CSotD: Governing from Inside a Bubble
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Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) both grabbed and sparked headlines this week with a brief mention of a Trump aide who, until then, had flown under the radar.
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.
Ossoff certainly packed a lot into that sentence: Trump’s notoriously short working hours, his obsession with monuments to himself, the expensive gift from Qatar, the escape from Ankara, all of them old and well-known presidential quirks, and Natalie Harp, whom nobody much outside the White House had even heard of but who has suddenly become the center of attention.
Apparently, Sack’s cartoon is fairly accurate: Harp’s job is to follow the president around, sometimes at absurd lengths, and tell him things he wants to hear. She also writes some of his Truth Social postings, reportedly including the Trump-as-Jesus picture and the racist meme that showed the Obamas as apes.
And her fierce loyalty to Trump, which sometimes bubbles over into notes that sound like schoolgirl crush material, likely stems from her previous position as a personality on OANN, one of the most slavish pro-Trump news networks.
Luckovich illustrates the chatter that has tried to connect Harp’s presence at the White House with Melania Trump’s absence, but there has been little insider discussion suggesting a sexual connection as there was when Laura Loomer started popping up at Trump’s side.
Rather, Harp is seen somewhat as a “work wife,” an opposite-sex office colleague who maintains an affectionate but chaste relationship. The expression came to light during George W. Bush’s administration because of his close relationship with Condoleezza Rice, which never suggested sexual contact, but led other people to discuss similar office relationships.
However, Rice was seen as a combination friend and advisor to Bush, while Sack’s cartoon captures Harp’s reported function: Given Trump’s well-known reluctance to study position papers or even maintain focus during office briefings, he doesn’t want someone feeding him deep political analysis.
Rather, he wants someone to tell him what he wants to hear and to reinforce his fragile, demanding ego. Harp may be the source of the positive polls Trump cites despite even Fox showing his approval ratings to be in the cellar.
Others in the White House are said to be jealous of her access to the president, but Bennett points out a real issue in her role, which is that she declined to file for a security clearance despite being present at many briefings and meetings in which classified information was being discussed. Growing pressure forced her to finally submit the necessary forms, but she heard many things before being cleared that she probably shouldn’t have.
On the other hand, her extreme loyalty is hardly an anomaly in the White House. Bok takes a predictable Republican approach with this anti-union cartoon, but he’s treading on thin ice, given that Trump’s Secretary of Education made a speech that drew mockery because she thought AI was pronounced A-One, like the steak sauce.
Political observers were not impressed, either, when the sister of the late Lindsey Graham, appointed at Trump’s request to fill out his Senate term and now chosen to run for the seat on her own merits, admitted in a debate that she knows nothing about national security and foreign policy and was unable to comment on whether we should support Taiwan against mainland China.
And Davies notes the problem farmers are having, given that deporting undocumented braceros and raising barriers to legal H2A visas for temporary farmworkers has made it more difficult to harvest crops.
But when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked on CNBC about a drop in jobs, he gave an illogical happy-talk response explaining that “After the deportations that we’ve seen and the closing of the border, we don’t need to produce as many jobs.”
When Aaron Ruper posted the quote on Xitter, he was flooded with comments mocking Bessent’s apparent idea that, rather than immigrants taking jobs from Americans, we had jobs that were only for undocumented immigrants and are no longer needed.
Nor has Trump’s Secretary of Defense War gained much positive response for his theory that military members need more testosterone, his refusal to promote women and minorities or his off-handed dismissal of complaints about conditions on the USS Lincoln, as Danziger here depicts.
And if Trump and Hegseth doubting the honesty of military families weren’t enough, there is also growing evidence that the resupply problems stem at least in part from damage by Iran to US bases in the Gulf area that the administration has kept secret from the press and public.
But, boy howdy, it’s hard to keep people from finding out about the deficit hitting the $40 trillion-with-a-T mark, and while people don’t necessarily understand how international finances work, they don’t consider this good news.
What people do understand is that $40 trillion is a very big number and that the party currently in power has lectured for decades about “tax-and-spend Democrats” but is now handing out tax cuts for the wealthy while spending money hand over fist on monuments and unprovoked wars.
You can play with this interactive graph from the Federal Reserve, but it basically shows that neither political party has clamped down much on spending, and that the debt has risen from about $2.6 billion in 1988, the point where people at the nation’s median age were born, to the current $40 trillion.
Benson blames Congress, and if she means the current congress, it’s a change from her usual loyalty to conservatives, since the GOP majorities have shown no intention of thwarting the president’s wishes.
If she means all the Congresses since that time when the debt was in the manageably low millions, she may be close to the problem, though, like prices of gasoline, prices of eggs and so forth, it’s generally seen by voters as the fault of the president.
It might help if Natalie would tell the president this, since he doesn’t seem to listen to anyone else.
But he might not want to hear it, even from her.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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