If you’ve been online in the last few days you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to Natalie Harp Discourse (NHD), the phenomenon surrounding a woman who has served since January 2025 as President Trump’s human emotional comfort blanket. Attention to Harp had been growing online over the last couple weeks. (Perhaps the canonical account on her role was published by the New York Times just after the 2024 election.) Even the TPM Editors’ Blog has been in on the action. But it kicked into high gear on Sunday when Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) referenced her with a mere three words in a campaign speech which was then sliced and diced for maximum social media exposure. Let me quote the full sentence with the three words about Harp in italics: “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.”
This may seem like fluff and frivolity to some. But among other things it brings to the surface a question that has hovered around the opposition to Trump ever since he entered the political scene more than a decade ago. I had been thinking about this in recent weeks because it becomes increasingly relevant, especially with the onset of the 2026 midterms.
A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.
This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.
