What’s this all about? Well, yesterday the Times published this story in which people in Trump’s orbit are obviously trying to get rid of Boris Epshteyn:
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s legal team found evidence that a top adviser asked for retainer fees from potential appointees in order to promote them for jobs in the new administration, five people briefed on the matter said on Monday.
Mr. Trump directed his team to carry out the review of the adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who coordinated the legal defenses in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases and is a powerful figure in the transition. Several people whom Mr. Trump trusts had alerted him that Mr. Epshteyn was seeking money from people looking for appointments, three of the people briefed on the matter said.
David Warrington, who was effectively the Trump campaign’s general counsel, conducted the review in recent days, the results of which were described to The New York Times. The review claimed that Mr. Epshteyn had sought payment from two people, including Scott Bessent, whom Mr. Trump recently picked as his nominee for Treasury secretary.
Boris was a top adviser throughout the Trump exile at Mar-a-lago. Somebody’s not happy about it.
Then today, there was more palace intrigue, with a whole lot of innuendo:
President-elect Donald J. Trump has always demanded loyalty from his aides, but few have answered the call quite like Natalie Harp.
A 33-year-old former far-right cable host, Ms. Harp is nearly always at Mr. Trump’s side. She has written him a series of devotional letters, including one that said, “You are all that matters to me.” Once, when Mr. Trump was playing golf in Scotland, she ran behind his cart to keep him up to date with positive stories and social media posts.
Little known beyond Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit, Ms. Harp is now poised to play a potentially influential role in his White House, sitting right outside the Oval Office and acting as the conduit for a largely unsupervised flow of information to and from the president and helping him with his social media feed.
She has no official title, but during the campaign, colleagues referred to her as the “human printer” because she followed Mr. Trump around with a portable printer and a battery pack to charge it, so she could hand him information in hard copy, as he prefers.
But Ms. Harp also established herself at the center of a fast-moving carousel of text messages, articles and tidbits directed at Mr. Trump. This has generated concern among other aides who feel she has been far too willing to serve as a funnel for conspiratorial information at a moment when Mr. Trump appears more contemptuous than ever of attempts to manage or control him. One of her go-to news sources, people who have observed her say, is the website Gateway Pundit, which frequently disseminates conspiracy theories embraced by the far right.
In recent weeks, people with knowledge of her performance say, she has been more willing to operate within the transition team’s chain of command. Still, her role over most of the past three years speaks to Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain open channels to a wide assortment of people and unvetted sources of information. And it underscores his tendency to surround himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. A top adviser to Mr. Trump used to say he would ask 49 people what they thought of something, stopping only at 50 if the last person told him what he wanted to hear.
Ms. Harp fits well inside those patterns, people who work with Mr. Trump have said. They have described her as a conduit, rather than a filter, and an instant enabler of his impulses. She types up his thoughts as he dictates them and she quickly dispatches them onto social media. She has sometimes arranged media interviews for him without the knowledge of Mr. Trump’s press team.
He calls her “sweetie” and treats her like his own daughter (which we know is a little weird as well…) She goes with him everywhere and does everything he wants. If anyone’s looking for a guardrail she isn’t it. She has no discretion and often enables his worst instincts on social media.
She’s a “devout Christian,” whatever that means these days, and Trump first spotted her on Fox news where she said he saved her life by signing legislation allowing experimental treatments. She was an anchor at OAN when he scooped her up to work for him in 2022. He believes that she’s the only staffer who really cares about him.
In 2023, Ms. Harp sent a series of letters to Mr. Trump that unnerved people around him, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.
“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them. “I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”
“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”
Oookay. That sounds perfectly innocent…
Apparently nobody on the staff can stop her and considering Trump’s angry tweet (probably dictated to Harp) this morning.
This stuf is part and parcel of a Trump administration and it’s mostly just a distraction. On the other hand,it does show that Trump is still the ridiculous fool he’s always been and in some ways it’s our best hope that we’ll get out of this horrific four years alive. His shallowness and ineptitude are the only guardrails left. (Of course, they can be lethal as well…)
