Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has roasted President Donald Trump over his curious attachment to his 35-year-old White House aide Natalie Harp.
The Georgia senator name-dropped Harp, who has been described as Trump’s “human binkie” for being seemingly inseparable from the 80-year-old president, during a scathing takedown at a rally in Atlanta on Sunday.
Accusing Trump of “lying a nation into war, treating citizens as fools, and those who serve as pawns,” Ossoff contrasted the sailors who have spent almost nine months at sea aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to the nap-taking billionaire president.
“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do his job,” the 39-year-old senator told the crowd, before invoking Trump’s peculiar relationship with his executive assistant.
“He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
Ossoff’s barb appeared particularly well-timed: Trump indeed traveled with Harp on his Qatari-gifted Air Force One on Sunday, flying from his New Jersey golf course back to D.C. after spending the weekend there.
Harp has become a near-constant presence in Trump’s life, and her estranged brother has called her bond with the president “very unhealthy.”
Early in his second term, Trump told his team that Harp “was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and his kids,” according to Regime Change, a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
Harp, meanwhile, would leave gushing letters for Trump in his “personal spaces,” with one reportedly reading, “You are all that matters to me,” according to the book.
Harp’s closeness to Trump was underscored last week when it was revealed that she was among the select few aides who accompanied him on a military plane out of Turkey after he snuck off Air Force One in a catering truck amid an Iranian assassination threat.
Other top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and top White House aide Stephen Miller, remained on the “decoy” Air Force One.
Haberman suggested to MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff on Sunday that Trump took Harp because she provided him comfort amid his cloak-and-dagger escape from Ankara. “She is sort of his Binkie, for lack of a better way of putting it—his comfort blanket,” Haberman said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
