I don't think people should be talking about presidential assistant Natalie Harp all day. Someday we won't, I suspect, and that’s a time that not only Natalie Harp, but we, ought to be looking forward to. However, we’ll be talking about Harp for as long The Atlantic, The New York Times, Bill Kristol, Joe Walsh, etc. think she’d be useful to beat Trump.
Apparently, Harp’s an issue more worthy of coverage and commentary than, let's say, war in the Middle East. And there are important reasons for this: Harp’s pretty, so writing a Substack about her or posting on X involves attractive images. And even just saying her name now entails a sexual innuendo about Trump. This is what we're doing: taking something and someone who isn’t an issue, and stalking her. We've been sexually harassing Natalie Harp, following her family around, repeating any rumor we can find. Insofar as we’re doing that, we’re attempting to destroy a particular young woman's life. And we’re doing it with no justification.
People such as Maureen Dowd have overcome their alleged qualms and are trying to give Harp the Lewinsky treatment. I want to remind Dowd that even she thinks the treatment of Monica Lewinsky was a festival of grotesque misogyny. Also, I want to point out that, unlike in the Clinton/Lewinsky situation we have no reason to think Trump and Harp are having or have ever had an affair. But that’s the non-stop implication of these idiots and their misogynist gossip train.
The most mainstream people are stalking Harp, harassing her relentlessly, diagnosing and sexually objectifying her, hacking her communications and publishing them. If someone were doing this to a person they agreed with politically or that they didn't fantasize could be a useful scandal for the midterms, Bill Kristol or Anne Applebaum would know this is ridiculously wrong. As it is, it makes me wonder whether any of their opposition to Trump is based on substantive disagreements. They’re raising the suggestion that their opposition to Trump is just a matter of personal distaste.
"Like others," wrote Dowd in her Saturday Times column, "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?" I think Dowd didn't wince at all, but perhaps gave a little grin. Be that as it may, she overcame any moral qualms she may have had about participating in Harp's gratuitous victimization. "As it turns out," she writes, "with three little words, Ossoff pulled a string and unraveled something really dark and deranged at the innermost circle of Trump’s White House."
I don't know what it shows. How or why people think this could be an effective issue for the midterms is beyond me. That Harp once rode in the trunk of an SUV in the presidential motorcade: you think that’s a substantive political issue? It's substantive to just this extent: it allows you to point at Harp and yell "what a weirdo," as though this, the American media landscape, was the worst mean-girl playground in America. Anne Applebaum, America's most serious foreign policy expert, by persona, focused on the apparent fact that Harp hadn’t initially requested a security clearance when she first worked at the White House. Now, maybe she just didn't think she would be or should at that stage be handling classified documents.
But Applebaum went with, "What doesn't she want anyone to find out?" Just sheer gratuitous innuendo, which is all anyone has got here. Kristol, for example, is just asking what Harp does to earn her $150,000. He may not regard himself as trafficking exclusively in innuendo, but it's hard not to see the glee. Also, the emptiness and leering sexism. Maggie Haberman has called Harp a "human binky." Meanwhile, reporters are chasing down her family members and have figured out that her brother disagrees with her, which itself has turned out to be a very important front page story.
Destroying young women by vilification based on innuendo, while hounding people's families looking for any shred of political advantage: this is just what we do now. Or it's one of many aspects in which Democrats and anti-MAGA people imitate what they think Trump is doing, in a pitiful attempt to beat him by fundamentally compromising their own personalities and betraying their professed belief systems.
I'd like to start a non-partisan society of girl-dads to protect young women from the likes of these anti-Trump obsessives.
The immediate response on X to my suggestion that everyone stop harassing, vilifying, stalking, and objectifying Natalie Harp was that all my MAGA idiots and I are even worse. But I’m not MAGA. Mine is a neutral standpoint—Ossoff, Kristol, Scarborough, Dowd, Walsh, Applebaum—you’re gross. I imagine you believe you have substantive criticisms of the Trump administration, though when it's all "She's so weird!" I wonder whether you do; I see that you'd say anything, and perhaps hope to drive young women with whom you disagree to disaster. Please slink away.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @crispinsartwell