Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Newly leaked letters from 35 year-old White House aide Natalie Harp are providing new insight into just how strange and intimate her relationship really is with 80 year-old Donald Trump. One of the president’s top advisors just posted an embarrassing tirade on social media in an apparent public meltdown over the flood of leaks coming out of the Trump White House. Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton is facing a fresh round of criticism over how his office sought to protect a research lab that tortured hundreds of puppies. And the U.S. Navy may strip the name of a heroic Black World War II sailor from a new aircraft carrier so it can be renamed for Trump instead.
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Natalie Harp’s Bizarre and Intimate Letters to Trump Leaked in Their Entirety
The Daily Beast recently published the full text of a pair of bizarre handwritten notes that presidential aide Natalie Harp wrote to Donald Trump back in 2023. They read less like communications from a White House staffer and more like something out of a lovestruck teen’s diary.
When Harp was 31 and Trump was 76, she told him, “you are all that matters to me… I don’t want to ever let you down.”
The letters appear to have been written during or right after a golf trip to Scotland and Ireland in May of 2023. Harp revealingly told Trump she was jealous of women “whose only job seems to be to talk with you and look pretty,” adding “I want that job!!”
She went to talk about how she forgot to eat and sleep, all while worrying that she would somehow upset Trump during their trip. One letter reads like a lengthy apology, in which she recalled how she was left behind by Trump’s entourage, sitting alone in a van outside customs without her passport and panicking instead of calling the Secret Service.
Harp is referred to as the “Human Printer” as she became known for carrying around a portable printer to print flattering news articles and social media posts to hand to Trump. More revealingly, she’s also become the point person for foreign leaders who want to reach the president. Harp also somehow went for more than a year without seeking the routine security clearance typically required of West Wing staffers.
Trump biopgrapher Michael Wolff, who was handed the letters by 2024 Trump campaign staff while writing his book “All or Nothing,” opined that Harp’s relationship with Trump “is not a relationship that should exist in a professional setting.”
Wolff added that at the time, there was “a revolt” among Trump’s staff, because tose in his orbit could see Harp’s influence growing without having actual experience to justify her proximity to the president.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle called Harp “one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides” on Trump’s team. After Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia mentioned Harp by name during a recent campaign rally, Ingle attacked Ossoff a “feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama.”
Longtime Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod called the Trump-Harp relationship “a deadly serious issue” due to her going for more than a year without a security clearance. He’s not wrong: Harp has no formal national security background and yet has access to Trump’s Truth Social account, which is his primary method of communication. She also accompanied him when he was smuggled via catering truck to a separate military aircraft after ditched Air Force One to escape a reported Iranian threat, leaving his own Cabinet officials behind as a decoy.
The framers wrote Article II so the people around a president would answer to the Senate and to the public, not just to the president himself. When the person deciding what a president reads and which foreign leaders reach him holds no confirmed office and answers to nobody but him, we’ve quietly rebuilt the exact arrangement the Constitution was written to prevent.
Top Trump Advisor Has Public Meltdown Over Leaks
The fallout from the last week of nonstop Natalie Harp coverage has apparently gotten to one of Trump’s most senior staffers.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, who also runs the office that decides who gets appointed to nearly every job in the federal government, posted a Thursday night rant on his official X account aimed at unnamed former staffers.
Scavino wrote that staffers who “get fired for doing a spectacularly s—ty job at an agency” and have their badges deactivated and building access revoked should accept that they have “the full ‘you’re dead to us’ package” instead of running to every media outlet willing to give them a microphone.
He added that those unnamed former employees should “just take the L, and move on,” calling them “LOSERS” in all-caps, refraining from naming any particular individuals.
Nobody close to Trump seemed to know who he was talking about. But with the ongoing exodus of top aides from the West Wing, there are plenty of names choose from. Just 19 months into Trump’s second term, White House officials have been leaking on an almost-daily basis on everything from the Epstein files to the Iran war.
But the timing of Scavino’s public meltdown also lines up with the most recent news cycle dominated by coverage of Natalie Harp. It started when Jon Ossoff told a crowd in Atlanta that Trump doesn’t actually want to do the job of president, but “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” on a “flying palace” gifted by Qatar’s royal family.
Trump notably didn’t refute Ossoff’s main line of attack about him not wanting to govern, but instead resorted to calling the Georgia senator a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike.” His communications director decided to use a weirdly sexual line of attack. But that only guaranteed Harp would stay in the headlines for the rest of the week.
We’ve since learned of Harp’s other bizarre behaviors, like reportedly setting up a bed in the maids’ quarters at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey gold club in the summer of 2023 after staff wouldn’t give her a room, then moved herself to the women’s locker room to get even closer to Trump. Wolff said Harp seems convinced that she’s the president’s “higher purpose bride.” That all came as First Lady Melania Trump finally resurfaced yesterday after being out of the public eye for almost a month. Melania’s press conference came just after it was reported that Harp was the leading advocate for the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, which has traditionally housed the Office of the First Lady of the United States.
Former Trump press secretary Sarah Matthews told CNN that Harp’s closeness to the president has apparently unsettled even his own Secret Service detail. The network also recently reported that in 2023, Harp once climbed into the trunk of an SUV just so she could ride along to court with Trump when there was no room for her in his motorcade.
In their book “Regime Change,” New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published their own excerpts from the letters. Haberman called Harp Trump’s “human binkie. So when you put it all together, Scavino’s meltdown is simply because the dam is leaking like a sieve from a dozen different places.
Back in 1931, in Near v. Minnesota, the Supreme Court told government it doesn’t get to shut down a publication it finds inconvenient, and every administration since has had to live with reporting it can’t stand. When a White House treats its own leaks as betrayal rather than accountability, it’s telling you it wants back the one power that ruling took away.
Paxton Protected Research Lab That Tortured Hundreds of Puppies
In Texas, the U.S. Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton and Democratic state representative James Talarico has become one of the most closely watched contests in the country. Talarico has been leading in recent polls and has a real chance of giving Democrats their first U.S. Senate seat in Texas in three decades.
Talarico has a long list of potential attacks on Paxton. There’s the securities fraud case that hung over Paxton’s head for years before the charges were finally dismissed in 2025, after he completed a pretrial diversion deal. There’s also Paxton’s 2023 impeachment by the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives, which ended with an acquittal from the state Senate. There’s also whistleblower allegations from Paxton’s former senior staffers. But Talarico’s campaign may have finally found something that could cause lasting damage to Paxton’s chances: puppies.
Animal rights advocates have been calling for the release of veterinary records pertaining to roughly 400 puppies used as lab animals in various horrific experiments at Texas A&M. The university has steadfastly refused, citing confidentiality rules, and a 2015 report found the school leaned on a legal opinion issued by Ken Paxton’s office to justify keeping the documents under seal.
Talarico has turned that into a blunt campaign message, recently posting to X, “I wish Ken Paxton would protect puppies the way he protects pedophiles.” That’s a reference to a plea deal Paxton’s office cut with convicted child molester Adam Hoffman, who only had to serve a few weeks in jail and didn’t even have to register as a sex offender. Paxton’s team has defended that deal by saying the first trial ended in a hung jury and the victim didn’t want to testify a second time.
Political strategist Mike Fahey told Newsweek that modern politics is “increasingly a battle for memory,” adding that “the most effective political stories are the ones you can explain at the dinner table in 15 seconds.” He further observed that if any line of attack “requires a law degree and a flow chart to understand, you’ve probably already lost most voters.”
Whether a story about puppies moves more Texas voters than a complex securities fraud case is still an open question, but it demonstrates that Talarico’s messaging strategy is continuing to evolve.
When Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, the whole point was that a government working for you doesn’t get to pick and choose which of its own files you’re allowed to see. An attorney general’s real job is enforcing that principle, and every time an office finds a fresh reason to keep the folder closed, ordinary people lose a little more of the power to check the government they pay for.
Navy May Name Aircraft Carrier After Trump Instead of Heroic Black Sailor
U.S. Navy leadership is now discussing the possibility of renaming an aircraft carrier after Donald Trump, instead of a Black World War II hero.
The carrier was initially meant to honor Doris Miller, who performed heroic acts during the attack on Pearl Harbor that eventually prompted the U.S. to throw its weight behind the Allies in World War II.
Miller was a mess attendant with no anti-aircraft weapons training. But during Japan’s attack on the base, he grabbed a gun anyway and shot down at least one Japanese plane. Miller also dragged wounded sailors to safety while under fire. He became the first Black service member in American history to be awarded the Navy Cross, which is the branch’s second-highest honor.
The U.S.S. Doris Miller was set to make history as the first aircraft carrier ever named after a Black man, and the first named after an enlisted service member rather than an officer or a president. Ironically, Trump made that call himself during his first term.
According to CNN, the renaming discussions have apparently been going back and forth for months. The Navy has reportedly stopped using Miller’s name internally, and are instead only referring to the ship by its hull number, CVN-81. Two unnamed officials told NBC that Doris Miller may be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, though the White House hasn’t officially approved it as of Friday. Aircraft carriers are almost always named after presidents, while destroyers tend to be named for Medal of Honor recipients. The shuffle of names is looking less like tradition and more like a deliberate swap to appease the man in the Oval Office.
The final decision on the ship’s name rests with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao. If the name change becomes official, a ship meant to honor a working-class Black sailor who put his life on the line at Pearl Harbor would instead carry the name of a man who had his doctor tell the military that he couldn’t be drafted to Vietnam because of bone spurs.
In 1941, the same year Doris Miller picked up that gun, A. Philip Randolph had to threaten a march on Washington just to force Franklin Roosevelt to open defense jobs to Black workers. Miller’s name on that carrier was a small and very late payment on a debt this country still hasn’t settled, and taking it back tells you exactly who’s expected to keep sacrificing and who’s expected to be celebrated.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are some stories you may have missed:
ICE Detains 5-Year-Old Boy on His Way to a Soccer Game. Five-year-old Liam Tadeo and his father were both recently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Austin, Texas, and are currently being held at the notorious Dilley, Texas immigrant detention center. That’s the same detention facility where another five-year-old boy named Liam was jailed after ICE agents in Minneapolis arrested him and his father as he was taking him to school. Advocacy groups have accused Dilley of housing immigrants in deplorable conditions, with insect-ridden cells, spoiled food and a pattern of guards failing to give detainees their prescribed medication.
Former Obama Aide Sounds Alarm Over Natalie Harp’s Access. In an op-ed for the New Republic, Greg Greene — who ran former President Barack Obama’s social media accounts — said 35 year-old Trump White House staffer Natalie Harp’s level of access “should concern everyone.” Greene recounted how when he held Harp’s job, every post had rigorous standards and underwent thorough review before being blasted out to the public. He also pointed out that no one person had the power to both write the president’s social media posts and send them, but that the process relied on a collaborative effort from a team of professionals who sought to use the correct language to make sure the voice of the president was always sound and reasonable. Greene lamented that those standards seem to have gone out the window in Trump’s second term, pointing out that Harp is the same aide who posted the video depicting the Obamas as apes and the AI-generated video of Trump dropping feces on “No Kings” protesters.
Outraged Americans Across the Country Are Vandalizing Flock Cameras. The propensity of AI-powered Flock cameras, which are the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that have been installed on street corners across the U.S., have caused outrage and concern among Americans on both sides of the political aisle. More Americans have started to attack the cameras with saws, lasers and spray paint, while critics have shown up at city council meetings to pressure officials to cancel their contracts with Flock Safety, which has installed more than 100,000 of the ALPRs in all 50 states. Police officers in multiple cities have been fired and criminally charged for misusing Flock cameras to track significant others and family members, and one woman from Texas was reportedly tracked with Flock cameras as she traveled out of state to obtain an abortion.
