Senator Jon Ossoff stood at a campaign rally in Georgia on August 16 and decided the best way to attack President Trump was through a 35-year-old woman on his staff. "He doesn't want to do the job," Ossoff told the crowd. "He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace."
Natalie Harp is the Executive Assistant to the President. She's also a bone cancer survivor who credits the Right to Try Act — signed by Trump in 2019 — with saving her life.
Ossoff didn't mention any of that. He didn't name the dozens of male aides who travel with the President daily. He singled out one woman by first name, wrapped the line in innuendo, and waited for the crowd to fill in the blanks. As Miranda Devine wrote in the New York Post, it was a "disgustingly sly and sexist" attack — and it backfired almost immediately.
White House Spokesperson Davis Ingle didn't mince words. "Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump's team," Ingle said. "Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama."
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida was more direct: "Your gross implication otherwise only highlights your own insecurity and guilty conscience."
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called Harp "truly a phenomenal member of POTUS' team." Harp joined Trump's campaign in 2020 and earned the nickname "human printer" among West Wing staff for her relentless work curating news materials for the President. She's a staffer. She does her job. And a sitting U.S. senator from Georgia just tried to turn her into a tawdry punchline.
Once the backlash hit, Ossoff scrambled to reframe. His clarification: Trump "retreats into this bubble of West Wing aides who are his security blanket." So now it was about all the aides. Not specifically Natalie. Not the woman he named by first name in front of a rally crowd while smirking through the innuendo.
The feminist organizations that normally issue press releases when a Republican says "ladies" in the wrong tone of voice have been remarkably quiet. No statements from Emily's List. No condemnation from the National Organization for Women. No cable news panels dissecting the "problematic implications" of a male senator using a woman's name as a rhetorical weapon. The silence is its own kind of statement.
Ossoff is up for reelection in Georgia, a state Trump carried. His calculation was apparently that a sly dig at the President's female aide would play well with the base — a base that spent the last decade lecturing the rest of us about respecting women in politics and the corrosive effect of sexist innuendo on public discourse.
He named every male aide on the President's team zero times. He named the woman once, by first name, at a rally, in a sentence designed to imply something he didn't have the courage to say out loud.
That's not a critique of the administration. That's a character reference — for Ossoff.
