SATURDAY: Did Ossoff float an insinuation?

SATURDAY, AUGUST 22, 2026

Citizen Heilemann, please! Should Natalie Harp be subject to ridicule?  On balance, we'd say no. 

That said, we told you the ridicule was going to come. Starting yesterday afternoon, here's a sample, from Mediaite alone:   

Natalie Harp Seen Running Behind Trump’s Golf Cart in Newly Unearthed Photo 
(For full report, click here.)

Natalie Harp Once Claimed Trump Saved Her Life in Bizarre Resurfaced Clip 
(For full report, click here.)

FLASHBACK: Natalie Harp’s Election-Denial Interview With Karoline Leavitt Resurfaces 
(For full report, click here.)

Maggie Haberman Describes Natalie Harp as Trump’s ‘Binkie’  
(For full report, click here.)

All of a sudden, a lot of material is being resurfaced (unearthed). Harp's conduct is framed as "bizarre," and she's described as a "binkie."   

In that FLASHBACK report, readers learned that Harp told Leavitt that the 2020 election was fixed. Our questions:

Is there anyone in MAGA World who hasn't advanced such unfounded claims? 

Also, when did major orgs like the New York Times ever devote appropriate focus and space to the widespread existence of crazy claims made by the president himself? 

We Blues! Our stars are afraid of the sitting president (and of the Fox News Channel). On the other hand, we do enjoy mocking "the girl," just as it ever was.

Is some such gender politics involved in the ridicule being directed at Harp? Consider what Maggie Haberman said on CNN, as reported within that "Trump's binkie" dispatch.  

Haberman has done tons of outstanding work during the endless Trump years. With respect to that "binkie" remark, this is what she said:

I described her the other day as, you know, a binkie, for lack of a better way of putting it—a comfort blanket. There are men who have played that role for him too. One of them would be Boris Epstein, about whom—you know, he is legal adviser—of whom the president describes him as his psychiatrist and says sometimes you just want somebody to tell you everything is going to be okay. That is a lot of what the president values.    

For lack of a better way of putting it? To our ear, Haberman—she's done tons of good work—was possibly trying to slide away from an earlier unfortunate comment. (Everyone makes mistakes.)   

Possibly trying to slide away from an earlier gendered remark, she offered Boris Epstein as a male example of what she was talking about. We'll assume that she has never referred to him as a binkie—and you can be sure that, if someone ever did, no one would notice or care. 

(Epstein remains almost wholly unknown. Harp is becoming quite famous.)

With respect to going after "the girl," the most remarkable statement of all came early on, from a journalist who has been widely and correctly praised for her work on the Jeffrey Epstein matter. Good grief! Senator Ossoff delivered a speech, and Julie K. Brown said this:

Award-Winning Epstein Reporter Brands Natalie Harp the ‘Side Piece’ of Trump   

Celebrated journalist Julie K. Brown joined the gang of critics bashing President Donald Trump’s aide Natalie Harp on Wednesday by branding her the president’s “side piece.”

Brown—who won a series of awards for her reporting on dead sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein in The Miami Herald—made the accusation on X.  

[...]

“None of these people defending Trump’s side piece seemed to have any issue with Trump calling female reporters ‘piggy’ and ‘hag,'” Brown posted.   

Her accusation stands out, considering Brown is one of the more acclaimed journalists in America.

And so on from there. Brown—a fully justified feminist / humanist hero—described Harp as Trump's "side piece." Dear friends, riddle us this:

His side piece of what?  

(Everyone makes mistakes.)

Yesterday morning, John Heilemann swore, on Morning Joe, that Senator Ossoff wasn't making this same insinuation when he spoke in Atlanta last Sunday.  He misquoted Ossoff's words as a way of proving his point.

Please don't make us waste our time reviewing what Heilemann unwisely said. For the record, though, Ossoff has established himself as a genuine master of stinging rhetoric. In our view, his brilliantly crafted insinuation was blindingly obvious that day.   

Based on a mountain of reported evidence, Natalie Harp seems to have extremely limited judgment. We'll admit that we sympathize with the person who lost her father the way she did, after her trial by bone cancer.

She seems to have extremely limited judgment. That's grotesquely true of the president himself, but our Blue American tribunes are unwilling to say what they surely must know about him—and we do enjoy mocking "the girl."   

European literature began with a story of subjugation. The impulse has never left, and we Blues aren't always sharp enough to understand who we sometimes are. 

Monday: The rage of Steven Cheung

What the senator said: As many people have noted, Senator Ossoff has established himself as a genuine master of stinging rhetoric. It's a remarkably powerful tool. This is what he said:  

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.   

That's astoundingly skillful rhetoric. For the record, we aren't even saying it's morally wrong.

That said, Walt Nauta snuck away on the catering truck too. Do the lovebirds share "their palace" with him?   

Within the boundaries of that rhetoric, we think you can see that they don't!

FRIDAY: "Multiple paths," the Cook Report says!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2026

Unless you're watching Fox: Who will control the Senate next year?  

We have no idea. If we were somehow forced to bet, we'd bet that the GOP will retain control, but it seems to us that old rules of thumb concerning such predictions have never seemed quite so old.   

In yesterday morning's report, we reported this new fact:

El-Sayed is ahead by seven—unless you're watching Fox!  

That bit of whimsy concerned one part of the clowning which had occurred on the previous day's edition of The Five. 

Leave it to the children! During their discussion of a recent statement by Chuck Schumer, Emily Compagno was incoherent and Harold Ford was an embarrassing mess, with Dana Perino ruling the roost. 

Along the way, we noted the fact that even if Michigan falls, observers have begun to say that there are now several ways Democrats could imaginably end up in control of the Senate.   

Today, Sarah Rumpf discusses this state of affairs over at Mediaite. Headline included, her report starts like this:   

Cook Political Report Finds Democrats Have ‘Multiple Paths’ to Take the Senate  

The Cook Political Report updated its ratings for the upcoming midterms, predicting that Democrats now have “multiple paths” to take back the Senate majority, especially with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) dragging down Republicans.

The GOP’s grasp on majority control of the House and Senate hangs in the balance this November, and political prognosticators and pollsters have been highlighting several states that are in play, including the Lone Star State, where Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D) is facing off against Paxton to succeed the incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). 

[...]  

The new shifts, [Cook's Jessica] Taylor said, mean “there are multiple paths now for Democrats to Senate majority,” so even if they lose tough races in Maine or Michigan, for example, they could still take the Senate.

It was “still a very narrow path” and Cook was now rating the overall Senate majority as a Toss Up, said Taylor. It “still might slightly favor Republicans,” she continued, “but it is an increasingly competitive opportunity for Democrats.”   

The Cook Report isn't always right. But that's what the Cook Report says.

Like the performers on The Five, we have no way of knowing what will happen in November. Unlike the silly stars of The Five, we do know how to describe what Chuck Schumer recently said to the Washington Post.   

Overall, the clowning on The Five is an undisguised assault on the very possibility of the American project. Last night, we forced ourselves to watch a large chunk of Jesse Watter Primetime, which operates from the sludge-filled basement found beneath the National Tabloid / Slag Heap Building.

The Fox News Channel is a disgrace. So are the endless Blue American news orgs which are unwilling to report and discuss what the messengers do over there.

Our stars are afraid to talk about Fox. They're graduates of the finest schools, but they simply aren't willing to serve.

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

THURSDAY: He knows how to buy good trees!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2026

And he's very good at flagpoles: "I'm very good at flagpoles," the sitting president said.   

He said it yesterday, during a 32-minute press corps excursion. On CNN, Kasie Hunt described as "an impromptu tour of his various White House construction projects."   

The man is clearly out on his feet. The comment recalls what he said to Haberman and Swan when they interviewed him in the Oval Office at the start of the current war:

From Regime Change, Haberman/Swan:
As he greeted us, the war seemed the furthest thing from Trump’s mind. On the Resolute Desk, instead of a map of the Middle East, were printouts of maple trees. 

“I’m ordering trees for the White House,” Trump told us. “I know how to buy good trees.”   

Plainly, he's out on his feet. He says he knows how to buy good trees, and he's very good at flagpoles.  

The man is out on his feet. The press corps' refusal to come to terms with that fairly obvious fact is an astonishing part of our failing nation's journalistic culture.

It's especially amazing to see the press corps refuse to discuss this state of affairs in the wake of the situation which unfolded with the previous president.  

That said, nothing is going to make them change. And when academics (quite rarely) attempt to speak, they end up losing their jobs.

It's in this context that the peculiar behavior widely attributed to executive assistant Natalie Harp takes on obvious relevance, though we recommend generosity here, even a bit of kindness.

Very unusual behavior seems to surround the sitting president. We'll plan on detailing what we mean when we return to this topic tomorrow.

PITIFUL/INACCURATE: A new poll had the hopeful ahead!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2026

Unless you were watching The Five: Another day, another poll—though of course, it's only one poll.   

The new Michigan poll is only one poll. But here's what the new poll says:   

SHOCK POLL: El-Sayed Opens Up 7-Point Lead Over GOP Rival After Recent Data Showed Him Trailing   

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D) came ahead with a healthy lead on his opponent Republican Mike Rogers in the latest polling following recent surveys showing a much closer race.

According to polling from Susquehanna released on Wednesday, El-Sayed is polling at 46% while Rogers is seven points behind at 39%.   

Other recent polling has shown a much closer race. A Fox News survey had Rogers leading El-Sayed at 51%-47%...

Last week, we took note of that Fox News poll. The new poll from Susquehanna has El-Sayed up by seven. 

Susquehanna Polling and Research has often been praised for its work in the past. That, of course, doesn't mean that this new poll has to be accurate. 

Is El-Sayed actually leading Rogers at this point? There's no way to know for sure! We do know that we all should feel sorry for the messenger children of the Fox News Channel, who found themselves forced to go deep into the blarney on the day that new survey appeared.  

Friends, is there anything Dana Perino won't say at this point? Surrounded by a gang of spear-chuckers, she was assigned the unlovely task of leading the second pseudo-discussion on yesterday's edition of The Five.  

Their mission, should the panelists choose to accept it:

Convince the largest audience in all of American "cable news" that El-Sayed's efforts are coming undone. 

Perino was hosting the segment. Because there's nothing she won't read from prompter for pay, she wittily started with this:  

PERINO (8/19/26): So he's Chucky [?] mission overboard! 

Chuck Schumer sure sounds like he's already hedging his bets on far-left Abdul El-Sayed, the candidate he did not back in the primary, telling the Washington Post [text appears on the screen]:

"A path to winning back the Senate clearly goes through Michigan, but we have a whole bunch of different paths." 

Inevitably, a witty Fox chyron said this: 

SCHUMER CHUCKS EL-SAYED  

With Perino politely reciting, that's what millions of viewers were told. 

Having said that, hold on! Did that statement really make it sound like Schumer has given up on the Michigan Senate race? As the segment proceeded, the other children agreed to pretend that it did. 

It didn't quite sound that way to us. When we went to the Washington Post report in question, this is the larger passage we found:   

Backlash in Michigan complicates Democrats’ road to retaking the Senate

[...]

Schumer said he was confident El-Sayed would win, citing the enthusiasm of his supporters. Still, Schumer and J.B. Poersch, the president of Senate Majority PAC, the lead Democratic super PAC in Senate races, both disputed that Democrats had no shot at retaking the majority without Michigan.

“A path to winning back the Senate clearly goes through Michigan, but we have a whole bunch of different paths,” Schumer said.  

We don't know what Schumer actually thinks, but that's the actual Post report about what he actually said. He may even believe, as some observers may be coming to do, that Democratic candidates suddenly seem to be alive in an unexpected number of traditional red states. 

(That would include some Independent candidates who would caucus with Democrats.) 

We don't know what Schumer thinks, but that's what Schumer said. Unless you were watching The Five, where Dana Perino was reading text designed to please Fox viewers.

Increasingly, we're struck by the things Perino seems to be willing to do on The Five. In that opening volley, she pleasured viewers with the thought that it's all over in Michigan—did so on the very day when a poll arrived showing El-Sayed ahead by seven points! 

The new poll went unmentioned by Perino, but also by the day's other performers:   

The Five: Wednesday, August 19, 2026  
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered  
Harold Ford: increasingly hard to explain
Jesse Watters: host, Jesse Watters Primetime 
Dana Perino: co-host, The Five 
Tom Shillue: comedian

Her initial presentation hadn't seemed to make sense, but the other children played along as the segment continued. 

It fell to Harold Ford to say the following. Allegedly, he was sitting in the program's Democratic Party/non-MAGA chair. It fell to him to say this. 

PERINO: Harold Ford Jr., if Michigan is off the table, do the Senate Republicans breathe a little easier, even if they're having to spend a lot of money in Ohio and Texas?  

FORD: So, for the leader of the Democrats in the Senate to say that about Michigan, I think it gives a window, not only into his thinking, but I think some of the things Jesse said in his remarks about, his comments about, the swing vote there...  

Did Ford know what Schumer had actually said? Later, the persistently puzzling Emily Compagno improbably pitched in with this:

PERINO: Emily, Bernie Bros—and Bernie Sanders himself strikes again. And I imagine that Chuck Schumer doesn't want to be seeing him in the lunchroom.

COMPAGNO: It's so telling that he's not saying—Schumer's not saying, "OK, come on, guys! We can still win!" Or, "We can still win without Michigan." 

He's explaining how they can win without Michigan. So this is not sort of cheerleading to me. This is not championing, this is crisis management.  

In fairness, Compagno is a famous fast talker. We aren't sure if the word "or" was included in her initial jumble or not.

Either way, we have no idea what she meant, and neither did anyone else. It was "close enough for cable news work" on the day when that new poll appeared.

("I think they've already given up" on Michigan, Compagno eventually said.)

Regarding Perino, she advanced two other points to tell Fox viewers what Fox News wanted its viewers to hear:   

Additional points from Perino: 

1) A 20-year-old staffer for El Sayed had made a stupid remark on X. According to several panelists, this would surely be enough to doom the campaign all by itself 

2) Back in May, the candidate had "compared himself to Jesus."   

The silly remark by the 20-year-old is likely to affect as many as zero votes. The children were really reaching when they wailed about that.   

Regarding El-Sayed as Jesus, Perino voiced that claim as soon as she had finished pretending to report what Schumer had said. We're going to leave it to you to decide if El-Sayed had drawn some such comparison in some sort of troubling way.   

You can click here to see what The Five's viewers were shown. For a somewhat fuller presentation of the interview session in May, you can simply click this.   

As for yesterday's presentation, we would tell you this:   

Schumer had told the Washington Post that El Sayed is going to win. Also, a new poll had him up by seven points:

Unless you were watching The Five!

Tomorrow: Days of "socialism" (and what the Sam Hill is that?)