donald Trump’s political weakness right now, and how Dems can exploit it in today’s information environment. We’re talking about it all with Democratic strategist Greg Greene, who held the job of managing social media accounts under President Obama and wrote about this experience for The New Republic. Greg, good to have you on.
Sargent: OK, so last week Senator Jon Ossoff pointed out that Trump doesn’t like doing the job as president, and instead likes to spend his time traveling with Natalie on the presidential plane. The White House and MAGA went absolutely haywire, resulting in a story that continues right now. Greg, can you bring us up to speed on all this?
Sargent: Yeah, and we’re going to get to that in a second. But we’re now getting new reporting from The Atlantic that reports that the White House freak-out over Harp was really a self-own. The White House publicly tried to humiliate journalists who wrote or asked about Harp, but that only persuaded more outlets that had ignored her role to write about her.
Greene: I agree with the White House staffers who believe that this approach to the conversation has really backfired on the White House. Natalie Harp is someone who people have covered since at least 2024.
Sargent: Absolutely. And Greg, we know how Trump operates. It goes all the way back to Roy Cohn. It’s never concede error, always attack, always try to humiliate at all costs. What’s the difference between the way Natalie Harp and Trump are doing this versus the way you did it under Obama?
So it was never an instance of one staffer—never mind myself—getting into the president’s ear and proposing material, because really it was an operation designed to support the presidency, rather than one person just whispering into another person’s ear.
You’ve been doing this stuff a long time. What does this tell us about how Washington works?
He has usually been able to escape this sort of cyclical scrutiny that amplifies as news cycles go on, one after the next. But this time people are really interested in Natalie Harp. And I have to say, they have reason to be, because the relationship between her and the president, and the fashion in which she manages the president’s communications—helping him text with world leaders, helping him craft his social media posts, his Truth Social—without having a gatekeeper in between her and the send button, is highly unusual.
And listen to this from the Times: “She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter, like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes.” Greg, I don’t get why that little nugget didn’t get more attention. It’s a big deal that she was behind him posting that, isn’t it?
Sargent: I mean, under a conventional presidency, something like that would be a firing offense. I get that Donald Trump has completely revamped the rules for everything and turned the whole idea of a firing offense and scandal into something completely different than it ever was before.
Greene: Yes, I absolutely do think someone would get fired instantly. And more than that, I can think of any number of people who you and I both know, from my time working at the Democratic National Committee, at whose hands I might not even be alive right now had I been so irresponsible with the privilege I had of administering those accounts. It is not only a firing offense, in my view, but it’s unspeakable.
And you can kind of see something even more unnerving in all this, because we’ve now learned from reporting that she really deifies Donald Trump. And so from her letters and stuff like that, we’ve—she essentially dotes over him to the degree that she doesn’t want him to ever suffer any negative feelings of any kind. She wants to bring him joy and so forth and so on.
Greene: Yes, absolutely. And there is a lack of perspective that is revealed in the letters that were reported yesterday in another publication, that she had written to the president—calling herself unworthy, asking for his approval and forgiveness. Things that I would never have contemplated doing, because, frankly, I was working for the betterment of the president and the presidency, and deliberately kept myself out of public view in my role writing that content, because my profile was not the point. The point was the president’s agenda, and the agenda of the people who helped to bring him to the White House.
It’s not about one person. It’s about something that the country possesses. It’s an institution that is preserved from one administration to the next. It isn’t about the deification of one person. And under Donald Trump, tons have been written about how his presidency is functionally like a personalist one. But there you really see it very clearly.
Greene: It’s really degrading and sordid to be governed in this way—to have the highest office in the land used as a vehicle for glorification of someone who would post material depicting a former president as an ape. Who would post material depicting himself as a fighter pilot dropping poop on No Kings protesters, who are his fellow Americans, on whose behalf he’s supposed to be governing.
Sargent: And we haven’t even probed yet—no reporters have really gotten to the core of whether she’s instrumental in his tweets that seem to undermine his own negotiators with Iran, for instance.
Sargent: There’s a paradox at the core of this I want to try to identify as well. Trump and MAGA really think that they have this boundless power to humiliate anyone who dares to criticize them, or really anyone who dares to tell the truth about them. They have this limitless ability to control the information space, they think. And so to them, they can just simply demolish anyone who talks about Harp and leave them in kind of smoking ruins or whatever.
Greene: Yes, I do think their power to control and dictate the agenda does dissipate in moments like this. And what we’re seeing here with Natalie Harp is a picture of a White House run poorly, of a president with no self-restraint, with terrible instincts about what’s in the best interest of the country to publish.
Sargent: Well, you certainly did. And one last thought on all this, to close. I think a lot of people, you know, in the media look at this and they say, OK, well, did Jon Ossoff err by, you know, making this personal? Did Jon Ossoff make a mistake by attacking a professional woman? Did Jon Ossoff open himself to attacks from the White House by appearing to insinuate things about Trump’s sexual habits or whatever?
And I think the American people look at a story like this and they see it the way we’re describing it, not the way those D.C. insider types describe it. They see a story of someone who’s just wiping his ass with a public thing, which is the presidency. And they hate that. They hate the ballroom, they hate the Reflecting Pool nonsense.
Greene: I think that’s right. It’s certainly how I perceive it. It’s certainly my feeling about how the presidency and the White House have been treated over the last year and a half–plus. I would also say this. Natalie Harp is a grown woman. Just like I was a grown man when I was running those accounts and when I was working at the DNC, there were times when I came under attack for things that I wrote in my personal capacity—not in a public capacity, but that were visible to the public and the press, which followed me at the time.
So if you are holding a position of public trust—whether that’s even just public-facing, like mine at the Democratic National Committee, or if you are on the federal salary paid by the American people, like Natalie Harp—you have to be able to accept criticism and scrutiny. And the idea that she is a damsel who needs defending from the eyes of the public who pay her salary is pathetic, frankly. I would hope she gets her big-girl pants on and faces the scrutiny that is rightly coming to her, head-on.
Greene: I appreciate it. Thanks.
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