Maureen Dowd Natalie’s Magnificent Obsession

[cigaretteman]

I’ve spent my career watching officials maneuver and scheme, often in absurd ways, to get closer to presidents. But I’d never seen anything like the photo of Natalie Harp dashing after President Trump’s golf cart in Scotland three years ago. I’d also never heard of a staffer jumping into the trunk of an S.U.V., as Harp did, when she was denied a seat in the motorcade.
The hit horror movie “Obsession,” about a man who wishes for more adoration from a young woman, who falls under his spell and maniacally provides it, is playing out on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Like others, I winced when I first heard Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat, refer to how Trump liked to “travel with Natalie.” Was he gratuitously turning a salacious spotlight onto a White House aide?
But as it turns out, with three little words, Ossoff pulled a string and unraveled something really dark and deranged at the innermost circle of Trump’s White House.
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The president’s proclivity for surrounding himself with sycophants — and attractive young blondes — is well known.
But this relationship is pathological, and a source of great irritation among other courtiers. It is Trump distilled to his essence: cult leader and his most rabid follower, narcissist and his most flattering mirror.
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The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, Harp idolizes Trump with a rare fervor. As one of his social media facilitators, she is with him most of the day and often evenings, and she never takes a day off. The Times’s Maggie Haberman calls Harp the “binky” of the man-child president.
Harp is nicknamed — and refers to herself as — “the human printer” because she follows Trump around with a portable printer to provide him with paper copies of any positive stories or tweets. (When The Mirror published the picture on Friday of Harp dashing after the golf cart at Turnberry in Scotland, the story’s author dubbed Harp “the human sprinter.”) Haberman said foreign leaders also try to use Harp as a conduit to reach Trump.
As Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in their blockbuster, “Regime Change,” Trump told his staff that Harp was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids did. “She’ll never leave me,” he would tell other staffers.

​

Harp first came to his attention in 2019 when she spoke on Fox News about how Trump had helped save her life with the Right to Try Act, which she said had allowed her to get experimental treatment for bone cancer.
Before she began to work on Trump’s restoration in 2022, Harp was an anchor at the far-right OAN and spread the gospel that the election was stolen. This winter, she was the one who posted the sickening video depicting Trump as the king of the jungle and the Obamas as apes.
The Harp saga reflects a truly weird fact about Trump. The 80-year-old president got elected, governs, provokes and seeks revenge using social media, and he was surrounded by bootlicking tech titans at his inaugural. But he still needs someone young and online to sit beside him and type his posts. Their online symbiosis raises the question of whether all those strange capitalizations are his or hers.
Ossoff impaled Trump with his Natalie Harp-oon last weekend during a speech in Atlanta. The senator was lambasting the commander in chief for his erratic, pathetic handling of the Iran war: “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.” After so many years of flailing around, trying to figure out how to get under Trump’s skin, as he has grown ever more destructive and unhinged, Democrats are not in the mood to follow Michelle Obama’s dictum, “When they go low, we go high.” They were happy to drag Natalie into the fray.
But it was the MAGA megaphone that did in Natalie. The White House was clearly rattled by the allusion to the close relationship between Trump and his 35-year-old, $150,000-a-year social media helper. Melania even made a rare appearance to show the conjugal flag.
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Harp made headlines earlier when the president chose her and a few other close aides to accompany him when he sneaked into a catering truck and switched planes to fly back from Turkey to the District, after a threat of an Iranian assassination attack. Shockingly, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent and the media were left on the other plane as decoys.
The vitriolic MAGA response to Ossoff, the usual risible caricature of macho bullying, had a suspicious “doth protest too much” aroma. The White House called Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid” and Trump mocked him as Pee-wee Herman (showing that he has lost his touch for nasty but effective nicknames).
After Kristen Holmes, the CNN White House correspondent, asked Trump about Ossoff’s critique, the White House tweeted a creepy warning: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
But the troubling thing was the tone of Harp’s adoring letters to the man she addresses as “Mr. President,” released by The Daily Beast, in which she talks about her fragile emotional state — forgetting to eat or sleep and getting hurt by others’ critical remarks.
“I want things to always be right between us,” she writes, adding, “I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
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She frets in another that she works so hard for him that she looks like “a hunchback who didn’t have time to freshen up.” She pleads, “We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!!” and pines to “hear every conversation” he has.
Harp quotes a line from “Pride and Prejudice” to say that it would have been hard to lose her father if she had not had someone so “worthy” to turn to in Trump. “And, I will add,” she signs off, “it is I who is unworthy.”
It’s a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he’s amazing. And he agrees.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/opinion/natalie-harp-jon-ossoff-trump.html

 

[LiveFreeOrDie97]

I’m hopeful for cute nurses around me when I’m shidding my pants and falling asleep during my daily security briefings as well.

 

[cigaretteman]

Natalie Harp’s brother had a busy morning Friday on Facebook.
In post after post, Preston Harp made clear the profound political differences that separate him from his estranged sister, one of President Donald Trump’s closest personal aides and the subject of intense scrutiny this week in Washington.


Photos Harp posted that he said depicted his home in Masaya, a city in western Nicaragua, also appeared to identify him as an ardent supporter of the Sandinistas, a Marxist-influenced revolutionary movement that has dominated Nicaraguan politics for decades under President Daniel Ortega.



What appeared to be a Sandinista military hat lay beside a suitcase. A flag of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) — which led an armed guerrilla resistance that overthrew the dictatorship of U.S.-backed Anastasio Somoza in 1979 — hung from his wall. Displayed on a shelf were several books by and about the Argentine-born revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara, as well as a certificate issued by a Sandinista-affiliated group.
“Preston Harp,” read the caption of another photo, “Un gringo Sandinista.”
Preston Harp did not respond Friday to several requests for comment. Neither did the White House, and neither did Natalie Harp.
The Washington Post confirmed Preston Harp’s residency in Nicaragua and the authenticity of his Facebook account with two Nicaraguan friends whose photos he posted.

“He’s a big fan” of the Sandinistas, said one friend, Francisco Larios. “He likes the government.”
Both of the Harp siblings were in the news this week, after Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) invoked Natalie Harp’s name while criticizing the president. Ossoff’s comments brought new focus to a presidential aide who credits Trump with saving her life during a bout with cancer.
She lavishes attention on Trump and provides him with printouts of favorable media stories, according to a book published this year by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
“You are all that matters to me,” she told him in a letter, according to the book.

President Donald Trump, with aide Natalie Harp, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on July 22. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
In an interview earlier this week with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Preston Harp called his sister’s relationship with the president “sad.”
“That’s obsession,” he said. “That’s like an unhealthy obsession with someone.”
He urged Natalie to renounce her politics.
“I hope you change and that you wake up and you realize that everybody on this Earth is part of a human family, and no country is better than any other country,” he said.



Washington has long showcased political rifts between family members.
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, has repeatedly assailed her uncle’s politics and policies.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/05/09/mothers-day-challenges/


Numerous Kennedy family members have also denounced Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling him unfit to serve as the health and human services secretary.
Vociferous Trump critic George Conway famously disagreed with his wife, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
Ronald Reagan’s son, Ron Reagan, became an outspoken liberal and critic of conservative politics.
But few divides have been quite as wide as the one that seems to separate Natalie and Preston Harp.
She is part of an administration that has sought to reassert the U.S. military’s presence in Latin America, overseeing a military campaign that has destroyed scores of suspected drug boats and killed hundreds of alleged traffickers, and led to the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Trump has openly backed right-wing governments and political candidates, dismissing concerns of human rights abuses in El Salvador and coming to the financial rescue of Argentine President Javier Milei.

In recent weeks, the long-running antagonism between the Sandinista regime and the United States, which has accused Ortega of dismantling democratic institutions and stifling dissent, has intensified.


After Ortega announced in July that his country would no longer hold elections — alleging that U.S.-supported groups would use it to try to “seize” power — Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Nicaraguan president a coward.
“Daniel Ortega’s statement that under his family dictatorship, Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare his true authoritarian nature,” Rubio said.
Preston Harp, who posted an image of the Venezuelan flag and said he “supports” Maduro, seems to disagree.
“¡Viva el Frente Sandinista!” he wrote Thursday. “¡Patria libre o morir!” Long live the Sandinista Front! A free fatherland or death!

Preston Harp’s social media accounts were first reported by the Spanish newspaper El País.
In another image, posted beside old family photos of the Harps, Preston Harp has on his chest a tattoo of a revolutionary guerrilla hoisting a rifle against a background of a red star, a long-standing symbol of communism.
In another post, he condemned what he called “American imperialism all over the world.”
And in a series of short videos, he interviewed a man he described as a Sandinista guerrilla. A Sandinista flag hung in the background, while the man criticized the United States.
“We’ve been told all over the world that the United States is the best, but no,” the man said. “The United States needs to look after its own country, and look after its own people — and stop looking at other peoples.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=true&_=1787435291150

 

[cigaretteman]

 

[magaboy]

who tf shares Maureen Dowd articles?

 

[stillh8unlv]

who tf shares Maureen Dowd articles?

People who not only learned to read, but also....and this is key....learned how to comprehend what they read.