The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 24 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.
The furor around Donald Trump’s very devoted young aide, Natalie Harp, isn’t abating in the least, and new reporting indicates that anger inside the White House over this story—all driven by the fury of one person in particular—might have backfired, making the story even worse for him. This comes as new leaks also suggest Harp’s role is even more unnerving than we thought.
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.
Greg Greene: Glad to be here.
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?
Greene: Yes. Jon Ossoff really set off a furor by bringing Natalie into the conversation, and the story has spun out of control almost since then for the White House. What I would say is that I really got interested in this thinking about how Natalie Harp has access not only to the president himself, but also to his phone and to his social media accounts, which really raises questions, in my view, based on my experience, about the appropriateness of her role without supervision in the content that goes out.
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.
And then The Atlantic reports that aides inside the White House grew angrier because, according to sources, they were, quote, “taking their cues from a furious president.”
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.
Maggie Haberman has written about her role in the White House operation and the campaign operation before, but she managed to fly under the radar before now—when, thanks to the escapade in Ankara, Turkey, with the catering cart, she became a live wire in news coverage, in a heated story, and has been since then talked about in a way that really hasn’t served her interests or the president’s, in a time when the president’s approval ratings are already in the tank.
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?
Greene: Well, the biggest difference is that there were many layers between myself and the president. As I say in the piece for The New Republic, I never wrote on a plane, never mind a catering cart. I spent my time at the Democratic National Committee working with colleagues there and consulting with the digital director, the communications director, and people inside the White House communications office to figure out what priorities we had for getting messages out, and to shape our posts around those agenda items.
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.
Sargent: And you also didn’t decide what the president saw and what he doesn’t see. If the White House had said nothing, most reporters would have moved on very quickly. But then the vehemence of the reaction kind of stirs the interest of the reporters, because it starts to look like there’s some reason the White House doesn’t want this relationship with this young aide talked about. And boom, there’s the ingredient to really make it blow up.
You’ve been doing this stuff a long time. What does this tell us about how Washington works?
Greene: Well, I would say the first thing is that Washington loves a scandal. When I was at the University of Virginia as a student many, many years ago, I studied in a seminar with political scientist Larry Sabato about campaigns and elections. He wrote the book Feeding Frenzy, about how scandals develop and gain a momentum of their own. And what we’re seeing, perhaps for one of the first times in the Trump presidency, especially in his second term, is an example of that playing out in real life.
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.
Sargent: It sure is. Well, The New York Times talked to a bunch of advisors around Trump, and they were pretty happy to leak about Natalie Harp. They talked about how she’s really this information gatekeeper for Trump, and his advisors think that because of her, some of the information he gets is, quote, “poisonous and counterproductive,” as the Times put it.
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?
Greene: It is a massive revelation. I was personally not shocked, but taken aback by that confirmation. And I would say that, just as a professional who’s been in the shoes of people who post to these accounts that are widely watched, there is a serious lack of editorial judgment that is spoken to by the idea of depicting any public figure in this country, especially a former president of the United States, as an ape. I don’t understand how that had not been a bigger story up to now.
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.
But I would think that if anything close to that happened under a Democratic president, and we knew from the pages of The New York Times that this particular aide fished out this image and got it put on social media under the president’s handle, you’d think that person would get fired instantly, wouldn’t you?
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.
Sargent: And so if she’s got this control over his social media feed—we’ve seen posts with him depicted as Jesus Christ and all these other types of posts that really deify him, that really go to the core of this kind of personalist-dictator vibe that he wants out there about himself. She’s clearly the key figure.
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.
So you can kind of see where these posts depicting him as Jesus Christ are actually coming from. And I think that given that the whole world is seeing the American president depict himself as the Almighty, we want to know who’s behind that, I think.
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.
Sargent: I think you really put your finger on an important distinction there, which is that under previous presidents—maybe somewhat less so under George W. Bush, but certainly under Democratic presidents—a lot of the senior staff that work with the president and shape his message and so forth understand the presidency as a public thing.
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.
The people around Trump do not see the presidency as a public thing, as something that he is stewarding and shepherding on behalf of the American people. They solely understand it as being only about him. And I think this story really reveals that very clearly. What do you think of that?
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.
It is a day-in and day-out sordid spectacle. And for me personally, I find this—I don’t take it as a personal embarrassment, because I’m not in the White House, I have long since been away from the role of posting social media for people in high office. But I do find this incredibly disappointing and concerning, because the access that she has, both to his information flow and to his accounts, really creates problems for people who are concerned about misuse of that access for various purposes, whether insider trading or worse.
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.
Greene: Exactly.
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.
But the problem for them is that the Natalie Harp story does reveal highly unnerving truths about this man’s temperament and total unfitness to be president. And once the story gets onto that topic, their power shrivels and disappears. That’s what we’re seeing here. What do you think of all that, Greg?
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.
And it’s being displayed in a visceral way, because we have also seen Natalie Harp being rescued from what the president considered to be an Air Force One at possible risk—over the head of the secretary of state and other Cabinet officers who are in the presidential line of succession. It is an incredible story about judgment and misjudgment, and it almost tells itself, but I’m glad to help tell part of it.
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 just think that mindset that looks at it that way is wrong. And it’s actually an insider-D.C. mindset that just misses what I think you got at earlier, which is the degree to which this kind of stuff—seeing this president do this—is just degrading and terrible for us all to live under.
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.
I think this stuff really works against Trump and Republicans, and underscores that the Republican Party has just let this madman run amok with our stuff, right? And I think that’s the way the story is perceived. What do you think, Greg?
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.
And there were times when people gave me grief over wordings of social media posts I made on behalf of the Democrats. There are people who today go after the woman who runs the Democrats’ official account now, as in the time when she went after Stephen Miller, rightly so, in my opinion.
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.
Sargent: Very well said. Greg Greene, thanks so much for coming on, man. We really appreciate it.
Greene: I appreciate it. Thanks.
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