HOPELESSLY DEVOTED/LIMITED JUDGMENT: "He felt compassion," Chekhov wrote!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2026

We Blues most likely won't: "Jesus Christ is down here on the waterfront?"

We ourselves don't hold religious or cosmological beliefs, aside from the belief that we humans don't know what we are or where we are or how we happen to be here.  

Other people do have religious beliefs. In the honored film, On the Waterfront, the Karl Malden character—Father Pete Barry—tells a collection of angry longshoremen that Jesus Christ is right down there, is among them.   

Telephonically, and by happenstance, we had occasion last Sunday to discuss the film's female undercard. We spoke with a lifelong friend about the performance by Eva Marie Saint.

In that part of the film, the Brando character—Terry Malloy—is able to see that Edie Doyle is a better person than he is. Remarkably, he tries to become more like her.   

It starts in the famous scene where the young pair walk in a park. He picks up the glove she has dropped and slips it onto his hand. 

Soon, she tells him how she would have treated him, back in their days in Catholic school when the nuns had treated him harshly:    

TERRY: The way those sisters used to whack me, I don't know what. They thought they were gonna beat an education into me, but I foxed 'em.   

EDIE: Maybe they just didn't know how to handle you.   

TERRY: How would you have done it?   

EDIE: With a little more patience? And kindness?  

We'd call that a very strong moment, and an unusual plea.

As the movie proceeds, Terry Malloy lets the deeply insightful female character help him discover the depth of his conscience. (That key word appears throughout). 

Inevitably, the film was destined to end with a furious fist fight—with the classic masculine solution. But in our view, it's this unusual gender undercard which makes the film so great.

We're recommending kindness today in one part of the conduct of our Blue political wars. Are you able to feel empathy for this new arrival on the front?   

Natalie Harp  

Natalie Harp (born 1991) is an American political aide and former television presenter who has served as special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president of the United States since 2025.

[...]

Natalie Harp was born in 1991. Her father, Robert Harp, was a real estate broker who founded a consultancy for travel companies; he died by suicide in July 2020. Harp was raised in California. She is a practicing Christian. She and her brother were homeschooled. Harp graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012, and from Liberty University in 2015 with an MBA.  

By 2017, Harp had become vocally critical of healthcare in the United States after she began suffering from health issues, particularly chronic pain and complications incurred by a medical error involving intravenous therapy for stage II bone cancer. In a 2019 interview on Fox News, she praised Trump for signing into law a federal right-to-try law that she claimed allowed her to access experimental treatments which she credited with saving her life. However, The Washington Post cast doubt on Harp's story, citing experts that noted the law's limited scope and reporting that two months before the law was signed she had already made public comments about receiving the new treatment.   

Trump invited Harp to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention... By that month, she had become a member of the advisory board for Trump's 2020 presidential campaign.   

And so on from there.

That background isn't much like ours. That said, can you imagine feeling empathy for someone whose father took his own life when she was 28—for someone who apparently dealt with a life-threatening cancer condition when she was even younger than that?   

(For that Washington Post article, just click here. We've never seen anyone say that Harp didn't face a life-threatening cancer issue in the period described.)

Today, Harp will become a figure of ridicule due to the release of two letters she wrote to the president in recent years. In one of the letters, she expresses gratitude for the fact that she'd been able to travel to Ireland and Scotland as a Trump aide:   

"I’ll never forget when you made that promise to me after losing my Dad, and I know how happy he is right now that I did get to go to Scotland and Ireland, as he always wanted for me." 

Are you able to feel for that person? To read the letters in full, click here. For excerpts, click this.  

(Chekhov, writing of the male protagonist Gurov in The Lady with the Lapdog, a story widely considered to be one of the greatest ever written: "He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own...He felt profound compassion.")  

Harp will be subjected to extensive ridicule. It's the way Homey plays.

Beyond that, she seems to have vastly imperfect political and journalistic judgment, as is true of many others in this dangerous, rage-filled time.   

It seems that Harp's conduct has sometimes, perhaps frequently, been highly unusual. According to Maggie Haberman, the Secret Service had become "alarmed" at one point by the content of her letters to Trump—and given the way the world sometimes works, it's hard to say that their concern was misplaced.   

That said, Natalie Harp is a person. On this morning's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough described this aspect of her person as he spoke with John Heilemann:

SCARBOROUGH (8/21/28): By the way, I've spoken to Natalie Harp a good bit, as most people have—very polite, and we have polite, kind conversations. I've been in the White House, and I’ve talked to Donald Trump, the president, and seen her there. Never once assumed anything inappropriate was going on...

Scarborough described an actual person, a person with whom he has routinely spoken in thoroughly normal ways. He seems to say that she traffics in kindness on the personal level, even when conversing with an aggressive critic of the highly disordered person she serves.

That said, her behavior has been unusual. She seems to have extremely bad judgment, much like the powerful person who has positioned her where she is.

Of course, other people have limited judgment too. For all the outstanding work he has done, Scarborough still refuses to tell the truth about the person for whom Harp works. 

Scarborough is hardly alone in that agreement not to speak. Many of us Blues are going to beat up on Harp while refusing to be forthright about the much more powerful man. And by the way:

Heilemann's elaborate claim today—his claim that Jon Ossoff wasn't making an insinuation when he mentioned "Natalie" in his speech—could hardly have been much more clueless. We may discuss that cluelessness tomorrow.

In closing for today, we'll say this:

Harp's outsized devotion to the sitting president is one thing. Beyond that, her apparent lack of journalistic judgment is amazingly widespread.

Steven Cheung's ugly rage is something much more significant. Our heralded Blue American journalists all know the backstory here. 

They know the source of the destructive rage. Eagerly preserving their access to paychecks, they all agree not to name it.

Still coming: The rage of Trump and Cheung