Last weekend, one first name was enough to send Washington into the gutter. At a campaign rally, Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff claimed that Donald Trump did not want to do his job but would rather build a ballroom and “travel with Natalie”. Everyone knew he meant Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old executive assistant almost constantly seen at the president’s side. Ossoff never alleged an affair. He supplied the insinuation and allowed the crowd to fill in the blanks. Axios accurately summed up the episode as a test of Democrats’ appetite for “going low.”
The media accepted the invitation. The New York Times described Harp as “sylphlike” and a “platinum blonde geyser of positivity” whose eyes remain fixed on the president. Rolling Stone declared that nothing about Trump and Harp was normal. Salon recast her as a babysitter nursing Trump through his decline and even speculated about the contents of the bag she carries.
The Daily Beast announced a secret power struggle between Harp and Melania Trump. CNN invited Harp’s estranged brother to characterize her devotion as an “unhealthy obsession”, while private letters were published in which she called Trump her “Guardian and Protector”. No publication needed to call her Trump’s mistress outright. Her age, hair color, emotional letters and Melania’s absence were enough to invite the insinuation.
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A Job Built on Proximity
Harp’s official title, according to the White House staff report, is special assistant and executive assistant to the president. Anyone who has worked for a senior official understands that the principal’s finite time is the scarce resource around which everything else is organized. Personal staff manage access, prepare information, protect the schedule and travel with the boss. Trump prefers paper, so Harp carries a portable printer and types posts he dictates for Truth Social. The “human printer”, as Harp is also often referred to, has adapted her work to the habits of her employer.
Barack Obama’s aide Reggie Love was rarely more than a few steps away from him. He carried speeches and newspapers, kept Obama on schedule and helped determine who received his attention. George W. Bush’s aide Blake Gottesman spent more time with the president than either the vice president or Karl Rove and accompanied Bush on a secret flight to Baghdad. Both were trusted “body men”. Their proximity inspired no speculation about emotional dependency or a conflict with the first lady.
Harp’s letters admittedly sound unusually emotional for a professional relationship. She believes Trump saved her life by signing the federal Right to Try Act after she was diagnosed with bone cancer. That history may help explain why her loyalty exceeds conventional professional gratitude, but it does not make her Trump’s mistress or geriatric nurse.
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The Hypocrisy in the Oval Office
CNN correspondent Kristen Holmes confronted Trump with Ossoff’s remark during an Oval Office event on Monday. Trump mocked the senator as a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike”. When Holmes later asked about North Korea, he called her loud and disrespectful, accused CNN of spreading fake news and repeatedly ordered her to be quiet. An official White House account then claimed that her children would one day be ashamed of her.
The Washington Post placed the exchange within Trump’s history of attacking female reporters. On Democracy Now, Maggie Haberman said Trump’s attacks on women invariably involve their appearance. During the same interview, she described Harp as Trump’s “human binky” and “comfort blanket”, while her newspaper lingered over Harp’s figure and platinum-blonde hair. The rule against reducing women to their looks and imagined sexual function apparently contains a partisan exemption.
So, after a week of obsessive coverage, a 35-year-old employee has been transformed into a combination of nanny, nurse and sexual punchline. However, many of the same newsrooms will greet Trump’s next attack on a woman with another solemn lecture about how he has degraded American political culture.
