The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 19 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
MAGA and the White House are in a fury at Jon Ossoff. 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, Ossoff 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 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.
Paul Waldman: Thanks.
Sargent: So here’s what Senator Jon Ossoff said about Natalie Harp, the very loyal aide to Trump. Listen.
Jon Ossoff (voiceover): While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. 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.
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?
Waldman: 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. 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 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.
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, foreign travel.
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?
Waldman: Yeah, and I think that is important, because a lot of his decision-making is driven by how he perceives the world as perceiving him. And you know, when he’s out there always saying, like, everybody loves what I’m doing, you know, my polls 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 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.
One of the things I say in that piece I wrote at The 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, embarrassingly complimentary thing to Trump. But you know, those don’t happen every day. He needs that kind of emotional sustenance constantly. And that’s what Natalie Harp provides 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.”
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 it 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?
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, the funny thing about that is that if you look at what Ossoff 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 are the only words that referenced her. And immediately all of the Republicans say, well, you’re obviously saying they’re having an affair. Is he, though? Why is it that they are all jumping to that conclusion?
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.
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 Ossoff is a cuck and he’s feminine—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 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.
Sargent: Yeah, I would think not. I want to flag another thing that some of these MAGA figures did here, to your point about their bad-faith umbrage. People like Katie Pavlich and Laura Loomer cited the fact that Natalie Harp survived bone cancer to paint Ossoff’s broadside as a cheap shot.
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.
As far as I can tell, Ossoff’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. Ossoff, in the subsequent interview that you’re talking about, essentially said, this woman is part of the information bubble around the president. That’s a hundred percent correct. I mean, of course we’re going to talk about that, right?
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.
Sargent: Right. And it’s being reported by Semafor 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.
Waldman: 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 is that she’s feeding him, whether or not it’s stuff that he should be seeing. Apparently she gets a lot of information from Gateway Pundit, which is this conspiratorial website. And if she’s giving Trump, kind of crazy stuff from the depths of the right-wing internet, then that’s a real problem. But he obviously is very devoted to her.
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.
So there is something, you know, so worshipful, obviously, in that relationship that she has with him. And it’s OK, 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 then influencing the decisions that he makes, then that makes the things that are already problematic even worse.
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.
Like, 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.
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.
Waldman: 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 heard 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 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.
Sargent: 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. Jon Ossoff said three words, poked the bear, and as a result, he’s getting viciously abused across the internet and across the airwaves, but he forced a conversation over what we’re talking about. And that strikes me as something Democrats should learn from.
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.
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?
So Democrats can certainly think about that as a way to frame even substantive things that they want to talk about. And too often Democrats 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. And also, as you say, all too often they are defending themselves rather than going on the attack in ways that have some spice to them. And you can do that at the same time as you’re bringing up legitimate issues.
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.
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. They have 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 that Democrats don’t have. And maybe this is an example of how you can kind of cultivate that.
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.
And I think we should note here that Jon Ossoff is running for reelection in a very difficult state, Georgia, and he’s significantly up. So I wouldn’t want to say that the fact that Jon Ossoff 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.
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.
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, or any of the years where they had big, huge victories. You don’t actually need that. People are pissed off at the president.
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.
That is more than enough to get themselves over the finish line this year. And I think that someone like Ossoff actually 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. And this stuff is often not as complicated as it seems.
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.
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, that is pure heresy in Democratic circles. But on The Daily Blast, you get the real dope, man. Paul, thanks for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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