Natalie Harp would be just another of those adoring faces behind Trump at a rally, ever smiling, laughing at the weakest of his jokes, delighted when he breaks into his absurd Trump-dance, fists jutting out, jowl-flaps quivering. Instead, as has been pointed out ad nauseum over the last few days, there she is seated at his side in Marine One, at his heels on the tarmac, even included in his stealth exit from the G-7 summit in an airline food service container, carted off to a lesser version of Air Force One as the real plane served as a decoy.

That Harp was among the select few in Turkey is what publicly reintroduced her as ever-present in Trump’s life: his “human printer,” Trump’s “binkie,” according to the increasingly acerbic Maggie Haberman, who seems to have delightfully discovered her inner-snark since the book she wrote about Trump with Jonathan Swan, “Regime Change,” hit the number one slot on the Times bestseller list.

Every blog on the planet has taken on the phenomenon of Natalie this week. Jonathan V. Last at the Bulwark weighed in with “Trump’s Human Printer is Cray-Cray.” Jo Jo from Jerz wrote a hilarious take-down of the woman she calls “Trump’s flowers in the attic fluffer,” counseling that she should be, at age 35, drowning herself in a margarita in a “glass the size of a Home Depot lighting fixture” and “spending six disastrous weeks with a personal trainer named Bryce” she met on Hinge.

Everyone is taking note of Harp’s apparent devotion to The Man Who Doesn’t Deserve It, Donald Trump, whose own wife has decamped permanently, or just about, to New York to be with Barron as he studies for his classes at NYU and makes crypto trades on inside information he gloms from his brothers and his daddy.

Harp is said to be the one who stays up late with Trump in the White House helping him post his insane Truth Social rants. She was at his side at Mar a Lago when Trump posted more than 40 attacks on E. Jean Carroll after he was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming her. When he travels – which is at least weekly to one of his golf resorts -- Harp follows him around carrying a portable printer she uses to supply him with a never-ending plethora of stories praising him that she prints out from right wing media such as Gateway Pundit.

In other words, her job – she is a government employee working in the White House – is to keep the President of the United States happy.

Senator Jon Ossoff brought Harp to the fore last week in a campaign speech in Georgia when he noted that given his druthers, Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” on his flying Qatari bribe palace than do the actual job of overseeing a war on Iran that has driven the price of gas and everything else through the roof and caused the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemembers.

In response, Trump compared Ossoff to Pew Wee Herman, and the right-wing media went performatively nuts, defending…well, what exactly were they defending? Trump’s right to be attended by a Stepford person outfitted in tight skirts and skyscraper heels and blond hair and perfect makeup, just the way Trump likes them?

Yes. That’s what they’re defending, because Natalie Harp fits in with the right-wing uber-narrative that Donald Trump is entitled to Whatever He Wants, whether it’s destroying the White House or slapping his name on everything in Washington from the Kennedy Center to neighborhood trash receptacles. Jonathan Last at The Bulwark got close to it with this: “Trump’s defenders are eager to pretend that Ossoff was suggesting an affair between Trump and Harp because the reality of the relationship is so much worse.”

But beyond all the juicy inside-Washington hint-dropping about the relationship between Trump and Harp, whatever it is, what’s really going on here?

If you expand the definition of what an abusive relationship is, this is one of them. Trump is the problem, not Natalie Harp. We don’t know what goes on between them behind closed doors. They might do a little light petting, or he might find ways to belittle her the way he does to every female media figure. We’ll never know unless Harp one days treats us to a tell-all, revealing their secret love-texts or the inside details of his twisted take on women.

But it’s clear that Trump is taking advantage of her. He is using her in the way that abusive men use women who are dedicated to them as spouses or bosses. The gigantic bag Harp is photographed carrying around behind him could contain a portable printer, or it could be his laundry, or as the snark-set speculates, a supply of his Depends. She is his porter, and he obviously enjoys seeing her in that role. Whatever the bag contains could be transported to Marine One or to his limousine or through the doors of Mar a Lago or Bedminster by an actual porter, an employee hired for the purpose of carrying luggage and other accoutrements of a traveling executive.

Trump gets off on Harp’s self-negating devotion. He doesn’t have to belittle her in public to bend her to his will, the aim of every abuser. She does it to herself. Natalie Harp is a victim in a sick relationship. She is not to blame. Trump is.

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It’s a heartrending story that has been making headlines across the country: A nurse from Alaska was working as a surrogate mother for a California couple when the fetus was diagnosed with a serious heart condition that would require multiple surgeries and would likely impact his health for the rest of his life. The biological parents demanded an abortion. The surrogate fought them, making her way to anti-abortion Texas for maximal protection. The parents said they would withhold medical treatment if the surrogate didn’t go through with the abortion; she defied them. Baby Gabriel has now been born, and while the surrogate has not succeeded in claiming parental rights, he is getting the treatment he needs in Dallas.

Heartrending indeed. And basically none of it is true.

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The baby’s name is not Gabriel; it’s Rumi. His parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, did not demand that the surrogate, McKenna West, terminate or else they would allow a newborn baby to suffer without treatment; they in fact want him getting treatment at a top-rate facility in Los Angeles, not at a less-excellent one in Texas. The surrogate parents legally could not have forced West to terminate in the first place, no matter which state she was in, and when she said she didn’t want to have an abortion they said that was fine. She didn’t decamp to Texas because it bans abortion, but because Texas often confers parental rights onto whoever gives birth. Rumi’s parents are in fact getting him the treatment he needs, which has been complicated by the fact that West insisted on birthing in Texas instead of in California, where Rumi’s care would have been better. And it strikes me as… interesting… that the anti-abortion movement gave the baby a strongly Christian-coded name without having any idea of what his actual parents planned to call him.

The story is a story because it’s a mess, but it’s also a story because the anti-abortion movement has latched onto it and exploited it. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running against James Talarico for a US Senate seat, has put himself in the middle of the whole debacle in order to score campaign points. Some of the country’s most prominent “pro-life” activists have made this their latest cause as a way of demonizing both abortion and surrogacy. The degree to which abortion opponents have manipulated and outright invented facts in this case is stunning, even from a movement rife with dishonestly and manipulation.

They have, however, succeeded in directing the public’s attention to this case, and by extension to commercial surrogacy. And defenders of women’s rights are perilously off-guard. Unlike our counterparts across most of Europe, American feminists have not deeply grappled with the surrogacy issue, instead layering it onto American abortion politics, if we think about it at all. That winds up with simplistic and unsatisfying conclusions, like “her body her choice” — when commercial surrogacy is complicated by money, contracts, power, biology, and truly complex ethical questions about paying for reproduction and whether something can even be fairly considered paid work if it comes with no seconds let alone days off, no labor protections, no way to simply quit, and significant physical risk up to and including death.

The anti-surrogacy movement, which overlaps significantly with the anti-abortion movement, has an easy answer: Babies shouldn’t be commodities; surrogacy should be banned. It’s tempting for supporters of women’s rights and abortion rights to simply negatively polarize ourselves here — if “pro-lifers” are against surrogacy, then we should probably be for it. That would be a mistake. And it’s women who will end up paying the price.

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I will tell you up-front that I have no ideal legal framework to regulate commercial surrogacy. It is banned in almost all of Europe. Countries that allow it with little regulation have found themselves turned into hubs for human trafficking, as women from poor nations are moved to surrogacy-friendly ones to turn out babies for foreigners. It is hard to overstate what a total nightmare a whole lot of international commercial surrogacy is for the women who are coerced into it.

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I am fully cognizant of the uselessness of expecting the daily mutterings of the President of the United States to make sense. He doesn’t, and his mutterings don’t.

But this is getting ridiculous.

In a speech earlier this summer at the far-right Christian nationalist Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, Trump referred to the entire Democratic Party as “hardcore, Godless Communists.” At his midnight Fourth of July speech on the National Mall, Trump again referred to Democrats as a communist “cancer” on America. He calls Mayor Mamdani a communist, the winner of the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a communist. He’s got Senate and House candidates sounding like Joe McCarthy, kicking the C-word around like a political hackey-sack.

And then last night on Truth Social, he’s praising a real, actual Communist dictator, Kim Jong Un as someone “who has always treated me with great respect” and is “very positive,” while taking a shot at South Korea for not joining his war on Iran, after not informing South Korea he was going to attack Iran or asking for South Korean aid beforehand, as if South Korea was supposed to read his mind and send him money, or missiles, or Diet Cokes…or something anyway. Then he ordered Hegseth to reduce the U.S. involvement with South Korea in long-planned exercises that prepared for war with North Korea.

Let’s play the “what if” game, shall we? What do you think would have happened if Joe Biden had launched a shooting war on Iran that immediately lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and a 50 percent rise in gas prices and significant increases in prices of food, rare metals, fertilizer for farmers, and pretty much everything else that keeps the world’s economy humming? Do you think Trump and every single one of his MAGA allies in Congress would have called for his impeachment?

Of course they would have.

What do you think would happen if it came out that Senators Mark Kelley and Jon Ossoff, both of whom appear to be readying runs for the White House, were close buddies of Jeffrey Epstein, and their names appeared in the Epstein files 30 or 40 thousand times? Do you think there would be screaming and yelling from the MAGAsphere for their political scalps?

What do you think would happen if a Democrat…any Democrat…had put the USS Abraham Lincoln to sea for more than 250 days and reports came out that there were food shortages on the ship, that sailors didn’t have hot water for showers, that the ship was moldy and unsanitary?

How about this: What if a Democrat had gone to war against Iran and said the war wouldn’t let up until that country “surrendered and waved the white flag,” and said one of the goals of the war was to eliminate Iran’s missile program, and then a few months later, said it was understandable if Iran wanted offensive missiles because “other countries in the region like Saudi Arabia” had them? What if a Democrat agreed to end the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf? What if a Democrat had lifted sanctions on Iran’s sale of oil, and ended banking and insurance sanctions that had constrained that country for decades? What if a Democrat had agreed to lift restrictions of Iran’s use of its funds in foreign banks and unfroze all its assets around the world?

What if a Democrat had pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that had been signed by France, the UK, Russia, Germany, the European Union and China, and allowed Iran to return to enriching uranium to near-nuclear weapons grade, putting the country on a path to develop a weapon within months, not years? What if a Democrat signed a document that allowed Iran to restrict access to its nuclear sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency, essentially ending all intelligence about the status of Iran’s nuclear program and accepting whatever Iran decided to tell the world about it?

What if a Democrat learned that Russia was assisting Iran’s war effort against the U.S. and had even provided targeting data on U.S. installations in the Middle East that resulted in the deaths of American soldiers, and did nothing in response?

What if a Democrat, having started a war with Iran, expended 90 percent of U.S. long range missiles and more than 50 percent of our country’s anti-missile defenses, not to mention spent $100 billion, and then lost the war?

What if a Democrat, knowing that North Korea had sent more than 10,000 of its soldiers to fight against Ukraine and had provided Russia with missiles and other weapons, declared that North Korea was essentially an ally and let it go? What if a Democrat learned that North Korea planned to send as many as 30,000 more soldiers to join Russia’s war on Ukraine, and then the Democrat declared that North Korea’s dictatorial leaker was a good guy? What if a Democrat said that because the North Korean leader “respects” him, he could do anything he wanted in providing aid and comfort to Russia’s war on Ukraine? What if a Democrat was in charge when it became obvious that North Korea was aiding Russia’s threat to NATO nations in defiance of the U.S. treaty with NATO?

What if a Democrat repeatedly treated allies of this country such as Canada and Germany and France and Sweden and Italy as enemies rather than friends?

What if a Democrat enriched himself in office to the tune of $2.2 billion in a single year in defiance of norms and laws that had been respected by every president for more than 240 years?

How long do you think it would take for Republicans to impeach that Democratic president?

See what I mean about this getting ridiculous?

Here is a sad truth we have lived through before. We can vote in a new Congress controlled by Democrats. We can vote in a Democrat as president. And then, as happened in 2008 and many times before, going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrats will be saddled with the duty of repairing the damage that Republicans have done to everything that matters in this country, from foreign relations to the economy to the health of the American public to the need to repair America’s place in the world and rebuild the U.S. government, brick by brick, from the ground up.

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The people who voted for Donald Trump apparently don’t see anything wrong with an old man staying up all night using artificial intelligence to compare himself to the first president of the Republic.

This stuff was all over the internet today. You couldn’t not see it. He froze up at one of his rallies, staring unblinkingly, speechless for 21 seconds. He leans forward so far when he walks, he looks like he’s going to fall over, a clear sign of dementia. And yet, there he is every day, our president.

He has taken leave of his senses. I am at a loss confronted with this certifiable insanity.

I’m taking the night off to rest my brain. It hurts.

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Give Donald Trump’s White House credit for its agile imagination to turn out a never-ending series of daily fantasies and would-be solutions, new and refurbished,  that just make things worse.

Announcement that Homeland Security is spending $20 million on electrified gloves – cleverly called G.L.O.V.E. – for border agents essentially to send electrified pain on demand to any recalcitrant migrant or loud-mouthed protester they encounter can only emerge from an authoritarian’s  fertile imagination.

What exactly is the problem that requires taser-like gloves for masked agents running around in camouflage? Does the government truly believe that instant electric shock on citizens upset that the mass deportation program is out of control is a useful response? How about training or some restraint on ICE agent encounters with protestors altogether?

We’re seeing daily disclosures, either by journalists who find a leak in this “transparent” administration or through nutty posts by the government itself, that just make one sit back and remark on inventiveness and excess.

Somehow, the White House offers a constant rollout of program changes to ballyhoo its agenda, but in practical sense do something other than the announced purpose.

Donald Trump, who knows nothing about science and medicine, announced a change of childhood vaccine schedule recommendations, insisting that breaking up shots for measles, mumps and rubella will result in health benefits – at the very time when his administration’s vaccine hesitancy is helping to spreading measles thought eliminated decades ago. To make matters worse, he adds in misinformation about the volumes of liquid contained in vaccines and suggests that dropping recommendations over which he has no control will lessen autism, an unproved scientific link.

There are similar issues with announcements about war and peace (“The Strait is fully open,” says Trump), about inflation, immigration and election security. Ordering the Postal Service not to deliver mail ballot applications or the ballots themselves in states not submitting their voter lists – now blocked by courts – will simply limit voting in a partisan manner rather than enhance election security. On the same day that War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says there is no food and morale problem on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, suddenly there’s a replacement on its way from the Pacific.

As recent primary election turnout shows, the announcements are many, but seemingly unpersuasive to a growing crowd of anti-Trump voters concerned only about who can be the most forceful voices in opposition. Trump is answering questions no one but him is asking.

The Vanity Projects

We long had felt benumbed by images of knocking down the White House’s East Wing to make way for Trump’s self-glorifying and gilded ballroom – to be built with private funds and “not a dime” of taxpayer money. But now here are the bills for an “emergency” ballroom, some kind of presidential bunker, a concrete helipad (now being re-laid because the work was rushed) and a refurbished visitor center coming in at $900 million and oodles of public tax money stolen from other government processes with no congressional authority in sight.

Meanwhile, the whole project is in court.

That total doesn’t include the zillions going into regilding statues around Washington or a gargantuan arch monument to outdo Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. It doesn’t include the price or legal entanglements of repainting the Lincoln Center Memorial Pool or the overpriced renovations at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Ordering new misdemeanor charges over “vandalism” of the Reflecting Pools won’t create new evidence for a crime that even the U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro says didn’t happen, and the revisit to slapping Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center simply draws laughs.

The total certainly doesn’t cover the $1.7 billion estimate for extending the deployment of National Guard units from 23 states through the remainder of the Trump term. What is so galling is the finding this week that while the presence of Guardsmen may be keeping lesser street crime down, there has been virtually no impact on violent crimes.

The idea to sell early access to “market-moving” Trump Social posts before the rest of the world, seemingly institutionalizing insider trading for Wall Streeters willing to pay $100,000 a month, is not only nutty but likely illegal. The inventiveness, however, deserves a gold star along with insisting that a Trump-owned social media outlet is the recognized source for government news even as Trump wants to insist that the posts need not be seen as presidential records required to be logged.

Only congressional Republicans fail to see that making these vanity projects the primary drive for this White House is missing the point of why we have government at all.

Always, The Spin

Steven Miller, Trump’s go-to guy on immigration and domestic issues, has said repeatedly that he and colleagues arrived for Trump 2.0 with bushels of plans and rollbacks already in hand and that the strategy is to continue to roll them out speedily and with fanfare.

The Heritage Foundation’ Project 2025 has been a blueprint for reordering government, Elon Musk’s DOGE effort, while seemingly a failure on its own terms, bulldozed destructive efforts still underway, and JD Vance’s anti-fraud efforts are a mask for partisan punishment of blue states.

The White House continues to roll out its aims, shading the practical impact along the way as to mask concerns about ideology or simple acquisition of power along the way.

Increasingly, however, the announcements are being met with near-instant legal challenges, all of which start what feel like endless hearings, trials and appeals. Even when some issues to the Supreme Court, as with both tariffs and birthright citizenship policies, Trump does not stop re-inventing the same policies under new legal justification and demanding a re-hearing before the court for whom he has appointed three justices.

In most cases, Trump could get what he wants done in a more legally reliable way by going through Congress. But the desire for an all-powerful presidency won’t allow doing so. The simple reason he declares everything an “emergency” is so he can bypass rules meant for others.

Trump may have lost 20 consecutive trials about demanding adherence of voting rules he wants to mandate for state-run elections, but it does not keep him from issuing yet more, restarting that court cycle.

Of course, we expect that Trump, as all presidents, will try to spin events and developments to highlight his agenda. We just need to approach it all with more skepticism.

The issue with whisking Trump from his grifted Air Force One jet to the original only to wheel him off in a catering truck was not presidential safety. We can even give Trump and the Secret Service credit for doing so – though it turns out the CIA had “low confidence” in the reported threats. But playacting and lying after the fact just suggests that he knew he was pulling a fast one on Americans, including those left at risk on a decoy plane.

Trump sees himself as a “president of consequence.” He ought to act that way.

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The post An Ever-Imaginative White House appeared first on DCReport.org.

Texas previously created an incentive program for National Board Certification of Teachers, complete with $$ "reimbursement" for districts, but it may scuttle that because of scary DEI.  NBTC hasn't been hugely successful in Texas-- only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that's 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because "tolerance."

The state is pushing the National Board to comply with Texas's version of a "Don't Say Gay" law.  The Texas State Board of Education is worried about the diversity, equity and inclusion content-- especially when it comes to gender and sex stuff, as reported by Jaden Edison for the Texas Tribune.  

“About 10% of the training that a teacher would go to is based on DEI, gender identity and sexual orientation — and how to help transition children — which violates our state law and violates parental rights,” board member Julie Pickren said during the April meeting.

Pickensd shared some of the offending passages:

Teachers design and implement lessons that help students develop awareness of, sensitivity to, and respect for others. For example, accomplished teachers are aware that children may begin to question their sexual identity at a young age. Teachers know that acceptance of their curiosity will make them feel safe and secure. In such instances, teachers may feature children’s literature in which diverse gender roles are portrayed.

Yes, that sounds just terrible. Students wrestling with questions about their sexuality should understand that their curiosity and confusion is unacceptable, and they should not expect to feel safe and secure at school. 

Edison has continued to follow this story; I wish more reporters were doing so. I won't pretend the issues here aren't complicated and difficult, but the moment policy makers decide that parents have all the rights and children have none, they've embraced a "solution" that is simple and wrong. Children are not chattel.

It makes me wonder-- if parents have thrown their LGBTQ child out of the house for coming out, would a school district be contradicting parental choice and thereby violating one of these parental rights laws by trying to help the student deal with homelessness?