The New Republic

Natalie Harp’s relationship with President Donald Trump is even more intimate than we thought.

The Daily Beast published two intimate letters Thursday from Trump’s assistant, courtesy of Michael Wolff, Trump’s biographer who maintained a disturbingly close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The letters were written in 2023, either during or after a business trip to Scotland.

Here’s the complete text of Harp’s first letter (emphasis added):

Dear Mr. President,

I’m sorry. I thought I was the only one left behind last night, and had no idea Margo’s car was also pulled over, and sent back to the Airport. Since I was alone in the van outside Customs without my passport, I panicked, and should have just called Secret Service instead of you. I also am sorry if I was an embarrassment walking the course in Scotland. The first day I was told there were no carts, and people walked, which is why I walked. The second day, I was specifically asked by, I forget who his name was, but one of the main people who worked there, if I could continue walking, and tell any other girls who would head out there to do the same to spare the Course any more Carts. If there is anything else I have done to cause you trouble, please forgive me. I know that some people have said I haven’t been texting them back, and there have been some International cell issues (John was having technical issues on the Plane too, so asked me to help him out).

I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time). I haven’t been myself, dwelling on the Past, and the pain of losing my Dad, and I started letting the remarks of people who haven’t bothered me before, get to me—not because I care what others think, but because I see myself being lowered in your eyes and good opinion. That is the fear you see, because I never want to bring you anything but joy. I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life—That’s what I wanted to use this card for, when you saw me at the Cash Register, and once again did what you didn’t have to do, and gifted me with Mementos of this Trip of a Lifetime, a Coming of Age. I will return a better person. I have to sign off now, as the cars are leaving. See you soon.

Harp signed that message with “All my heart.” Very normal stuff to send to your boss.

Here is the complete text of the second letter (emphasis added):

Dear Mr. President

Now this is the Note I wanted to write (But the apology needed to come first.)

I have learned so much about myself on this Trip—I always knew coming home to my roots would be enlightening, but I had no idea how much. For the first time, in I don’t know how long, you forced me to “unplug.” We could be out on the Course, with no machines, and even forget what time it was! I didn’t have to be “Human Printer.” I could take time to enjoy good conversation, and still get all my work done at the end of the day. In fact, I even had time to take long morning and evening walks to enjoy each Sunrise and Sunset (though I did forget to eat and sleep!). With so much thinking time, I confess it did have a slightly negative effect at times, that I know you picked up on, but the end result, I believe, will be worth it. I had no idea how rapidly I was approaching burnout, and starting to envy those whose only “job” seems to be to talk with you, and look pretty. I want that job!! So many times, I’m just trying to stay afloat with all that’s coming in for you, I look like a hunchback who didn’t have time to freshen up (at least you know what I should look like)! Plus, I miss the days when you used to call, during my Talkshow days, and we’d talk about everything and nothing. I want to get back to that synergy. We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!! I’ve always felt like an in-betweener, somewhere between Staff and those you enjoy talking to on the Plane or at Dinner, because that’s who I used to be to you when I was a “Talkshow Host” (as much as I hated that actual job!). I wish I could hear every conversation, because that’s when you’re having a good time, getting away from it all, at least for a few moments.

But after going through all this self-analysis, my conclusion? I need to reunite my past self with my current into a better version who will make you proud. And please, when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more. Thank you for always being there for me—I’ll never forget when you made that promise to me after losing my Dad, and I know how happy he is right now that I did get to go to Scotland and Ireland, as he always wanted for me. To modify a classic, ‘I could not have parted with you, to anyone less worthy’—And, I will add, it is I who is unworthy.”

Harp signed her second letter with “Always.”

Within the span of the second letter, Harp vacillates from viewing Trump as a kind of spiritual adviser, a father figure, and a Mr. Darcy-type romantic lead. As for her request for more access, it seems Harp got her wish. White House staff and national security officials have expressed serious concerns about her unfettered access to the president—and all of his conversations.

Michael Cohen’s highly anticipated reunion radio interview with President Trump was a masterclass in brown-nosing. 

The president made a sleepy appearance on Cohen’s weekly talk radio program and podcast When You Know You Know on Thursday night and the two men spent most of the time relitigating what they see as their persecution and trading stale old stories. 

“So I wanna go back to 2016 if we can, because you and I have obviously traveled a pretty rocky road together,” Cohen said near the beginning of the interview after playing the song “Why Can’t We Be Friends” by War. “Do you remember, sir, when I went on CNN with Brianna Keilar and she told me that you were underwater in the polls and I responded with those famous two words, says who, which became some worldwide meme?”

“A good advocate, and then they weaponized you like nobody’s ever been weaponized, like few have been,” Trump responded. 

“Well, maybe just you and I, sir.”

“Yeah. Me too, but … mine was, mine was at a level that nobody’s ever seen before. But they weaponized you, they weaponized a lot of people. And, uh, I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump continued. “And that’s a big, that’s a big thing that you did.”

The rest of the interview was effectively a stock speech for Trump, as he eventually devolved into ranting about polling, Iran, gas prices, and upcoming elections. 

“I think that we’re doing really well in the polls, the real polls. If I were running today, I think I’d win by 25 points. I think we’d win by a lot. The economy has never been stronger. We’re doing numbers that nobody’s ever seen before,” he said. (His approval rating fell to 33 percent this week, the lowest level of his presidency.)

“Venezuela was amazing. And now with Iran, they will never have a nuclear weapon, he continued. “We’re essentially controlling and soon controlling the straits. We’re doing very well with Iran. The press doesn’t like to say that, although a lot of the press does say it, you know, because the Navy’s gone, the Air Force is gone, the leadership is gone.... I had [gas] down to $1.85 a barrel. And then I said, ‘But we have to make a journey to the Middle East because we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’ And that’s what happened.... We’ve wiped them out, militarily wiped out.” 

What Cohen and Trump didn’t talk about was Cohen’s multiple politically advantageous  transformations. 

He was first Trump’s longtime attorney—before being sentenced to three years in federal prison on charges related to his role as the middleman in Trump’s hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Then he had a #Resistance liberal hero arc, lambasting Trump as “a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man” in his book and testifying against him in court. And now that Trump is back in power, he’s returned to bending over backwards to appease him. 

Cohen ended the episode with Peaches & Herb’s “Reunited.” 

Michael Cohen, whose testimony helped get Trump convicted of felonies, just interviewed Donald Trump after “recanting” what he said under oath.

A podcast means nothing. This man is a liar as he always has been.

Here’s a clip: pic.twitter.com/zu8Y0ipBVU

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) August 20, 2026

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 21 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump, who’s very angry over the Iran war, just unleashed more crazed threats at a host of new targets. He vowed economic warfare against anyone that helps Iran, but news organizations are struggling to figure out what on earth this is supposed to accomplish. This comes as Marjorie Taylor Greene just issued a stark warning to Republicans, claiming that Trump’s coalition is imploding, portending a GOP disaster in the midterms.

These things are linked. Probably nothing is wrecking the MAGA coalition more than his inability to find a way out of the war. You can see other signs that MAGA media is completely lost on how to deal with Trump’s total impotence. None of this was supposed to happen. So we’re trying to parse where MAGA goes now with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing really well on the MAGA crack-up. Virginia, thanks for coming on.

Virginia Heffernan: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So Marjorie Taylor Greene is almost like a MAGA oracle at this point, or maybe like MAGA’s Greek chorus or something. She posted this video on TikTok about the midterms. Listen to this.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): Let me explain to you guys how this is actually going to work. ‘26 midterms and the ‘28 presidential race is not going to be anything like 2024, where there was so much support for MAGA. The coalition came in. You want to know why ‘26 and ‘28 is going to be different? Because Donald Trump broke his big, big campaign promise of no more foreign wars, and actually has got us embroiled in a war with Iran, a war that should not be happening, and he’s not backing off of it. And it will probably get worse. So that has fed the affordability crisis. That’s why people can’t afford gasoline. That’s why people’s bills keep going up. Food prices are still going up. Beef is at all-time high. It’s ridiculous. You know what you should have done? You should have stuck to your campaign promises, and you should have delivered for the people that put you in office, not the ones writing you the big fat checks.

Sargent: When Marjorie Taylor Greene says the coalition is falling apart, all these voters feel betrayed by you, Mr. President—she isn’t just making a prediction. She’s essentially saying to these voters, you know, you shouldn’t show up for this guy because he fucked you, right? That’s what she’s really saying. And it’s true. She’s right about it.

Heffernan: She is absolutely right. And I think she also mentioned a tweet of Trump’s, where he said, sometime around the Epstein files, when she and Thomas Massie were agitating for the release of them—Trump is quoted as saying he doesn’t care about his old voters. And she and lots of people took that very personally.

And the way she describes those earlier voters, so his, like, diehard supporters in both 2020 and 2024—she says that they are basically the people that she’s often standing with. Women who care about affordability, but these are the women who may have been anti-vax, who may have been open to RFK, who may have even supported QAnon, the Marjorie Taylor Greene stuff. But then, on the more sane side of things, also really don’t want war.

War is never very popular with women, going back to times when women were worried about their sons being killed. They don’t like this idea of a deployment. They don’t like the idea that we don’t really know the number of American casualties in Iran. And women are keeping that issue top of mind, and connecting it to the Epstein class’s exploitation of children.

And then the affordability piece, which brings together household management and kind of feeding my children and how much do groceries cost. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene points out, when he called affordability a quote, “Democrat hoax,” when he called Epstein a Democrat hoax, that really touched a nerve with this population that she believes—and I think maybe rightly—is crucial to keeping Trump in power.

Sargent: Yes, and on Iran, Trump is utterly stuck. He raged wildly on Truth Social. Here’s what he said: “Today I am announcing the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country. This will be economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale.” Trump then also said that any country that acts in any way to interact economically with Iran will itself face “tremendous” economic consequences.

Now, Virginia, The New York Times pointed out aptly that he isn’t specifying which countries he’s actually willing to punish, which could be countries like China. And it also pointed out that this is going to be a really complex and time-consuming thing to enforce on other countries, even if he goes through with it.

It just seems like Trump is desperate at this point to create the mere perception that he’s acting. We’re, like, well beyond him having any actual plan. It’s all about just looking as if he’s doing something. What do you make of all that?

Heffernan: Part of what made the neocons for a time so effective is that they really looked like they had the inside line. When they were selling us on the fact of WMDs, and it was Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld—these people, like the architects of the war in Vietnam, they sort of had some kind of aura around them, like they had some kind of genius to them, like a sort of Elon Musk aura. That would give them clout way beyond what they were actually doing, which was incredibly destructive and misguided.

But Trump doesn’t—there is no genius halo around either Trump or Hegseth, or really anyone who is bringing us into this disaster. They just don’t get that pass from us. Nobody is, like, trying to sell this to us. He just does not care what the American people think of what the Pentagon is doing. And that has become very clear, and Americans on the right and left don’t like that.

Sargent: Well, I think you’re putting your finger on a really important irony here, because remember, Donald Trump rose to power in 2016 by making the case that the Bushes and the Rumsfelds and the Colin Powells were part of this corrupt elite that said that it was going to organize the world in an effective way, but ultimately lied to the American people and ended up costing the lives of thousands of Americans abroad, in that awful extended quagmire.

And so I think maybe the rebellion against Donald Trump now is partly rooted in that, right? In the sense that MAGA actually bought this idea that Trump was a different kind of elite.

Heffernan: And I think he actually was against the Iraq War, sort of, at the time. I mean, I think on Howard Stern he says, reluctantly, he supported it, but he really was against it.

I don’t think he was against it because he’s a peacenik at heart. I think he was against it because he thought it was spending a lot of money, right? Money that probably he thinks should be his.

Sargent: And they weren’t taking the oil.

Heffernan: And they weren’t taking the oil, like in Venezuela. Right, they weren’t taking the oil. People were being boneheaded and stupid and just spending money abroad. So in a weird way, he started to create this kind of manly opposition to war that was more about, like, waste, more about just overspending, more about, like, the world not being grateful to us or not paying us enough, or NATO, not kissing our palms enough or whatever. And also, like, keeping the money here, keeping the money in America.

Sargent: And we’re not going to waste young men. We’re not going to pour young men down the tubes, right?

Heffernan: I mean, I’m not sure that he cared much about our soldiers, but yes, that definitely would appeal to people. The other thing is, there are a lot of veterans in his base, and veterans had come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, often multiple tours, with PTSD, strongly anti-war.

I mean, you think, on the other side of the aisle, Graham Platner, right? Like, came back just with absolute contempt for the war machine. And so they also had this manly opposition to war. And it worked well with the kind of more feminine—I’m putting that in quotes—opposition to the war that Marjorie Taylor Greene articulates, which is, like, fear for our children, fear for people, fear for soldiers, and strong support for the military. And that combination of things had some nice heft to it.

Sargent: Yeah. So he’s, like, repeating the elite folly, but just telling everybody to suck it up, in a way that, like, no other previous president would have done. So Matt Gertz of Media Matters caught something interesting as well. Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who’s probably Trump’s most devoted propagandist, has largely gone silent about the Iran war in recent weeks. He only just broke his silence to say that Trump isn’t getting enough credit for his successes in Iran.

I think this goes to what we were talking about before, Virginia, which is that a lot of these propagandists just don’t know what to do right now, because Trump is so visibly stuck, and it’s all so unpopular, and their own audiences are turning against them over their support for the war. And so can you talk about that dynamic? It seems like the propaganda now has hit this wall where there’s no audience for it anymore.

Heffernan: I think Giuliani today said you have to give up everything you believe to work at Fox News. And that’s absolutely right, because you have to sync with the audience. They only want to hear what they want to hear, right? You’re not a propagandist leading the way. You’re following ratings.

So I don’t know what Hannity thinks of the actual war in Iran. I assume he’s in favor, but whatever. But he will not talk about it if he thinks the audience doesn’t want to hear about it, which is what he’s been doing.

The only thing he can talk about is an old refrain of Trump’s, the sort of, like, Rodney Dangerfield, “I don’t get no respect”—the, like, that Trump doesn’t get enough credit, or Trump’s always persecuted. This is something that does appeal to the MAGA base, because they, I think, identify with being—he’s sometimes described them as forgotten, overlooked.

They too are not getting credit. They too have run into a system that doesn’t respect them. And if Trump is not getting credit for something, people might be able to find in him the, like, persecuted Trump that they like.

Sargent: Yeah. And I think a lot of these Fox and MAGA figures are bumping up against another problem. They don’t know how to talk about Trump and the Iran war, because in their minds, Trump’s might and power and ability to impose his will on his enemies was always unquestioned.

And of course, the funny thing is, they’re required to treat it as fact that Trump’s defeat over Iran has been absolute, that it’s been one of the greatest military triumphs in world history. They’re required to repeat that, because Trump has said it. So now, how do they explain the fact that Trump can’t impose his will on Iran?

Heffernan: I do, by the way, think that figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and maybe wiser people, are kind of reevaluating everything through a different lens. I mean, you know, I don’t know if you see some people testifying to basically falling out with MAGA, or deconstructing their experience with MAGA. And they’re in shambles.

Like, their brains feel like they’re in their component parts all around them. And they’re just going through, I believed this, I believed this, I can’t believe I believed this. I can’t believe I thought I should shoot bleach into my veins. Like, the whole thing. It’s like being lost all at once.

And if we undo things like some of the language, like hoax or fake news, and understand that they were strategies by this very increasingly powerful person—until he’s the most powerful person in the world—to subjugate people, then you start to be able to, I don’t know, to, like, imagine how we could rebuild, you know, this broken country.

Sargent: Well, just to bring this back to the Republicans in the midterms, we had Mike Johnson talking about the war in a surprisingly candid way. He had this to say.

Mike Johnson (voiceover): The Iran conflict has been a cause, of course, of gas prices going up. It’s drug on.

Sargent: That kind of strips away the spell in a way doesn’t it?

Heffernan: I mean Trump has at times said we have to get used to inflation, inflation is a small price to pay for whatever he’s doing in Iran. So they don’t exactly, they don’t just lie and say that inflation will come down, but it’s not down yet, or gas prices, I mean, will come down. Yeah, for some reason they are not able to call inflation a hoax.

We have to get used to inflation. Inflation’s a small price to pay for whatever he’s doing in Iran. I don’t know why that one is where the rubber hits the road for them. I mean, you’d think that they would say—they’d have their own polls. They’d have, like, a Rasmussen gas prices, and be like, look, it’s three dollars a gallon for Rasmussen. So they’re just citing fake polls.

They don’t do that. Inflation—there’s something about inflation that it’s just such a populist issue. It really gets to someone: the Fed, the war machine, the elites, whatever, are raising prices to make my life unaffordable. And you just don’t mess with it as an issue, partly because Trump ran on the idea that Biden had created all this inflation, and that he was going to bring inflation down, and it would be, you know, to record lows in two weeks or whatever it was. And here we are.

So I think it’s interesting to see Mike Johnson have to wrestle with that, because we are getting down to where his constituents live, which is on affordability.

Sargent: Just presuming for now that there’s a pretty decisive Democratic win—next year, Donald Trump is a lame duck. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s prediction about MAGA cracking up and scattering and splintering will have come true. I don’t think we’re prepared for how weak and disorganized MAGA might look at that point. Can you talk about that?

Heffernan: I mean, yeah, right. What are they going to do when he’s impeached every day, as Ted Cruz once said would happen? I don’t know.

Sargent: Yeah, when he faces, like, serious oversight, and he’s just, like, this, you know, raging figure who’s kind of tied down by Democrats in Congress, at least to some degree. Obviously, he’s going to abuse his powers in all sorts of horrible ways, but it will be trench warfare more than mighty Trump ruling over his domain, right? And so he’ll look weak, and he’ll look constrained, and he’ll look like he’s struggling, and people will be talking about JD Vance and what’s next. And I think MAGA will look really kind of disorganized and shattered at that point, is my prediction.

Heffernan: I think so too. I mean, we will see the Game of Thrones happening, with maybe Tucker Carlson or whoever else trying to consolidate the America First side of things. We’re not in the clear. I mean, Democrats—or the country—is not in the clear, if Democrats win the midterms, or if they even impeach Trump. Because the America First side of things is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Just because they oppose the war, just because they talk about affordability, does not mean they don’t want a lot of toxic, toxic things.

Sargent: Yeah. And so, you know, we talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene as this oracle now, but maybe we’ll regret it later.

Heffernan: That’s right.

Sargent: Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for all this.

Heffernan: Thank you.

Handling a U.S. president’s social-media voice is a magisterial job. The work involved ranges far and wide—from figuring out how to handle the president’s receipt of a Nobel Peace Prize to huddling with colleagues to pull just the right clip from a speech. Or, if you’re President Donald Trump’s aide and traveling companion Natalie Harp, you might use AI to portray the president as a fighter pilot dropping payloads of poop on No Kings demonstrators.

I know something about this particular job. I managed President Barack Obama’s partisan social media accounts over much of the first year of his presidency. It’s fair to say this was a more innocent age. The watchwords I took to the work were ones like “safeguards” and “restraint,” instead of “poop jet” and “what if we depicted the president as Jesus Christ.” A president’s statements, I knew, could move markets even if ventriloquized by twenty- and thirtysomethings working to channel the top guy’s voice. At every point, my colleagues and I took intentional steps to guard against loose words.

It hardly takes a genius to spot how the standards around Trump’s social media accounts have slipped, even against the low baseline of his first term. With The New York Times calling Harp, Trump’s omnipresent aide, the “sylphlike woman” who “supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes),” we have a good idea of why those standards have tumbled—and strong reason to wonder what else the woman who “texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf” and operates “entirely outside the usual chain of command” is doing with her prized, rare access.

I never boarded any presidential jets, never mind a catering cart. I came into the role of managing Obama’s political accounts by happenstance: I joined the communications team of the Democratic National Committee to handle what people now might call influencer outreach. Insiders who knew my reputation across a few social media personae—such as the DNC’s new digital director, and the person who managed social for Obama’s 2008 campaign—learned of my arrival … and voilà: I got the keys.

Or more accurately, I didn’t get the keys. That was at my insistence; I felt adamant that no one person, myself included, should both write for those accounts and post. We tapped a new digital hire I trusted—they’d worked with the woman who’s now my spouse—to hold the account credentials, and I built a process to put multiple sets of eyes on every word intended for Obama’s accounts before publication.

In hindsight, I may have gone overboard with the approval steps we put into place, but I didn’t want anything approaching sole ownership over the digital personae of a president of the United States. More to the point, I thought no responsible person should want such a thing. Putting figures from disparate parts of the president’s teams in the decision loop—my boss in DNC communications, the digital director, the White House communications office—kept me accountable and ensured that what went out matched Obama’s voice and careful demeanor.

Sure, that cost us nimbleness in quick-moving moments. Some of my successors in running the DNC’s accounts, which I ran for a bit longer after handing off Obama’s, have taken up a freewheeling style that lets them move at the speed of the digital conversation—with fantastic results. Still, speaking for the political operation of a president demanded precision, especially when the president measured his words as famously as Obama does. Managing those accounts demanded a process with multiple circuit breakers between any individual and the ‘publish’ button—rather than, say, a Grima Wormtongue-style solo operator with the president’s ear and his passwords.

What could I have done in an environment free of safeguards, like the one surrounding this president? Kalshi and Polymarket were but glimmers in some preteen future techbros’ eyes when I did this work, but if I had sure knowledge of what a president’s accounts would post—because I stayed up late with Trump, as Harp reportedly does, to draft each line—I could earn a pretty penny by trading on that information before tapping some market-shifting words into Truth Social.

Not that people should say this administration is known for rampant profiteering on insider info, mind you. Far from it — it’s more apt to call it notorious for that.

How has Harp handled her touchscreen access to Trump’s private communications with world leaders? I can’t say. More worryingly, government agencies can’t say either; MS NOW reports that for a year, Harp repeatedly declined to seek the security clearance that West Wing staffers usually obtain. I also had no clearance—at the DNC, that wasn’t required—but that’s precisely why my colleagues and I built a process where people with clearances had visibility and could step in.

Maybe she’s on the up-and-up with her access to the president and his accounts. Maybe she sees devotion to Trump as its own reward, even if that means squeezing herself behind an SUV’s seats like a stowaway. But that Harp fights so hard for both proximity to the president and a free hand to post on his behalf is why I don’t trust her at all—and neither should you.

Policymakers and economists have long treated climate change as a crisis whose costs would mainly accrue to future generations. Unfortunately, that future is here. As the world frets over the consequences of the Iran war on everything from the cost of goods to the food supply, a separate phenomenon is also choking maritime traffic—and will continue to snarl supply chains long after the Strait of Hormuz reopens.

Water levels in Germany’s Rhine River—one of Europe’s busiest shipping routes—have been at record lows amid weeks of drought, forcing cargo carriers to cut shipments to as little as one-fifth of normal capacity. Those problems didn’t start this summer, either. Rising temperatures caused by climate change have meant less snow in the Alps during the winter, and so less meltwater draining into the Rhine in warmer months. ING, the Dutch banking giant, estimates that the halt of traffic on the Rhine ​will lower Germany’s GDP by 0.3 percentage points this year, which is especially bad news considering the country was on track to grow by just 0.8 percentage points all year. German insurer Allianz likewise estimates that the brutal two-week heatwave in June will cut all of Europe’s GDP by 0.3 percentage points. In May, Allianz analysts had already projected that the countries most exposed to extreme heat—France, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain—will see economic output that’s 5 to 7 percent lower than it would have been otherwise by 2030.

It’s not just Europe. The cost of shipping goods through the busiest lanes in the Panama Canal have jumped to record highs amid falling water levels and increased traffic from vessels redirected from routes disrupted by the Iran war. The Financial Times reports that transit slots on the canal’s most commonly used locks are being auctioned off for 16 times the average price for the same period last year. The ongoing El Niño—on track to be the strongest such event in 76 years—has seen wet season rainfalls slip below previous levels. Climate change has already made rainfall there much less predictable, meaning extreme droughts and floods both threaten to “push canal infrastructure past its operational limits,” The New York Times reported.

Influential environmental economists, including Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus, have argued that spending heavily to respond to climate change in the present risks dinging economic growth down the line. The theory holds that by taking a more gradual approach—forgoing massive investments in adaptation and decarbonization, and continuing to reap the economic benefits of the fossil fuel economy for a while—continued robust growth will make our future selves rich enough to respond to climate change more easily (read: more cheaply) than we can today.

The problem is that our poorer, present selves are now paying for the ballooning costs of climate change in all sorts of nightmarish ways. Direct hits like hurricanes and wildfires dole out damages all at once, destroying homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Governments pay for emergency response, then to clean up damages and rebuild. Insurance companies pay out to policyholders, and then raise rates in ways that strain household budgets, making federally backed mortgages harder to get and pushing up rents as landlords pass those rising costs onto tenants. If major insurance companies opt not to offer coverage to riskier markets, as in Florida, states step in to create their own insurers of last resort and open the market up to smaller, sometimes sketchier firms that threaten to leave policyholders to foot the bill when disaster strikes again. Heat waves drain labor productivity and droughts push down agricultural yields as farmers harvest crops later. Wars, like Trump’s misadventure in Iran, exacerbate these costs in the Panama Canal and elsewhere; growers are paying more for fertilizers, or losing access to them, because maritime traffic has ground to a halt in the contested Strait of Hormuz.

Record-low water levels in the Danube have forced nuclear plants in Hungary and Romania to cut output and shut down without the river water needed to cool down reactors. Hungary’s MBH Bank reported a 0.1 percentage point hit to GDP for every week the country’s largest nuclear generator is offline. In France, three nuclear reactors were taken offline earlier this month as jellyfish—whose populations have been buoyed by warming waters, overfishing and plastic pollution—swarmed the seawater pumping stations used to cool them.

The models that experts use to assess the costs of climate change also have a tendency to understate risks and leave out things now proving to be extraordinarily costly. A study in Nature last year, Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer noted recently, found that “climate-driven smoke deaths” resulted in economic damages that “exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the U.S.A.”

It’d be unfair, of course, to blame governments’ failure to prepare for this moment on a handful of overly sanguine economic modelers; although their more prescient colleagues deserve credit for assessing climate risks more accurately, precious few economists have even bothered to consider the effects of rising temperatures. Climate change is a genuinely thorny problem to tackle given that our world still runs on the substances driving it, on fossil fuels in particular. In America, that fact has been ably exploited by Big Energy companies and the Republican politicians they fund, who’ve gone to great lengths to deny the problem and stop governments at every level from doing anything about it. Among the many hellish results of those efforts is that policymakers are essentially flying blind into a world that’s becoming increasingly expensive, and quite literally unnavigable.

By the time Chibuike was 24 years old, he had been kicked out of his family home multiple times, developed a drug addiction, attempted suicide, and scammed tens of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting victims overseas. For most of his career as a cybercriminal, Chibuike lived in one hotel after another in his native Ikotun—a bustling, impoverished neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria. He spent lavishly on nights out, knockoff designer wares, and an ever-expanding circle of friends. At night, buoyed by meth and crack, he logged hours on his phone, talking to women who thought they were talking to the American wrestler Cody Rhodes.

Chibuike is a “Yahoo Boy,” a moniker for online fraudsters based in West Africa, especially Nigeria, who con foreigners out of their life savings. Named for the Yahoo email addresses they once used, they build intimate, often romantic relationships with their victims based on fake personas. With enough time and ingenuity, they extract money from “clients” in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world where digital manipulation, sextortion, or fake cryptocurrency investment opportunities can lure lucrative targets.

Chibuike is one of four young men at the center of Carlos Barragán’s riveting new book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers. Barragán, a reporter at The New York Times, was drawn into the subject when his own mother fell prey to a Nigerian scammer masquerading as a U.S. soldier. What began as a quest for her scammer became a more searching look into the real lives of Yahoo Boys, and how their crimes and aspirations offered a grim reflection of a modern world riddled with poverty, inequality, and transoceanic loneliness.

The “Nigerian prince” email is one of the best known online frauds: A deposed royal asks his unwitting recipients for help with a frozen bank account, promising a generous cut of his estate in exchange for a small advance payment. The fortune is, of course, nonexistent. The beguiling prince makes off with his ill-gotten gains, and the victim is left brooding over their depleted bank account and their naiveté.

Though “Nigerian prince” emails exploded in step with the expansion of the internet in the 2000s, versions of the scheme were prevalent long before the digital age, operating via the postal service and fax machines. 419 scams—named after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code—have their roots in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, which created ideal conditions for legally questionable get-rich-quick schemes. As the historian Stephen Ellis has observed, the British practice of colonial governance through indigenous elites, known as indirect rule, incentivized charlatanry and corruption among local officials with unchecked power. One commissioner in southeastern Nigeria deceived locals into thinking he possessed supernatural powers, while another officer used a glass eye to create the impression that he was always watching his subordinates. At times, ordinary people masqueraded as colonial officials to demand fines from their victims. “Some Nigerians realized they could exploit the terrifying power and reputation of the white man and his symbols of authority to extort their fellow Nigerians,” the historian Max Siollun has explained. Later impersonation scammers cast a wider net, such as when “Prince Bil Morrison,” who was really a 14-year-old schoolboy, began soliciting funds from American and Canadian “pen pals” in the 1940s.

419 scams—named after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code—have their roots in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, which created ideal conditions for legally questionable get-rich-quick schemes.

Following the end of empire, economic opportunities abounded in Africa as the continent’s new political elites sought foreign capital to fund the costly work of nation-building. This created a class of well-connected intermediaries who profited off the position they straddled between foreign firms and domestic resources. One such middleman was Nigeria’s first Finance Minister Festus Okotie-Eboh, who, according to one American diplomat, “attracted much foreign investment to his country and was spurred to do so because he operated on a straight commission basis.”

The 1970s oil boom led to an influx of petrodollars even as it deepened economic inequality and corruption, leaving millions of educated youths in poverty. Eager to mimic the wealth flaunted by corrupt elites amid scarcity, many young people turned to fraud. The director of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Commission estimated in 2023 that seven out of 10 students were involved in cybercrimes, Barragán relates. A new generation of scammers would incorporate into their playbooks tales of payouts and windfalls that often drew inspiration from real headlines. Their fabricated offers to share funds embezzled from government accounts would gain credibility precisely because cases of embezzlement took place so regularly—such as when the former head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation was arrested for fraud and money laundering in 2017.

This is the world Chibuike, Biggy, Richie, and Azeez grew up in. They are blessed with unbridled entrepreneurial spirit yet cursed with limited avenues along which to channel it. Throughout the book, Barragán makes clear the narrow horizon of choices on offer. The other jobs they hold at various points—Richie has worked as a cashier at a sports betting center and Azeez apprenticed at a neighborhood tailor—pay poorly and afford no real upward mobility. When Barragán asked Biggy where he saw himself in five years, he responded: “A rich-ass motherfucker.” In reality, Biggy was about to turn 30, still living at home, and perpetually on the verge of being broke. It was this disjuncture between their outsize economic ambitions and disappointing realities that fostered the allure of Yahooing. As Biggy explained, “I started doing it for a better life, because the country itself is fucked up.” A smartphone, which can be purchased for as little as five thousand naira (less than four dollars), becomes a golden ticket, promising at once deliverance and ruin.

Some see the wealth they scam out of foreigners as a form of reparations for slavery and colonialism. Others view successful scams as acts of empowerment.

The stories that Yahoo Boys tell themselves are varied. Some, like Biggy, see the wealth they scam out of foreigners as a form of reparations for slavery and colonialism. Others view successful scams as acts of empowerment. In a world in which negative stereotypes about African incompetence remain pervasive, they wear the ability to outcon unsuspecting white people as a badge of honor. At times, the reason for scamming is movingly simple: Azeez, the youngest scammer Barragán interviewed, turned to Yahooing just so he could dine at the local restaurant Foodcity again.

Many Yahoo Boys see themselves as Robin Hood characters, giving away significant portions of their earnings to schoolchildren, friends, and acquaintances. They’re also generous in sharing “formats,” pre-written documents with step-by-step instructions on how to approach romance scam victims. Neighborhood stores thrive on their earnings and spending habits. “We are brainers, not scammers,” one of them told Barragán proudly. “We’re bringing money to the country.” Miracle, a Yahoo Girl, has paintings of both Pablo Escobar and the Virgin Mary hanging in her room. Barragán observes that “when she needed money, she prayed to both.”

Richie, Azeez, and others may have embraced Yahooing for material reasons, but what keeps them in thrall to the hustle are the intangibles: dignity, status, purpose, community, a sense of self. Barragán shows how all four men had experienced the kind of invisibility that came with poverty. Chibuike, for instance, admitted to feeling “completely alone in the world for as long as he could remember, and spending money on people was his way of filling that void.” In Ikotun, a successful “cashout” could transform an anonymous teenager into a local celebrity, with new clothes, new friends, and a new place in the pecking order. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, one character reflects on his newly acquired status as a Big Man in Lagos: “People treat you differently … Suddenly you’re getting all of this sucking-up from people because they think you expect it, all this exaggerated politeness, exaggerated praise, even exaggerated respect that you haven’t earned at all, and it’s so fake and so garish, it’s like a bad overcolored painting, but sometimes you start believing a little bit of it yourself and sometimes you see yourself differently.”

The attempt to understand what, exactly, makes Yahoo Boys tick is the driving force of Barragán’s account. Unassuming and open-minded, Barragán has a knack for getting them to open up to him. Perhaps this is because Nigerian poverty and Western loneliness occupy two sides of the same coin. Both stem from the ravages of late-stage capitalism. The American or European retiree who spent decades working long hours while social bonds frayed, and the Nigerian teen whose wages fail to keep pace with inflation are both paying the price of upholding the global economic system, even as they remain on its margins.

Barragán’s story is set firmly in the late 2010s and early 2020s: the Covid-19 pandemic casts a long shadow, exacerbating economic volatility in the Global South and social isolation everywhere else. Lockdowns across the globe made surviving on honest wages in Lagos even harder, as many industries slowed, while “clients” in the West who were social distancing became all the more hungry for connection. The pathologies of our current moment—the yearning for genuine human connection, the ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and, in Chibuike’s case, a parasocial celebrity culture in the social media era—play out in living color.

Especially memorable is Barragán’s description of the inner workings of the scam economy, which illustrates both the wonders and pitfalls of internet-driven globalization: The American or European victim purchases a U.S. gift card for their Nigerian scammer, who sells it to Chinese contacts, who then unload it on netizens eager to circumvent the “Great Firewall.” The scam economy thus functions as an illicit subsector of the global economy with its own supply chains and digital networks. “We live in a world that commodifies human connection,” Barragán writes. The application of market logic to relationships recasts them as economic opportunities, leaving little room for alternative ethical frameworks.

Interestingly, Barragán draws the worlds of the Yahoo Boys more vividly than those of their victims, whose appearances in the book are episodic and anticlimactic. Towards the end of the book, Barragán explains his decision to shift the narrative focus from victims to perpetrators: “I wanted to understand how these boys saw us, how they made sense of our isolation, and how that shaped their lives and community.” This turned out to be the right call. Scam victims are usually less clear-eyed than their scammers about what happened. “Imagine if you’ve been single for ten years,” Biggy, for instance, reflects at one point. “Then, all of a sudden, someone starts showing you attention? Would you want to let go of it so soon? You won’t.”

The Yahoo Boys is, in form, a tragic coming of age story. As Chibuike, Biggy, Richie, and Azeez move from adolescence to early adulthood, they undergo the same patterns of experimentation and reinvention as their more fortunate counterparts in wealthier countries. Unlike teenagers from more privileged backgrounds, who often have the means to recover from mistakes, the young men of Ikotun rarely get second chances. When Azeez appeared on the cusp of a more promising life, I couldn’t help but root for him, which makes his uncertain end all the more devastating. By the end of Barragán’s story, he has renounced Yahooing in hopes of going back to school. Yet his family’s inability to come up with the registration fees leaves him in a no man’s land between his past and his future.

At once bold and empathetic, The Yahoo Boys is a rare account of the subterranean world of our digital age and those who inhabit it. The book bears an epigraph from James Baldwin: “What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you.” It’s an artful reminder that poverty and inequality in one place is poverty and inequality everywhere. Africa’s economic challenges—in part a legacy of colonialism—reverberate back to the West, a dark mirror of the insecure affluence and gamified isolation that define the lives of so many.

Millions of Americans spent this summer trying to beat the scorching heat at the beach. Next month, the Supreme Court justices will also do some wading of their own: through the ocean of petitions for review that have accumulated over the last few months at the court’s annual long conference.

One of those pending petitions—a case involving police power, the Fifth Amendment, and a Los Angeles print shop—warrants a deep dive from the court. At issue is a particularly troubling vision of law enforcement’s role in American society by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Without the court’s intervention, it could have corrosive implications for American policing and its place in everyday life.

Pena v. City of Los Angeles began with the pursuit of an armed fugitive by law-enforcement officials in southern California in 2022. At one point, Carlos Pena heard noise outside his print shop. “He opened his door to investigate, and saw a man running towards him, pursued by United States Marshals with weapons drawn,” his lawyers told the justices in their petition for review. “The fugitive struck Pena on the shoulder, threw him out of the shop, and barricaded himself inside.”

During the ensuing standoff, the Marshals called for backup from the Los Angeles Police Department, which sent its SWAT team to take control of the scene. The SWAT team eventually used heavy amounts of tear gas and pepper spray in an attempt to force the fugitive out of the building. Thirteen hours later, after conducting a thorough search of the building and its attic, officers concluded that the fugitive had either “escaped or was ‘gone on arrival,’” according to a lower-court ruling, which appears to be a polite way to say that the LAPD may have spent half of a day gassing an empty building.

While both the fugitive and the police soon moved on, Pena did not. The consequences for the small business he had operated for thirteen years were immense. To access the building, officers had damaged the “walls, doors, roof, and windows” at multiple points, either to gain entry or deploy gas. The chemical munitions took their own toll. “In addition, the tear gas and pepper spray permeated the entire shop, which [Pena] claims caused additional damage to his shop, his printing equipment, and his inventory, and rendered his shop uninhabitable until [he] had it cleaned by a hazardous materials team,” the lower court recounted.

After the unexpected siege, Pena sought to rebuild his livelihood. He told the courts that his insurance company (unsurprisingly) refused to compensate him for the destruction inflicted upon his business. The police officers who caused the damage were “under the impression that the city would compensate Pena” when he spoke to them, he told the justices, but city officials “categorically refused to pay for the damage.”

In 2023, Pena sued the city in federal court, arguing that the intentional destruction of his property violated the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. That clause states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This language is most familiar to Americans in the context of eminent domain: When the government wants to build a railroad or highway through someone’s farm, it has to provide fair compensation for the value of the property that it seizes to do so.

Pena argued that the clause’s language applied to him as well. Government officials, he contended, intentionally inflicted $60,000 worth of property damage while carrying out their official duties, then declined to compensate him for it. According to court filings, city attorneys not only didn’t deny that the city was responsible for the damage, but they never even responded to his initial requests for compensation before he filed his lawsuit.

Two separate courts ruled against Pena for different reasons. First, Judge John Walter rejected his claim in the district court by reasoning that the LAPD’s actions “constituted a valid use of police power” and therefore “did not constitute a taking for purposes of the Fifth Amendment.” The Supreme Court has not directly ruled on whether a state’s police power is exempt from the Takings Clause, but some of its rulings lean that way.

In 1996, for example, the court ruled against a Detroit woman whose car was seized by the city after police found her husband “engaged in sexual activity with a prostitute” inside the car, which the couple jointly owned. William Rehnquist, the chief justice at the time, noted that the wife had made a Takings Clause claim, but dispensed with it by blithely noting that the city had “lawfully acquired” it through forfeiture.

Walter’s opinion ably cited precedents from other courts that rejected similar Fifth Amendment claims after people’s homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the course of police actions. One of them, from the Fifth Circuit, involved a family whose home was partially destroyed by SWAT team bulldozers after a gunman took refuge in their garage with a hostage. There, the city declined to compensate the family for the inadvertent loss of their home, and the courts held that the Constitution provided them no recourse.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did not embrace Walter’s reasoning. The three-judge panel observed that the district court had gone too far by assuming that there was a categorical exception to the Takings Clause in this context. “We hold only that no taking occurs for the purposes of the Takings Clause when law enforcement officers destroy private property while acting reasonably in the necessary defense of public safety,” Judge Mark Bennett wrote for the panel majority.

From there, however, Bennett engaged in a history-and-tradition examination of the Takings Clause. It led him to a different rationale by which Pena’s claim could be denied. “In addition to the common law right to enter private property, the common law has long recognized a ‘necessity’ privilege for the destruction of private property,” Bennett explained.

This necessity defense has a long and well-established pedigree in some contexts. In 1788, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected a claim for compensation by a man named Sparhawk who lost 227 barrels of flour after patriot forces had removed them from a warehouse in 1777 as British forces approached Philadelphia, then lost them to the British anyway when they captured the barrels at the depot where they were moved. The court had denied Sparhawk’s claims, ruling that they were justified by wartime necessity.

“It is a rule, however, that it is better to suffer a private mischief, than a public inconvenience; and the rights of necessity, form a part of our law,” Chief Justice Thomas McKean, an influential founding-era statesman, wrote in his decision. That principle made its way into American constitutional law even after the Fifth Amendment’s ratification. The Supreme Court later invoked it to deny claims in cases where the military destroyed private property to prevent it from falling into enemy hands, including Southern railroads during the Civil War and petroleum refineries in the Philippines during World War II.

Bennett applied the same reasoning to civilian law-enforcement practices without hesitation. “We find Sparhawk particularly persuasive given that, as discussed further below, the Supreme Court has repeatedly cited Sparhawk for the principle that the government’s destruction of private property in wartime does not warrant just compensation,” the panel noted in a footnote. Though Pena’s shop was obviously not destroyed in the context of wartime, the panel concluded that the rules applied in the context of “governmental takings in the context of defending public safety.”

This is a deeply flawed view of the police power and law enforcement’s role in American society. Our constitutional order has always recognized a sharp and essential divide between civilian and military power, with the latter subordinated to the former at all times. Treating civilian law-enforcement officials as constitutionally equivalent to soldiers in an armed conflict logically places our free society under a permanent state of war—and radically reshapes the relationship between ordinary citizens and the police. It transmutes 330 million Americans into an occupied people subject to the arbitrary whims of whatever armed power determines to be a “necessity.”

Other members of the court recognized the problems with this reasoning. Judge Michelle Friedland wrote a separate opinion where she concurred only in the court’s judgment. She argued that Pena’s claim failed because it all within the search-and-arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment, which he would transpose to the Takings Clause. Friedland criticized the majority for expanding Sparhawk beyond the context it was written and the limits McKean himself had acknowledged.

The court in Sparhawk emphasized, however: “The transaction, it must be remembered, happened flagrante bello [during a state of war]; and many things are lawful in that season, which would not be permitted in a time of peace. The seizure of the property in question, can, indeed, only be justified under this distinction.” Sparhawk thus expressly relied on the fact that the country was in a state of war, and the government’s uncompensated seizure of private property was justified only by its need to protect the property from enemy forces.

That rationale, even on Bennett’s terms, cannot be fairly applied to the facts at hand in Pena’s case. Had British forces captured Sparhawk’s flour in Philadelphia, they might have used it to prolong the war against the early republic. The LAPD, by comparison, did not flood Pena’s print shop with chemical munitions because SWAT team members feared that the fugitive might produce obscene literature or reprint copyrighted texts without authorization. There was no direct “necessity” in destroying the print shop; it was merely how the LAPD chose to go about carrying their duties.

It is worth noting that Pena’s lawsuit is not hostile to law enforcement. He conceded that the LAPD SWAT team’s actions were “reasonable” and even acknowledged that, per court filings, “the public good required the destruction of his shop.” Similar cases cited by the district court had involved challenges where the plaintiffs had also alleged excessive force or other constitutional violations. Pena, on the other hand, did not even list the LAPD as a defendant. He simply argued that the city should compensate him for what they had to do.

A friend-of-the-court brief filed by Thomas Tiderington, a longtime police chief in Dallas, Jacksonville, and elsewhere, turned the policy justification for the necessity exception on his head. He argued that it would be more harmful for future police operations if officers had to consider the fate of innocent people’s livelihoods and property when making their decisions. “Officers have not asked for, do not expect, and are not motivated by this constitutional carveout” of the Takings Clause, he argued.

“Asking officers to execute raids or pursue fugitives knowing that their innocent neighbors or loved ones will foot the bill places an unfair burden on officers’ already heavy shoulders,” Tiderington told the court. “It asks officers to harm the people they are charged to protect—to act against the very mission of policing.” He emphasized that police officers “are not a separate caste,” and should not be asked to consider bankrupting their neighbors and friends as part of their job.

The Supreme Court may be interested in this case for its implications on the scope of the Takings Clause, which the conservative justices have expanded in some contexts in recent years. The lower courts are divided on when and how it applies in these situations, further justifying their intervention. More than anything else, Pena’s case warrants the court’s review because of the profound misapplication of wartime necessity exceptions to ordinary law-enforcement operations. Extending the wartime legal exceptions of military forces to more than 18,000 police departments around the country in everyday life is a mistake worth correcting by the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump just issued a crazed, rambling tirade, vowing to hit Iran with the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN” while threatening “TREMENDOUS” economic consequences to any country that helps Iran. News organizations are struggling to divine what he means and what it’s supposed to accomplish. Regardless, it shows just how stuck Trump is in this quagmire. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene offered her own extended prediction that the GOP is in deep trouble in the midterms and in 2028 as well. Trump’s broken promises on Iran, Greene said, have effectively shattered the MAGA coalition. Greene’s statement constitutes a remarkable moment, so we talked to New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about MAGA’s crackup. We discuss the deeper meaning of Greene’s stand, the hidden fissures splintering MAGA, why this threatens the GOP’s midterm hopes, and why even a crushing Democratic victory won’t get us out of the woods just yet. Listen to this episode here.

In the last week alone, the U.S. Federal Food & Drug Association has recalled twelve different products—a rate four times higher than the same week a year ago.  

In the past week, the FDA has discovered salmonella in granola, salad dressing, jalapenos, and animal food; glass in fruit popsicles; and metal in sourdough—just to name a few. 

Between August 14 and 20 in 2025, the FDA recalled only three products. In the same week in 2024, the FDA recalled only two, according to the FDA website. 

It’s not immediately clear whether the increase in recalls can be attributed to increased enforcement or more hazardous food—but the rapid recalls really make you wonder, is this what making America healthy again looks like? 

This week of many public health announcements follows a national cyclospora outbreak that has sickened more than 13,000 people and caused two deaths. Last week, the FDA finally dispatched investigators to the facilities linked to the outbreak—nearly a month after linking the parasite to Taylor Farms. Before any of this, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly cut back on parasite monitoring.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants you to think that a weak job market is a good thing.

CNBC’s Sara Eisen asked Bessent to comment on recent signs that the job market was cracking. Bessent downplayed the “noisy” numbers suggesting the job market was not stable.

“The jobs that we’re seeing are going to Americans,” Bessent. “After the deportations that we’ve seen during the President Trump administration and the closing of the border, that’s like this unfettered migration, we don’t need to produce as many jobs.”

Bessent on the latest bad jobs report: "After the deportations that we've seen and the closing of the border, we don't need to produce as many jobs" pic.twitter.com/kStWCiXAz5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2026

In July, the U.S. labor market shed 23,000 jobs, a worrying sign when paired with high gas prices and tariff-based inflation. Notably, women accounted for 100 percent of that decline, losing 32,000 jobs while men gained 9,000. The report also revised down job growth numbers from the previous two months.

For several months, the Trump administration has been pushing Americans to lower their expectations for job growth to reflect a labor market that doesn’t rely on undocumented immigrants. Americans don’t need jobs, apparently! It’s a strange spin for the simple fact that the president’s sweeping deportations are hurting the economy.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration claims that more than 2 million immigrants have left the country since Trump reentered office—something that couldn’t possibly be true.

The second episode of The Great American Road Trip, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s recently released vanity project travel show, starts in the massive suburban home Duffy shares with his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine more or less interchangeable children. 

Four of those children will accompany their parents on the upcoming leg of their road trip to Boston, Massachusetts and before they leave Duffy has to have a heart-to-heart with Paloma, his 17-year-old daughter. The family will soon be visiting colleges and the Transportation Secretary is worried. “Let’s say you got into Harvard, would you be pushing us to actually have you go?” Duffy asks. 

Paloma, sitting across a massive kitchen island from her father, answers yes as the first notes of foreboding music begin to play in the background. This conversation is not just about where Paloma will go to college. After years of raising their children as devout Catholics, the Duffys are worried about what a single semester at a liberal college could do to their daughter’s faith. This tension is stretched into a full-fledged storyline over the course of the six-part series, a twist on a coming-of-age tale. Paloma wants to grow and change; her parents have other plans. 

The camera then cuts to Rachel Campos-Duffy in a jarring nod to the aggressive editing style that characterizes most reality TV. “We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids, giving them an environment where they’re steeped in faith and values,” a strangely barefoot Campos-Duffy says while curled up on the couch beside her husband. “And so the idea of dropping her off at a place that would undermine that, or try to undo all those things makes me worried.” 

Speaking to Paloma, Duffy is less diplomatic about what he’s really worried about. “They have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you, and, I think, corrupt their minds,” he says. It’s a sinister, if vague, allegation that a Cabinet Secretary may want to look into. But Duffy is speaking to his daughter as her father, not as the man who currently sits 14th in the line of succession.

 Poor Paloma pushes back. “I went to an extremely conservative school in high school, and I’m part of an extremely conservative family. If I go to a liberal setting, that’s a way more rounded education than if I go to a conservative high school and then a conservative college,” she says.

A knowing look spreads across Duffy’s face—his daughter is still learning the ways of the world. She only sees Harvard as the nation’s preeminent private college, not as the sex and communism factory it really is. “They’re so good at it, you’ll see,” Duffy says. “Young people go to a conservative school with a conservative family, and they get perverted and contorted,” when they stray too far afield—like, say, by attending a prestigious “liberal” university. Paloma is clearly smart, but Duffy seems not to think she’s smart enough to evade the perverts and contortionists at Harvard. 

Unless you’re clamoring for a window into Paloma Campos-Duffy’s college plans for some reason, it’s not exactly compelling television. Still, it’s a conversation that gets at a tension  that runs throughout the Great American Road Trip. Duffy and his family are ostensibly on a journey to “[explore] destinations, transportation, and all the people and places that make America unique.” There’s just one problem: Duffy isn’t actually interested in most of the country he spent months traveling across. In fact, he wants to protect himself and his family from much of it, just like he wants to keep Paloma away from Harvard.

The six-part series is part unscripted series and part illegal advertisement. For something so boring, it has always been controversial. Its announcement was greeted by an immediate and severe backlash—which should have been expected given that The Great American Road Trip was paid for by corporate sponsors like Boeing, Toyota, and Shell—companies the Secretary of Transportation is ostensibly supposed to oversee and regulate. Initially scheduled to drop as part of President Trump’s sketchy Freedom 250 celebration, it quietly faded from view and was quietly dumped on the DOT’s official YouTube channel earlier this week. Millions of dollars were spent for a couple thousand views. The show is dreadfully boring. And the ethical problems that have dogged it from its inception haven’t gone away.

Federal employees are bound by a code of ethical standards that strictly prohibit them from using their public office for private gain and from endorsing any product, service or enterprise while they serve. Of course, that rule has become more of a suggestion during the second Trump administration—which is how we got The Great American Road Trip.

Before each episode, a disclaimer clarifies that no taxpayer dollars were spent on the Duffys’ family vacations. But it does not clarify whether the family received compensation for their participation from The Great American Road Trip Inc., a nonprofit 501(c)(4). Duffy and Campos-Duffy have publicly insisted that they were not compensated for their appearances on the show, but the nonprofit has yet to disclose its beneficiaries. If they got paid, that would not only be a violation of ethical standards, but also could potentially amount to bribery. 

In multiple episodes Duffy announces that he has to go to “work” for DOT, before visiting one of the medley of industry giants funding his family’s Road Trip.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the family visited a Boeing plant to gawk at the new Dreamliner. Boeing, one of the project’s main sponsors that has multiple contracts with the DOT. In Fort Worth, Texas, the secretary broke off to visit Cement Roadstone Holding (CRH), the country’s largest asphalt producer, which stands to earn big from the secretary’s slate of proposed highway expansions. In Scottsdale, Arizona, members of the Duffy family were treated to rides in Waymo’s autonomous vehicles that Dad calls “the future of transportation.”

Still, the disclaimers and quiet release of the series displays a level of self-consciousness that is uncharacteristic of the shameless Trump administration. Is it really possible that they got all the way through production before realizing how badly they’d broken the rules? 

The numerous ethical violations aren’t the only reason the show should never have aired: the series’ central college storyline is a humiliating blow to the Trump administration’s war on American colleges and universities. 

When the Duffy family visits Cambridge, they head to St. Paul’s Catholic Church to speak to Father Nathaniel Sanders, an undergraduate chaplain, about the Catholic culture at Harvard. Crammed together in a pew, the Duffys ask questions about whether a Catholic can possibly attend the Ivy League institution without becoming a God-less heathen. 

Campos-Duffy tells Sanders that after her eldest, Evita, had a bad experience at UChicago, she’s nervous about one of her daughters attending a godless Ivy League. “Why are we giving our money to people who hate us, hate our values?” she asks.

“I don’t think there’s anything nefarious going on,” Sanders tells the family. “You come here because it’s the best opportunity. And if someone has a sense of themselves and a sense of God before coming here, that will only flower.” The Duffys’ tour of Harvard Catholic Center is the only footage of the school included in the show, which suggests a college visit without a visit to the college. There’s a palpable sense that showing too much of Harvard would give the game away and expose just how preposterous the Duffys fearmongering about the school really is. 

Later, Duffy and Paloma sit down at Fenway Park to recap tours of Harvard and Boston College, and the secretary finally gives in. “I think a smart, good girl can completely navigate what is a really good school,” he says. After visiting the campus for himself, Duffy can no longer claim that Harvard brainwashes its students. This is what counts as narrative tension and character development on The Great American Road Trip.

It’s what many of us would call a “learning moment,” but amid the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to target the university as part of a larger war on “liberal” institutions of higher education, it feels even more hollow. The administration’s war on these schools is rooted in ignorance, fear, and culture war nonsense. Duffy backed down after visiting Harvard. What would it take for the rest of the administration to do the same?

Duffy may have had a Damascus moment in Cambridge, but the overarching lesson of The Great American Road Trip isn’t really that travel can serve as an engine for personal growth by putting us in touch with different people from diverse backgrounds. It’s that there isn’t much point to it at all. For Duffy, there’s really no point in encountering anyone or anything that contradicts his cosseted world view. Actually, there’s one point: Visiting the corporations that are footing the bill for your road trip. 

In the series’ final episode, Paloma learns she’s been accepted to the University of Chicago while driving down historic Route 66. As her family speeds into the past, she looks toward the future. It’s a heartwarming, kitschy ending to a nothingburger show. It makes you wonder why the family couldn’t visit Chicago. Then you remember that the Trump administration launched a federal invasion there. 

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Inside Washington

This could be Dems’ best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa

Sarah Trone Garriott might be Democrats’ best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa this year. But to do that, she’ll have to get past a barrage of culture war attacks from the GOP.

This week, four Iowa races were among the ten total races that Inside Elections reclassified based on recent polling, shifting them toward Democrats. The nonpartisan group reclassified the governor’s race between GOP businessman Zach Lahn and Democratic state auditor Rob Sand from “Toss-up” to “Tilt Democratic,” and switched the Senate race between GOP Representative Ashley Hinson and State Representative Josh Turek from “Lean Republican” to “Tilt Republican.” The 2nd congressional district moved from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican,” and the 3rd congressional district, where Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor and member of the state Senate faces incumbent Representative Zach Nunn, is now considered a “Toss-up.”

These kinds of prospects for Democrats would have seemed unthinkable in the red state even a few years ago. And the excitement from polling alone—the reinvigorating effect it might have on the state’s Democrats—could help down-ballot candidates like Trone Garriott, said Karen Kedrowski, a professor of political science at Iowa State University. “If the Democrats are showing up to vote because it’s an exciting year and they think they can flip some steep seats, and the Republicans don’t share that same enthusiasm, I think that she has a real shot.”

To win, Trone Garriott will have to take on both Nunn and a flood of attack ads against her. Nunn is endorsed by President Trump, but his advertising has instead been emphasizing his track record of bipartisan cooperation on the campaign trail, Kedrowski explained, which could help him appeal to the district’s swingy voters. That strategy changed somewhat on Monday, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Nunn at the Iowa State Fair, offering remarks wherein he justified the war in Iran and used an anti-trans slur.

Republicans have been attacking Trone Garriott over her support for trans people during her time in the state senate. As a lawmaker, she voted against a bill to prohibit elementary and secondary schools from letting someone use a bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity (the bill ultimately passed), and voted against a bill that based school and college sports eligibility on sex assigned at birth (that bill was signed into law in 2022).

Trone Garriott has also faced attacks claiming that she officiated a satanic wedding in 2006—despite the fact that she wasn’t an ordained minister at the time, and thus couldn’t actually officiate weddings. The attacks stem from a story she told publicly in 2023 with the Des Moines Register Storytellers Project. In 2006, she was an intern pastor at a Lutheran church in West Virginia, when the pastor training her officiated a wedding between a couple that identified as Satanists, and it fell to her to read a passage—she chose 1 Corinthians 13—for the ceremony. “I believe my calling as a minister is to share the word of God with everyone, even the most unlikely people,” she said at the storytelling event. “And I saw the power of scripture in that moment. And I do believe it made an impact on them. And it reminded me of my calling to love my neighbor, including the neighbor I don’t agree with and I don’t share the same values with, and I certainly did not have the same beliefs as these people.”

Though Trone Garriott’s campaign has been mostly positive, she’s found ways to hit Nunn. “She’s calling for mandatory town meetings. And with the exception of [Senator] Chuck Grassley, nobody has been holding town meetings because defending the Republican agenda right now is really pretty difficult,” Kedrowski said. In May, Trone Garriott held a town hall in each of the district’s 21 counties.

In recent weeks, she’s also criticized Nunn over his donations from Chinese-owned companies, arguing that he’s not “tough on China.” Between 2022 and 2026, Nunn’s campaign and leadership PAC accepted $18,750 from Syngenta Corporation and Smithfield Foods.

“I’m hearing from voters across the district who are very concerned about rising costs and the corruption in Washington. Zach Nunn is a career politician who has been in office since 2014. Instead of making Iowa more affordable during his time in Congress, he’s voted to increase costs for the rest of us. He’s desperate to distract from the fact that he has taken thousands of dollars from Chinese companies, and then voted to allow China to buy Iowa farmland,” she said in a statement to The New Republic.

Nunn’s campaign has been pushing back against her characterizations, citing legislation he’s supported “confronting” the Chinese Communist Party.

Electorally, Nunn has proved resilient, defeating a Democratic incumbent for the seat in 2022 and winning reelection in 2024. The district voted for Trump in all three of his elections. But Democrats are hopeful that Trone Garriott is the right person to unseat Nunn, and that 2026 is the right year. She won her elections to the state senate in 2020, ran in a new district in 2022 after redistricting, and won that seat again in 2024. In 2024, the district went for Trump, yet also reelected Trone Garriott.

“Nationally, we’re seeing a lot more enthusiasm on the part of Democratic voters in terms of turnout than Republican voters, and we’re seeing that in Iowa too,” Kedrowski said. “I think Iowa has a longer history of being a swing state than it has of being a solidly Republican state.”

Outside Washington

The backlash to data centers has been very bipartisan, but Democratic candidates have typically been more aggressive on the topic than Republicans. As Molly Beck notes in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin governor’s race may prove an exception. Once upon a time, it looked like the Democratic nominee was going to be championing a full data center moratorium—but that was because a lot of people expected the Democratic nominee to be Francesca Hong. Then moderate David Crowley pulled off an eleventh-hour upset of Hong in the primary. Now, in the general election, while both Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany are eager to portray themselves as tough on big tech, Crowley appears to be less aggressive than Tiffany on perhaps the biggest issue under debate, which is the state’s tax subsidies. Tiffany “is calling to end tax incentives outright,” Beck writes, “while Crowley said he would make it harder to get them”—specifically by requiring, in Crowley’s words, “100 percent clean power, no secret deals, real money back to the community, and no increase on consumer rates.” (Worth tossing into the conversation: Depending on how all this is measured, the benchmarks Crowley outlines may be tough for companies to meet, especially at the speed the industry is currently moving—so the difference between his position and outright canceling the subsidies may prove to be somewhat theoretical.)

In case you missed it: DeSmog recently published a striking piece about multiple speakers at the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council—a powerful conservative lobbying group—openly saying how important the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been for the oil and gas industry. Paul Watkins—a lawyer famous for fighting environmentally conscious investing practices on behalf of a group backed by conservative court strategy mastermind Leonard Leo—even warned of “catastrophic outcomes” for the oil industry should this majority be disrupted, reports Sarah Hofmann. Watkins and others were reportedly speaking, in particular, about lawsuits seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change.

The Ideas Factory

Tamar Jacoby, director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project, pens a piece in the Washington Monthly about the use of “ground drones,” or unmanned ground vehicles known as UGVs, by Ukrainian forces against Russia. Late last year, Jacoby writes, one Ukrainian strike unit that “emerged early on as a pioneer of ground-based robotic systems … used a single cart mounted with a Browning machine gun to hold a stretch of the front line for 45 days.”

At Pew Research, Drew Desilver asks whether teen summer employment might finally be ticking upward after decades of slump. “A summer job—whether scooping ice cream, busing tables, or teaching campers to make lanyards—once was a rite of passage for American teens,” Desilver writes. “But far fewer teens are working such jobs now than two or three decades ago.” For the summer of 2026, Pew finds, analyzing federal employment data, that 35.5 percent of teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have held a paying job. Hispanic and Black teen employment numbers are significantly lower than white teen employment numbers.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Wednesday was Bill Clinton’s 80th birthday. In what year was Clinton first elected governor of Arkansas, and how old was he? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

The Trump administration’s plan to allow oil and gas extraction near the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico is drawing concerns from UNESCO, the United Nations’ heritage organization.

The Guardian reports that the organization is alarmed that the administration is getting rid of a buffer zone around the park, which is a world heritage site. “The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status,” a UNESCO spokesperson told the paper.

The committee has also “emphasized that projects proposed outside world heritage properties should not adversely affect their outstanding universal value — which are the features of the site that justify its inscription, and should be subject to appropriate impact assessments before decisions are taken,” the spokesperson added.

The federal Bureau of Land Management has proposed getting rid of a 10-mile buffer zone protecting the area from any industrial activity, whether that’s uranium mining or fossil fuel drilling. Tribal leaders, environmental groups, and archaeologists have all warned that the site could be irreparably damaged from such activity. In a 12-day public comment period earlier this year, the government received close to 100,000 comments mostly opposed to ending the buffer zone.

“This park offers an incredible transportive experience where you essentially go back in time 1,000 years to experience what the ancient Pueblo people saw,” Maude Dinan, New Mexico program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, told The Guardian. “The buffer zone is incredibly important and removing it would completely change this experience.”

The New Mexico park is one of 27 world heritage sites in the U.S., ranging from national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone to landmarks like the Statue of Liberty. The lone American site on UNESCO’s list of heritage sites whose preservation is in danger is Everglades National Park in Florida thanks to nearby development and pollution. Chaco and other sites where the administration has pushed for development, mining, and drilling, such as Big Bend National Park, could soon join that list.

Senate Democrats are initiating a probe into whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth placed one of his own supporters inside the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

“Our offices have been informed that the Department of Defense assigned an active-duty Public Affairs officer to serve as a ‘deputy’ to Stars and Stripes Publisher Max Lederer, reportedly without consultation with Mr. Lederer,” Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Jeanne Shaheen wrote in a Thursday letter to Hegseth. “On August 18, Mr. Lederer announced that he will retire after more than three decades at Stars and Stripes … citing fundamental differences between his understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes and the Department’s plans for the organization.”

“The placement of an active-duty Public Affairs officer in the senior leadership of an organization whose credibility depends on its independence from the military chain of command raises serious questions.”

Stars and Stripes is partly funded by the Defense Department but has long had editorial independence. Installing an active-duty military officer in an editorial position at the newspaper in the midst of an extremely unpopular overhaul of Pentagon leadership—and an even more unpopular war on Iran—reeks of bias. The senators gave Hegseth a deadline of August 28 to offer a “detailed explanation” as to why he appointed the active-duty officer to oversee the outlet.

“For generations, American servicemembers, particularly those stationed overseas and in combat zones, have relied on Stars and Stripes for credible and independent news,” the letter concluded. “At this critical moment of leadership transition, that independence must not be compromised. We urge you to preserve that independence and provide prompt answers regarding these latest developments.”

Hegseth has already demonstrated a desire for narrative control over what both civilians and servicemembers know about his leadership. Earlier this year, the Pentagon fired the ombudsman responsible for guaranteeing the military paper’s editorial independence. Last year, he filled the Pentagon Press Corps with sycophants from the likes of ultraconservative organizations like Turning Point USA shortly after instituting a “pledge” for Pentagon reporters, requiring them to abstain from receiving any unauthorized material or publishing without approval. And the administration at large has fought with reporters covering troops’ low morale, low provisions, and severe injuries in the war on Iran.

Hegseth has yet to officially respond.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried in vain to spin the country’s astronomical $40 trillion debt on CNBC Thursday.

Speaking to the network’s Sara Eisen, Bessent admitted that he didn’t know when the Iran war would end, but that things were otherwise going well with the economy despite the soaring national debt and increasing deficit.

“This Iran conflict, we will get on the other side of this. We don’t know when,” Bessent said, failing to inspire much confidence.

Bessent was even less inspirational when it came to the national debt, telling Eisen, “There’s nothing magic about the 40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that,” before blaming tariff refunds for the poor GDP and rising deficit.

“One of things that’s temporary here that’s influencing the deficit has been these tariff refunds, and we won’t have to do that again,” Bessent said, adding that the administration was reinstituting tariffs. “I would expect that our 2026 tariff income is going to be roughly what it was in 2025.”

Bessent downplays the national debt: "There's nothing magic about the $40 trillion number. We can grow our way out of that." pic.twitter.com/ATQv5pMwid

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2026

When Eisen asked if “we have seen peak deficit during this administration,” Bessent replied, “I think there’s a very good chance we have.”

“We are going to be laser-focused, as I said. [Office of Management and Budget] Director Vought, myself, the president; that combined with the vice president’s fraud task force, where I think we could save several hundred billion dollars,” Bessent said.

Suggesting that the deficit isn’t going to increase beyond current levels doesn’t make sense with how President Trump is spending money on everything from the Iran war to his pet construction projects. There’s no guarantee that Trump’s new tariff approach will survive court challenges either. And Bessent couldn’t help but admit that the Iran war shows no sign of ending anytime soon, meaning that his positive forecast is just a lot of wishful thinking.

President Trump’s Justice Department is teaming up with Elon Musk’s xAI to fight Minnesota’s ban on AI that lets users create sexual images of people without their consent. 

The DOJ filed a statement of interest this week arguing that the law goes too far, and is broader than federal law. 

Minnesota’s ban states that “a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program, or other service must not: (1) allow a user to access, download, or use the website, application, software, program, or other service to nudify an image or video; or (2) nudify an image or video on behalf of a user.” Breaking the law carries a fine of up to $500,000.

The law defines “nudify” as “the process by which an image or video is altered or generated to depict an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual.” It also applies when “the altered or generated image or video is so realistic that a reasonable person would believe that the intimate part belongs to the identifiable individual.” 

The DOJ argued that the law “sweeps up constitutional and productive conduct not prohibited under federal law because of the way Minnesota drafted (and apparently will enforce) the statute.”

Musk’s xAi filed its lawsuit last month on First Amendment grounds after a temporary restraining order request was denied.

xAI’s attorneys argue that the law would hold the company unfairly liable for users nudifying images. They also argue that xAI has adequate moderation tactics in place to stop it from happening in the first place. 

“The state would punish xAI for allowing a user to nudify themselves,” attorney Robert Dunn said to Courthouse News. Minnesota disagrees.

“It’s certainly not surprising that xAI is not coming into federal court and saying, ‘We support these images,’” Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Janine Kimble said to Courthouse News. “They say, ‘Look at our terms of service; we tell people not to do this.’ … And yet, they still are reporting tens of thousands of users creating images.”

In January, Musk himself admitted that his Grok AI chatbot was posting nude images of children at the behest of some of his platform’s most perverted users. He blamed  “lapses in safeguards.” The chatbot also posted nude deepfake images of adult women without their consent—making Minnesota’s law seem all the more reasonable. 

South Carolina Senator Darline Graham has a baffling excuse for her humiliating debate performance—spoiler alert: It involves transgender athletes!

Speaking on Fox News’s Sean Hannity Show Wednesday, Graham explained the shocking moment she admitted she was “not informed on national security,” when asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea were national security issues for the United States.

“You know, I tripped up on one question last night regarding Taiwan. But you know I’ve said many times, I’m not a politician, certainly not a career politician, I don’t speak politician,” she said. “You know I was just honest, and I think that’s kind of a foreign concept.”

It’s true that a wise woman knows herself to be a fool—but Graham’s foolishness wasn’t finished.

“Of course Taiwan is our friend, but I think people in South Carolina are more worried about making ends meet, they’re concerned about boys in girls’ sports,” she added.

It would be surprising if people in South Carolina really felt that way—considering the state passed a law banning transgender students from playing on girls’ or women’s sports teams four years ago. The conservative-majority Supreme Court recently upheld similar rules in two other states, cementing the status of South Carolina’s transgender athlete ban.

She added that South Carolinians were more concerned about the second amendment, the SAVE America Act, and illegal immigration, “so they’re concerned about a lot of things other than Taiwan.”

Crucially, if Graham can’t answer simple questions about national security, she has no business being on that debate stage. She also has no business representing South Carolina, for in the same debate, Graham also claimed that there were 50 million people living in South Carolina. There are only 5.6 million.

Senator Jon Ossoff, a 2028 presidential contender, has struck gold with his jab at President Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.

The White House quickly lashed out after Ossoff mentioned Harp during an Atlanta rally on Sunday, and ever since then, Harp has been all over the news, with new details about her unusually close relationship with the president being revealed nearly every day. On Wednesday, Ossoff reveled in how he successfully rattled the Trump administration.

“It’s been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week. And about Natalie Harp, these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer, with immense power in positions of public trust,” Ossoff told MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “And whether it’s Natalie Harp printing out Donald Trump’s daily dose of delusion and flattery, or Peter Navarro steering taxpayer-funded loans to Trump family investments, or Pete Hegseth deluding the president daily into deepening this quagmire in the Middle East, no one cares about their feelings.”

Ossoff: It’s been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week. And about Natalie Harp, these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer, with immense power in positions of public trust. And whether it’s Natalie Harp printing out… pic.twitter.com/gxNNqlz2IL

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 20, 2026

Ossoff went on to attack Trump for being obsessed with building the White House ballroom and flying in a luxury jet gifted to him by Qatar while neglecting military personnel fighting his war, such as the sailors experiencing poor conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, accusing him of retreating “into this circle of sycophantic aides who tell him every day what he wants to hear, not what he needs to hear.”

On Sunday, Ossoff called out Trump, saying that “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 touched a nerve, with Trump calling him a “Pee-Wee Herman lookalike” and White House communications director Steven Cheung calling him “Jon Jackoff” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics.”

Since then, details have emerged about Harp’s obsession with the president, from insisting on riding in the trunk of Trump’s SUV in 2023 to stay close to him to writing gushing letters where she says she forgets to eat and sleep. Her brother told CNN Tuesday that she has written letters to other presidents and has “an unhealthy obsession.”

Other longtime Trump staffers have been perfectly willing to (anonymously) dish about Harp and her unusually close relationship with the president for years now, with aides calling her the “human printer” for printing out drafts of suggested social media posts for him to review and articles for him to read. She’s seen as the source of his bizarre social media posting habits, too. The more she is seen at his side, the more the news stories driving Trump’s inner circle wild will continue.

Michael Cohen won’t confirm or deny whether he’ll use President Trump’s Thursday appearance on his podcast to ask for a pardon.

“We’ll see,” he said to Politico regarding the potential pardon request. “Will I make that request down the road? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.” He noted that “people may be interested to hear two individuals that were friends for a decade and a half who have not publicly spoken in eight years” discuss their history together. “What could they talk about?” he mused.

Trump will call into Cohen’s weekly talk radio program and podcast When You Know You Know Thursday evening.

“Beyond ridiculous. Cohen conned so many liberals,” commentator Medhi Hasan wrote on X. “I am glad I was one of the few cable hosts, when I was at MSNBC/Peacock, to have actually grilled him on air and not just uncritically accept his BS and fake conversion.”

It’s unclear what exactly brought Cohen back to Trump. Cohen worked as an attorney for Trump from 2006 to 2018, when he was sentenced to three years in federal prison on charges related to his role as the middleman in Trump’s hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He wrote a book titled Disloyal in 2020 in which he called Trump “a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” He testified against him in 2024 regarding the hush money as well. Now Trump and Cohen are apparently chummy again.

Cohen wrote in a Substack article titled “The Impossible Reunion” on Thursday that “forgiveness doesn’t have amnesia.”

“Sometimes the most extraordinary act of courage isn’t winning the fight. It’s deciding the fight doesn’t have to last forever. And sometimes, after everything has burned down, forgiveness is the only thing capable of building something again,” he wrote. “This evening, you’ll hear whether we can.”

Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, refused to seek security clearance for more than a year while working in the White House.

Two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW that it was unclear why Harp had failed to obtain the proper security clearance received by all staff when they began working at the White House. Maybe she was too busy writing the president gushing love letters to finish filling out her SF-86 forms?

After concerns around Trump’s seemingly obsessed personal aide mounted among the White House counsel’s office and security officials, the president was forced to personally intervene, one of the people told MS NOW. In recent months, Harp filled out the forms to receive a background check and has since received her security clearance.

Harp’s missing security clearance is just one of several red flags raised by staff during Trump’s second administration that has spurred frustrations among West Wing staffers, four people told MS NOW.

Since joining the president’s posse ahead of the 2024 election, Harp has become a central gatekeeper to the president, allowing certain voices to be heard over others. Harp “plays into the less productive and more troublesome parts of his nature, putting things in front of him that aren’t vetted,” one of the four people told MS NOW.

One national security official voiced concerns that Harp’s unusually close proximity to Trump provided her access to more sensitive information than anyone else in the president’s orbit.

There had been “subtle moves,” to create space between Harp and Trump, another of the four people told MS NOW. “She is just persistent and not realizing that’s what they were trying to do,” they said.

Harp does seem persistent—she once reportedly rode in the trunk of Trump’s SUV when there weren’t enough seats for her up front.

The security clearance issue stems back to the early days ahead of Trump’s second term, when the president-elect’s team reportedly failed to submit security clearance requests for members of his second administration, in violation of the Presidential Transition Act, a federal law that coordinates and funds the transition of power from one administration to the next.

Harp’s security status is part of a broader trend of carelessness in Trump’s second administration. FBI Director Kash Patel also reportedly granted former deputy director Dan Bongino a waiver to bypass getting a key security clearance, but the deputy director was still given access to highly classified information, such as the president’s daily brief, which collates essential information from the intelligence community.