At a rally in Atlanta on Sunday, Sen. Jon Ossoff worked a single first name into an otherwise conventional list of grievances against President Trump. Trump, he said, “doesn’t want to do the job; he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie.”
The Natalie in question is Natalie Harp, 35, the aide who posts the president’s social media messages and has been a fixture at his side since before his return to office. Democrats insisted afterwards that nothing untoward had been implied. The coverage that followed suggested otherwise, and CNN in particular ran hard with the story.
Writing in the New York Post, columnist Miranda Devine argues the ambiguity was the point — a smear constructed so that its author could disown it, aimed at a woman who had no way to answer back.
Who Natalie Harp is
Harp battled debilitating bone cancer in her twenties, an illness that left her in severe pain and in a wheelchair. She credits Trump with saving her life by expanding patients’ access to experimental drugs during his first term, and said so in a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention while she was an anchor at One America News Network. He asked her to work for him in the years between his presidencies, and she stayed through the court cases and the assassination attempts.
She does not give interviews. Friends say she has told them she is “staying focused, on mission, 24/7. Too much to do, and too little time to do it.”
What the pile-on turned up
Very little, in Devine’s telling. CNN interviewed Harp’s estranged brother Preston, 38, who is openly hostile to the president and who nonetheless ruled out any romantic relationship. His explanation was that their upbringing, not attraction, accounted for his sister’s loyalty: “Trump is like everything that my mom taught us to respect,” he said. “I think that’s where her infatuation for Trump comes from, honestly, because I don’t think it’s a physical attraction.”
The family’s private grief — their father’s suicide in 2020 — was dredged up in the same week. Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary from Trump’s first term who later backed Kamala Harris, told CNN the Secret Service had been “alarmed” by Harp’s closeness to the president, a claim complicated by the fact that Matthews left the White House before Harp began working for Trump.
Devine’s argument is that the insinuation collapses under its own logic, and says something unflattering about the man who made it: that a hard-working professional woman could not have risen without sleeping with her boss. It is an odd position, she notes, for a senator who has spent years cultivating a decorous, Obama-inflected image.
The president responded in kind, labeling Ossoff “Pee Wee Herman.” The more telling verdict came from Ossoff’s own side: Democratic strategist David Axelrod called the remarks “gratuitous and unnecessary.”
This piece summarizes and responds to a New York Post column by Miranda Devine. The judgments described are hers; quotes are as reported by the Post, CNN and the outlets named. The photograph is a stock file image.
