The people around Trump, according to reports, call it “the Natalie situation.” The word they’re trying to avoid saying out loud is “Rasputin.”
In the past two weeks we’ve discovered that for quite some time his inner circle been trying hard to keep “Trump’s binky” away from the President of the United States.
So much so that they denied her a room at Bedminster (so she slept in the locker room), refused to give her a golf cart while at his golf motel in Scotland (so she chased Trump’s cart all over the golf course), and tried to keep her out of the motorcade going to Trump’s rape and defamation trial in New York (so she hopped into the trunk of one of the limousines). And let’s not forget her hiding with him in the food service truck in Turkey while the press and Secretary of State were relegated to the decoy plane.
People in the White House don’t work that hard to try to thwart a president’s preference for companionship just because they think she’s odd or even amusing. They’re worried, frightened of something, and it’s almost certainly a legitimate fear.
Harp isn’t just a passive little girl (I realize she’s 35, but this is how the press keeps characterizing her) with a daddy obsession. She’s a grown-ass woman with strong opinions and a history in rightwing propaganda operations. And now she’s controlling much of what Trump sees and reads and, apparently, even writes on his Nazi-infested social media network.
She was a host on the rightwing One America News TV network, which had unsuccessfully sued Rachel Maddow for ten million dollars when Maddow pointed out that they once employed a Russian national who was simultaneously drawing a paycheck from a Kremlin media outlet that US intelligence had tied to Putin’s 2016 “support Trump” election interference operation.
In 2019 she went on Fox “News” and tried to credit Trump with saving her life, falsely saying that the “Right To Try” law he’d signed earlier that year had given her access to treatment for her bone cancer. (The treatment was already widely available and FDA approved; her use was off-label, but that had nothing to do with Trump or Right To Try, according to reporting in The Washington Post, that also found she’d posted on social media about starting her cancer treatment two full months before Trump signed that law).
That obsequious appearance on Fox led to Trump inviting her to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where she repeated the story, which itself led her to a job on the air at OAN, which got her in close with Trump’s campaign. As The New York Times podcast The Daily noted yesterday, she’s basically been by his side ever since.
For years she was called “the human printer” (and referred to herself that way) because she carried a portable printer and laptop everywhere to print out stories for Trump, some about how wonderful he is and others sure to rile him up.
Reporting suggests she’s both reassuring Trump about the rightness of his instincts and biases, as well as feeding him a constant stream of rightwing propaganda that would make Vladimir Putin proud. As The New York Times’ Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman detailed last week:
“As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful…. She is a platinum blond geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough.”
And that’s where the Rasputin parallel is getting positively scary.
Grigori Rasputin was a peasant Russian monk who told the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, that he could heal their hemophiliac son Alexei when Russian doctors had basically given up. The Romanov family had ruled Russia for three centuries at that time.
Some accounts suggest his major contribution was to get them to stop giving the child aspirin (which would have helped big-time), but Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra were entranced and brought him into their household and court, taking his advice and opinions on everything from medicine to politics to war, even when it contradicted their own professional advisors.
He convinced them that the growing restiveness among the Russian population wasn’t consequential and became the primary source of news and information to the family. The result was their being blindsided by the Russian Revolution, and shocked when the Bolsheviks led by Yakov Yurovsky arrived at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg and murdered the entire family on July 17, 1918.
As biographer Antony Beevor notes, this “Siberian peasant, through his seduction of the imperial household, contributed to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world.”
This isn’t the first time in relatively modern history we’ve heard stories like this. My dear (late) friend Armin Lehmann was the 16-year-old Hitler Youth courier who handed Hitler the news that the War was lost in April of 1945. Armin and I spent several years traveling the world together when we worked as a team back in the 1980s.
Hitler had built a massive ballroom in that nation’s capital, Berlin, called the New Reich Chancellery, with a massive Führerbunker complex under it. It was in that bunker, Armin told me, where he saw how the generals and hangers-on were continuing to lie to Hitler about the state of the war. He was there when Hitler killed himself, wrote a book about it, and dedicated the rest of his life to promoting peace.
Right up to the last day, Hitler was moving little models of troops around maps, and nobody was willing to tell him the truth. They’d been selected by Hitler to be with him under that ballroom, in fact, for that very obsequiousness and eagerness to tell him what he wanted to hear, no matter how fantastical. The movie Downfall tells the story pretty straightforwardly.
The Romanovs were destroyed by a man in their inner circle who became a sole source of what turned out to be false and unrealistically optimistic information. One could argue the last months of Hitler’s reign played out similarly.
And now it’s Trump.
Yesterday’s Reuters and Ipsos polls put Trump’s approval at 33 percent, but that’s apparently not what he’s being fed as he keeps bragging about how much people love him. Odds are Natalie’s only showing him the polls that show he has a 93% approval rating with Republicans who call themselves MAGAts, a rapidly shrinking slice of the electorate.
That’s not unlike Hitler’s only hearing about the few victories his army had in its final days, or the Romanovs being told that the peasants wouldn’t dare revolt. It’s fundamentally dangerous, both to Trump himself, the GOP, and to our nation.
While Hitler probably knew what was really happening and just chose, perhaps in his methadone- and amphetamine-drugged stupor, to pretend otherwise, Tsar Nicholas was apparently blindsided.
Both scenarios are far too on-the-nose for us to ignore today.
Louise’s Daily Song: “The Whisperer”
Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:
Trump Revives Herbert Hoover’s Nightmare and Canada Fights Back
Nice work, Repugnicans. You’ve forcefully and convincingly shown the world that we can’t be trusted, now or ever again. Trust is precious, betrayal unforgettable. The damage you’ve done is likely immeasurable.
~ Tom Halstead
Trump and Republicans are insanely intentionally cruel and enjoy inflicting pain with a lawless fascist autocracy created with a criminal insurrection that rejects the rule of law and supports economic and other warfare to steal wealth liberty and happiness from everyone including Americans and people in other countries who are long term allies like Canada.
~ William L Miller
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I didn't know that Trump's "massive ballroom with bunker beneath" was a copy of Hitler's.
Thank you for retelling the story of Rasputin. That is exactly what this is.
And Hitler's bunker/ballroom. We are truly living repeated history.