Last month, after a warning that there might be an Iran-sponsored attempt on his life, President Trump secretly left Air Force One for a military jet when he was leaving the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. His Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his key deputy, Stephen Miller were left to fly on Air Force One.
Who did Trump bring on his emergency departure plane? There was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; a White House aide, Dan Scavino; and Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant.
Harp was in the news this week after Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia mentioned her in a stump speech, as an aside to an attack on Trump. “And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “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.”
The White House pounced, attacking Ossoff in crude, juvenile terms. But rather than change the subject, the ferocity of the response drove new questions about Harp’s role and relationship to the president. On MSNOW, my Times newsroom colleague Maggie Haberman referred to Harp as the president’s “comfort blanket.” And that role appears to include information management, as Haberman noted in an article she wrote with Shawn McCreesh:
As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.
Harp posts on social media in Trump’s name and even responds to foreign leaders in his name. She spends more time with Trump than any other aide and reports exclusively to him and no one else.
If the presidency is a job of crisis management, in which the principal task is to deal with an endless number of fires of various sizes and scope, then the most important thing a president can have is good information, to help him know what to handle, what to delegate and what to delay.
If Harp has as much control over Trump’s information environment as she appears to hold — if she is the one shaping his sense of the outside world — then it is entirely reasonable to say that Natalie Harp is one of the most powerful people in the United States.
The reason the Harp story has caught fire is that it is salacious — the elderly president spends nearly all of his waking hours with a young, attractive aide — but the reason it matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.
He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear. Trump has dismantled every institutional structure designed to curb the worst aspects of the presidency — a tendency toward isolation and groupthink — and has instead sunk deeper into his own propaganda and invented reality.
Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.
What I Wrote
My column this week was on Trump’s thirst for revenge, which takes the form of vendettas against any ordinary citizen who defies him.
Revenge shapes the president’s priorities, drives his actions and structures the decisions of his government. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Trump turns the weight of the federal government against those Americans who defy his will.
I also joined my colleagues David French and Michelle Cottle on an episode of “The Opinions.”
Now Reading
Andrew Marantz on Mahmoud Khalil for The New Yorker.
Laura O’Connor on Trump’s war on reproductive health care for The New Republic.
Sukaina Hirji on “The Odyssey” for Dissent.
Nate Wooley on Sonny Rollins for N+1.
Henry Farrell on the political economy of billionaire derangement for his Substack newsletter.
Photo of the Week
Meems Bottom Covered Bridge near Mount Jackson, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley.
Now Eating: Chana Masala
I am sure I have shared this recipe before — I have been writing this newsletter for more than seven years, after all — but having made this for lunch on Thursday I’m sharing it again. The only recommendation I would make is to go heavier on the spices than what the recipe calls for. From NYT Cooking.
Ingredients
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2 tablespoons ghee or neutral oil
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1 tablespoon garlic paste or freshly grated garlic
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1 tablespoon ginger paste or freshly grated ginger (from a peeled 2-inch piece), plus more fresh ginger, peeled and sliced into matchsticks, for serving
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1 medium red onion, peeled and finely chopped
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2 Thai green or bird’s eye chiles, chopped
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1 teaspoon cumin seeds
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¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
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½ teaspoon ground coriander
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1 teaspoon Kashmiri or other hot red chile powder
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4 Roma tomatoes, finely chopped
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¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
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2 (15-ounce) cans of chickpeas, drained, or 3 cups of cooked chickpeas (see Tip)
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2 cups unsalted chicken or vegetable stock, or water
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¾ teaspoon garam masala
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2 tablespoons chopped cilantro leaves and tender stems
Directions
In a medium pot, melt ghee on medium heat. Once melted, stir in the garlic, ginger and onion. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the onion softens, 5 to 7 minutes.
Stir in the green chiles, cumin, turmeric, coriander and chile powder. Continue stirring for 30 seconds so the spices don’t burn. Add the tomatoes and their juices and salt. Increase the heat to high and cook, stirring often, until the mixture is jammy, 5 to 7 minutes.
Stir in the chickpeas and stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the mixture has thickened slightly, 5 to 7 minutes. With the back of a spoon, smash some of the chickpeas against the inside of the pot to thicken the mixture; continue smashing until it reaches the desired thickness.
Sprinkle with garam masala and top with cilantro and ginger. If desired, serve rice or roti and lemon wedges alongside.
The post The Real Natalie Harp Scandal Is the President’s Information Diet appeared first on New York Times.
