Happy Wednesday! Itâs Swin again. Within hours of Senator Jon Ossoff making those now-viral remarks over the weekend about Donald Trump and his White House aide Natalie Harp, longtime Democratic and Republican operatives immediately messaged me about a) whether it was politically savvy for the senator to bait the White House like this, and b) how Republicans in and close to the Trump-Vance administration were already preparing to, well, take the bait. Well, it worked â very quickly and very loudly.
In todayâs âFirst Draft,â weâll get right into the strange, cultish history explaining why it feels like the entirety of the national Republican Party apparatus and key parts of the U.S. federal government were marshaled to gratuitously defend the honor of one blonde, young female Trump loyalist. Plus, progressives score a stunning upset in Florida, and Trumpâs administration keeps targeting the International Criminal Court.
Fair Game
It was late November 2024. Donald Trump hadnât even been sworn back into office yet, and yet he was already busy ordering up the kind of sweeping leak hunts that would come to define much of his second presidency.
The president-elect was absolutely livid, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told me. On Nov. 25 that year, the New York Times ran a story that quoted from a series of leaked âdevotional lettersâ that close Trump aide and confidant, Natalie Harp, had written to her boss. Eyebrow-raising lines included, âYou are all that matters to me.â
âI want to bring you joy,â Harp warmly penned, âto feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk âwork.ââ
Trump, the sources said, was furious about this for days, and ordered advisers to conduct what one of the sources called an expansive âmole huntâ to figure out who leaked the private correspondence â or, âlove letters,â as some Trump advisers mockingly called them. The president-elect privately bellowed about how there were a tiny number of people, including himself, who had access to Harpâs letters, and that he considered it a towering âinvasion of privacyâ for anyone to leak them.
One of the three sources says they were âinterviewedâ by Trump officials for the informal leak probe, and that they were asked to hand over their phone for inspection. It is unclear if Trump ever found the âmolesâ responsible. But his days of rage underscored a reality that was about to befall Trumpâs Washington: Natalie Harp â a 35-year-old former One America News Network personality who now seems to follow Trump everywhere â was a made woman, protected up on high by the MAGA prince of darkness himself.