One of Donald Trump’s staunchest defenders had a spectacular public meltdown over the rate at which unnamed MAGA aides are leaking details about the ongoing chaos inside the White House.
“An anonymous source insists what they heard from two other anonymous sources is 100% factually true—because one anonymous sources [sic] in the West Wing was told the exact same thing by two more anonymous sources at Cafe Milano, who also heard it,” Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, 50, posted in an apparently unedited Thursday-night tirade on X.
“So yes, we are writing this bulls--t story full of lies, and we’re sticking to it,” he went on, from the imagined perspective of an imaginary media outlet. “We’re going with the piece that rests on a grand total of six anonymous sources, while ignoring the eight Cabinet members who gave us statements on the record. I can’t imagine why the American people keep calling us Fake News!”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether one specific outlet had sent Scavino apoplectic, or whether his fury was directed at something as yet unpublished.
He’s spoiled for choice. During Trump’s 19 months back in office so far, White House officials have been panic-dialing journalists on everything from the Epstein files to the president’s catastrophic war in the Middle East.
The most likely trigger for Scavino appears to be recent coverage of the 80-year-old president’s alarmingly close relationship with his 35-year-old “human binkie,” Natalie Harp.
Harp, who makes $150,000 a year working as special assistant and executive assistant to the president, has long worried even Trump’s closest advisers with her fixation on the president, and a slew of reports this week has laid bare just how deep it runs.
Things ramped up over the weekend when Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff told supporters at an Atlanta rally on Saturday that Trump doesn’t actually want “to do the job,” and instead just “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
Ossoff was referring to a bombshell Washington Post report earlier this month that the pair had snuck off Air Force One in a catering truck ahead of departing a July NATO summit in Turkey.
They made the move due to an apparent Iranian threat to the president’s life, leaving other top aides and the White House press pool to fly on ahead as a “decoy.” Trump and Harp then rejoined the others at an airfield in the U.K., where the whole troupe boarded the $400 million luxury Boeing the Qatari royal family gifted to the president.
The senator’s comments instantly went viral. The furious backlash from Trump, who slammed Ossoff as a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike,” and his press team, which has branded the Democrat a “cuck loser” and “Jon Jackoff,” did the rest. Harp has not left the news cycle since.
On Monday, the Daily Beast reported revelations by Trump biographer Michael Wolff that in 2023, Harp set up a bed for herself first in the maids’ quarters, and later in the women’s locker room at the president’s Bedminster golf club, just to be closer to him during his unsuccessful re-election bid.
Wolff says Harp is determined to be Trump’s “higher purpose bride,” describing their bond as a “Christian devotional relationship.” That doesn’t seem to have sat well with the president’s actual wife, who re-emerged on Thursday after disappearing from public view for almost a month amid what’s said to be an intensifying power struggle with Harp behind closed doors.
The spotlight only got brighter on Tuesday, when Sarah Matthews, who served as deputy press secretary during Trump’s first term, confirmed to CNN the long-running reports that Harp’s closeness to the president is freaking out even his own security detail. The network then reported that in October 2023, Harp had clambered into the trunk of an SUV to attend court with Trump after the same detail told her there wasn’t enough room in the car.
New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published a report on Wednesday revealing letters Harp wrote to Trump about how she wanted “things to always be right between us,” and she’d been “forgetting to eat” and “even forgetting to sleep” in her devotion to him. She signed off: “With all my heart, Natalie.”
MS NOW then followed up with its own exposé on how Harp repeatedly refused, throughout Trump’s first year back in office, to obtain even the most basic security clearance to work at the White House. She only relented after he personally intervened, and has since filed and received it. The outlet added that other officials have made “subtle” efforts to limit her access, without success.
Haberman, who first dubbed Harp the president’s “human binkie” because she’s basically his “comfort blanket,” told CNN on Thursday that Trump’s loyal assistant is “not beloved by a lot of her colleagues,” and that her duties to the president now extend to screening calls from other world leaders who haven’t been able to reach him any other way.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
