The political world has been consumed over the past few days with a Republican meltdown about Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.
The story began when Democratic Georgia senator Jon Ossoff said at an event for his reelection campaign on Sunday the 16th August 2026 that President Donald Trump does not appear to want to do the job of the presidency. Ossoff added : “He golfs and trades stocks. 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.” That was it. That was all he said.
On Monday, CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked President Donald Trump to respond to Ossoff’s comment. President Donald Trump first referred to Ossoff as Pee-wee Herman, a child-man film character created by late actor Paul Reubens, then defended the ballroom and attacked the reporter. Later, as Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported, the White House rapid response team took to social media to call Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”
Then, in an unusual escalation, the account targeted Holmes’s children, posting : “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
You could almost feel the palpable relief that the White House might be able to gin up a controversy that could rally the base, one that, for the first time in a long time, didn’t automatically show the president or the administration in a bad light. Undermining Ossoff, whose speeches have been a particularly sharp thorn in the administration’s side lately, appeared to be icing on the cake.
Certainly the call went out to right-wing media figures to pile on to the idea that Ossoff was making a sexist attack on Harp. Megyn Kelly posted that Ossoff “was clearly implying that President Donald Trump is having an affair w/his staffer,” and Michael Knowles wrote : “Every time I see a woman at work, I just know she’s sleeping with her boss ! Am I right ? Anyway, am I the new Obama yet ?” White House spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote : “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” and Newt Gingrich posted : “Jon Ossoff owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her.”
Matt Royer of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council noted : “The word “affair” was never uttered, and yet apparently every single conservative talking head in the world heard it anyway, so what does that tell you ?” He added : “Never have I seen a more exquisite example of the Streisand Effect where someone’s supporters fall over themselves to basically accuse them of adultery when it wasn’t even brought up.”
Commandeering the news cycle with manufactured outrage distracted attention from other issues Ossoff did call attention to in the same sentence. Ossoff called out Trump’s apparent stock manipulation, an issue President Donald Trump highlighted recently when he sold early access to his Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 a month. It has been widely reported that investors appear to be making a killing by anticipating Trump’s posts as they make markets go up or down.
An investigation by Casey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman of CNN published on July 16 found that President Donald Trump himself “made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week before he posted a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives or their products.”
“He’s selling faster access to his tweets, and then you can bet on the markets,” comedian Shane Gillis recently told popular podcaster Joe Rogan, “It’s literally insider trading.” Rogan, whose support for President Donald Trump in 2024 was important to his victory, responded : “Wait a minute, is that real ? How is that legal ? Who’s telling him this is a good idea? $100K to get early tweets ? That’s literally crazy. He’s just on a grab.”
As Matthew Chapman of RawStory reported, the two went on to discuss Trump’s involvement with cryptocurrency. “This government has done some (expletive) that no government has ever done before and one of them is the crypto stuff,” Rogan said. “The crypto stuff is nuts. President Donald Trump has made billions in crypto. Then you got his sons and his sons are involved in these weird business deals, and there’s a lot of money flowing around that you could dig in and start arresting people.”
Attacking Ossoff for allegedly smearing Harp also shifted attention from Trump’s ballroom, which is enormously unpopular and which is in the news as President Donald Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court to override lower courts’ rulings that he does not have the authority to build such a structure without the permission of Congress. Even Republican members of Congress seem reluctant to grant such permission, as it highlights Trump’s grabs for luxury while Americans are hurting under high gas and grocery prices caused by Trump’s tariff wars and war on Iran.
Recently, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who with Jonathan Swan wrote about Trump’s second administration in Regime Change, has told podcasters Ezra Klein and Axios’s Mike Allen that Trump spends about “70%” of his time working on his Washington, D.C. projects. “He is spending a huge amount of energy, mental and otherwise, on these renovation projects, beautification projects around Washington, and then monuments to self,” Haberman told Allen.
She described a visit with President Donald Trump seventeen days into the Iran war in which “[i]t was very clear what his mind was on while we were there. And what it was not really on was the war.” “You would think that on the 17th day of the war that he would have maps of the Middle East or maps of troop deployments—who knows,” Haberman said. “He picks up these pictures, and [they’re] of maple trees. And he says : ‘I am choosing maple trees for the White House. I am good at picking trees.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but that is pretty much what he said.”
Recent news reports tie the lack of supplies on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to Iran’s damaging strike on the only U.S. naval base in the Middle East, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, in the first weeks of the war. President Donald Trump has downplayed the poor conditions aboard the vessel, infuriating the families of the sailors.
He continues to downplay the flailing of his administration in Iran, as well, as Iranian forces continue to control the Strait of Hormuz. When asked in August 2026 about the strait, he told reporters : “Last night we had a lot of boats come through, we have possession, complete control of the strait, I mean, outside of nuisance value—and there is nuisance value when they shoot a drone every once in a while, but and not everybody’s going to go through. But they come through. And over the last couple of weeks, we had a lot of oil coming in, a lot of oil. It’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s a lot of oil coming in, a lot. In fact, people are amazed.”
Scott Waldman of Politico reported on Monday the 17th of August 2026 that while an average of almost 140 ships a day traversed the strait before the war, last Sunday only 3 did.
The Harp story also has taken oxygen from increasing pushback against the Trump administration. At mid August 2026 ABC and its parent corporation, The Walt Disney Company, launched a federal lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), saying the Trump administration violated their free speech rights. The lawsuit claims that administration officials tried to do Trump’s bidding by launching investigations and challenging broadcast licenses because President Donald Trump didn’t like their talk show opinions, news coverage, and late-night comedians.
As David Folkenflik of NPR noted, the lawsuit began with the words : “Government censorship is deeply un-American.”
The settlement made ABC one of the first to settle with President Donald Trump. That money seems to have disappeared, and there is currently a congressional investigation into where it, along with almost $50 million more from similar settlements, has gone.
FCC chair Brendan Carr seemed to back away from previous threats, saying that ABC and Disney were acting too hastily and that the FCC has not yet decided whether to renew the licenses. “Ultimately,” he said, “they’re going to get a fair shake before the agency.”
