MS Now’s Joe Scarborough says the White House has only itself to blame for the media frenzy surrounding presidential aide Natalie Harp.
The Morning Joe host says Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff did not make the 35-year-old Harp a household name by name-dropping her at a rally. Instead, he said the White House’s own overreaction is what has Americans questioning her relationship with President Donald Trump.
“I thought it was bizarre in this sense, that it was a phrase in a speech that would have come and gone and nobody—it would have been forgotten,” he said of Ossoff’s comment. “But the White House, you talk about protesting too much, the White House actually blew this up into this massive story with a tweet that I just thought was so over the top.”
He continued, “And all of this, again, for a throwaway phrase, which again, standing on its own, as even [Fox News host] Jesse Watters said, pales so in comparison to everything Donald Trump says every day, that for the White House to freak out like that, to melt down like that, they made this story into something it would not have been.”
The posts Scarborough referenced were shared by the White House’s Rapid Response account on Monday. It called CNN star Kristen Holmes, who sought reaction from the president over Ossoff’s remark, “a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”
Their initial post added, “These scumbags are the lowest of the low.”
Thirty minutes later, the White House page took another, more personal swipe at Holmes.
“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the second post said, tagging Holmes’ account. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
Scarborough says this overreaction—which led people across CNN and the media to condemn the White House attack on Holmes—has sparked the ensuing Harp media frenzy, which culminated Thursday night with the Daily Beast exclusively revealing the adoring letters she penned to the married Trump, who is 45 years her senior.
“It was such a crazed attack that it actually required CNN to then come out and defend her, along with all of CNN’s employees defending her, which of course blew the story up even more,” he said. “... Just a classic miscalculation inside the White House from a White House that’s been doing that to everybody else for a decade now.”
MS Now’s Willie Geist agreed that the White House brought this headache upon itself.
“That wild overreaction suddenly led people to say, ‘Why did this hit so close to the bone?’ I’ll leave the Washington gossip element to other people,” he said. “I will say the letters written by a young staffer to the married president would make Jane Austen blush, but that’s a different matter.”
Harp is officially an executive assistant to Trump who is paid $150,000 annually. She has worked with the president since 2022, when she left her job hosting her own show on the far-right news network One America News.
A Daily Beast analysis found that Harp was with Trump for at least 56 percent of the days between July 19 and Thursday morning—a period when the president was not spotted with First Lady Melania Trump once.
Harp, who provides the president with a steady flow of social media content outside the usual chain of command, has come into the spotlight amid White House leaks about her obsessive behavior toward Trump, including letters in which she wrote that he is “all that matters to me.”
The admiration appears to be at least in part mutual. A new book alleges that the president has said that Harp is the person “who loves him as much as his wife and children.”
The young aide was also among the select few people in Trump’s inner circle who traveled with him on a “decoy plane” when there was a credible threat against Air Force One on July 8. Other top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, flew on the plane that the Secret Service deemed unsafe for the president to ride.
