Donald Trump is once again using taxpayer resources to throw himself a birthday party. Last year, it was a sparsely attended military parade on the National Mall. This year, the president wants blood sport, hosting an exclusive, open-air UFC event on the South Lawn of the White House that is estimated to cost upwards of $60 million. But while the president and his guests enjoy a night of man-on-man action at the White House, artists and celebrities will be hosting a benefit concert protesting the American Nero’s personal circus.
“Rise Up Sing Out” will take place on June 14 in New York City, and feature headline artists and speakers including Rufus Wainwright, Bette Midler, Patti Smith, Joy Reid — with watch parties being planned across the county. Ticket sales for the concert will benefit the Committee for the First Amendment, an alliance of celebrities, actors, and artists formed during the McCarthy era, and brought back last year.
The group was revived by actress and longtime activist Jane Fonda. Her father, the actor Henry Fonda, was a vocal opponent of the Hollywood Blacklisting conducted by the entertainment industry under pressure from the Republican anti-communist Red Scare led by former Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) Fonda helped found the committee as a public show of support to the “Hollywood Ten,” 10 directors and screenwriters who were held in contempt by Congress after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Jane Fonda will headline the concert, which will be held at New York City’s Town Hall, an auditorium founded by New York suffragists in the 1920s with a capacity for 1,500. (It was famously the site where Margaret Sanger — the founder of Planned Parenthood — was arrested at an educational meeting on birth control.) Last year, Fonda, now 88, announced the reformation of the committee at an ACLU event, saying that the need for organized protest and participation from the arts transcended Trump, who she describes as a fascist. “It’s not [just] Trump. If Trump died, we’d get another one,” like him, she said.
“We’ve gone past the period of protests. I mean, it’s protests are good because they remind us that we’re not alone, but the people in the White House, they’ll just wait us out. They don’t care,” she said. “What we have to do now is called non-cooperation.”
The event is also being promoted by the organizers of the massive No Kings protests that have in the past been timed to coincide with events promoted by Trump — including his birthday parade in 2025.
Ezra Levin — co-founder of Indivisible, one of the primary organizations behind the No Kings movement — explained to Rolling Stone that given the attention surrounding the UFC event, and the fact that it will effectively be closed to the public, prompted the coalition of activists to “throw in on something so people can give their attention to something else, ideally something with a pro-democracy bent.”
In a break with longstanding tradition and the bounds of American ethics laws, the White House event will be packed with corporate sponsorships — including Crypto.com, Dodge Ram, Bud Light, and Polymarket. Historically, White House ethics officers have avoided giving the impression that corporations can secure access to the president and his government through donations and sponsorships, but those standards have been drowned in the Potomac during the Trump presidency.
Reported attendees to the UFC event include the Trump family, Jared and Ivanka Kushner, members of Trump’s cabinet, a whole host of right wing celebrities and influencers, and hundreds of military members (if they meet the strict physical fitness requirements set by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.)
The fights will almost certainly take place on Sunday, but in a last-ditch effort to rain on Trump’s parade — outside of the wet and muggy forecasted weather in Washington D.C. this weekend — one organization has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to shut the whole thing down.
“The number one thing Trump wants now, as he always wants, is all attention on him,” Levin tells Rolling Stone. “That’s why he’s throwing himself this birthday party, too, with a whole bunch of donors and attendants, because he’s always looking to make some money on whatever grift he’s got going on.”
“I think it’s important for us to continue to hammer the message that he clearly cares about himself and enriching himself and his buddies,” he added. “If we’re going to stop him, we’ve got to focus on organizing our own communities.”
Natalie Harp with Donald Trump on July 22, 2026.
Nothing About Trump and Natalie Harp Is Normal
In early 2024, while reporting a story on New York’s boisterous, controversial Young Republican Club, one of my sources told me they had a pretty direct line to Donald Trump himself.
At the time, Trump wasn’t president again — yet. But he was campaigning, and in order to get something in front of his eyes you had to first get the attention of someone else: his assistant and right-hand woman, Natalie Harp.
Harp, 35, is now at the center of a major media frenzy, as Democrats like Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff have seized upon her unusual relationship with her boss: part assistant, part hype-man, part gatekeeper. On Sunday night, Ossoff made a comment that many interpreted as an insinuation that Harp had a more personal relationship to the president.
“The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” Ossoff said at a campaign event in Georgia. “See he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
Ossoff’s comments set off a firestorm both in Democratic circles and the GOP’s reactionary messaging apparatus.
“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted on Monday morning. By Tuesday, the entire media ecosystem had weighed in — with some coming right out and saying what they thought Ossoff was implying in his joke, and detailing why it was out of bounds.
“Ossoff was clearly implying that Trump was having an affair with his staffer,” Megyn Kelly wrote on X. Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna called him a “sexist arrogant jerk.” Pundit Robby Starbuck wrote that “Ossoff is a vile coward for insinuating they’re having an affair.” The flood of backlash poured out of just about every conservative commentator you could think of.
The White House joined the fray after CNN posed a question about Harp to Trump, asking him to respond to Ossoff’s comments directly. “You mean Pee-Wee Herman?” Trump quipped in the moment, referring to Ossoff. His comms team went for a full broadside later online. “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” Trump’s rapid response account posted at CNN reporter Kristen Holmes. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
Ossoff, meanwhile, tried to soften the blow of his joke, redirecting it — sort of — away from Harp herself to make it more of a comment on the president’s relationship to his staff in general. “I’ve heard this particular aide referred to as his security blanket,” he told Jen Psaki on MS NOW. “And I think we could say that about any number of the senior aides in the White House.”
But the damage was done, and it’s hard to believe Ossoff didn’t know exactly what he was doing. In recent years, some Democrats have occasionally flirted with the type of mud-slinging that Trump and his imitators became known for, but they’ve rarely landed a hit that provoked this much of a reaction.
“What a coward. Own your sexist joke, bro,” right-wing commentator Scott Jennings posted.
Harp’s history — and her relationship to the president — give some clues as to why the Republican beehive is so agitated.
Harp began her career in the public eye as an anchor for One America News, a right-wing propaganda outlet that was founded in 2013 and became something of a mouthpiece for the Trump administration and then the MAGA movement during the Biden administration. Democrats and liberal commentators have pointed out that Harp was often fawning over Trump during her segments.
While these clips have been used as more evidence that Trump and Harp have a strange dynamic, it’s hard to say that this kind of content is outside of the norm for OAN’s programming at the time. But that doesn’t mean Harp’s history with Trump isn’t strange — even by MAGA supplicant standards.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, she said she was a bone cancer survivor and credited her survival to a “Right to Try” policy pushed by Trump in 2018 that allowed patients to use experimental drugs.
“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” Harp said at the RNC. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”
The Washington Post, however, notes that the drug Harp used was already approved by the FDA — which would have meant that the “Right to Try” law wouldn’t have applied.
Still, it’s clear that Harp feels a close personal connection to Trump. After her short stint at OAN, the Post cited her as a Trump employee as early as 2022. In 2024, The New York Times reported that Harp’s primary role on Trump’s staff was what other aides called “the human printer” — following Trump around with a battery powered printer so she could give him physical copies of social media posts, missives, text messages, and positive, often conspiratorial news stories. The Post story in 2022 also detailed her in this role, noting that other aides were “particularly distressed” by her access to and influence with the president.
“She is indicative of the people around him who just love him,” one anonymous adviser told the Post in 2022. “Love him too much.”
The Times’ reporting also noted that Harp’s esteem for Trump was particularly fervent, describing how she wrote him a series of what the newspaper called “devotional letters,” one of which said: “You are all that matters to me.” The Times described her running behind Trump’s golf cart, reading him social media posts and news articles. Following one of those instances, the Times reports that she wrote him another letter, apologizing for being “an embarrassment” while on the golf course in Scotland. “I want things to always be right between us,” she wrote. “I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).” Harp signed the letter, “With all my heart, Natalie.”
Harp’s family have acknowledged that her relationship to Trump is not that of a traditional staffer. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday night, Harp’s estranged brother Preston Harp said that “Since she was 16 she’s had an obsession with – she’s written letters to other presidents, let me put it that way,” Preston Harp said, mentioning “George Bush during the Iraq War” and that “her dream came true finally.”
These details are certainly odd, but so is basically everything about the particularities of Trump’s inner circle. Ossoff’s comment, however, likely came at least partially in response to another outlandish story that broke earlier this month.
On August 10, the Post reported that Trump had covertly switched planes during a trip to Turkey, hiding in an airline catering truck with a tiny group of aides in order to dodge a potential attack on Air Force One by Iranian proxies. The White House press corps and several key government figures — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio — stayed on board the “decoy plane.” Harp did not. She was reportedly in the food truck with Trump.
It’s impossible to know the exact nature of Harp’s relationship with Trump. Ossoff did not specifically mention an affair, though it’s hard to interpret his familiar comment as anything else — and the right-wing media is reacting to it as such, trying to take a moral high ground on behalf of a president who has, at least in civil court, been found liable for sexual abuse on at least one count, and routinely makes sexist comments toward female reporters and others.
Jesse Watters of Fox News was one of the only right-wing commentators to recognize the hypocrisy of bashing Ossoff’s comment while supporting Trump: “Am I fazed by this comment? No. Has Trump said so much worse, so much more sleazy things against other people? Yes. Have I defended those things? Absolutely. So, I’m not going to pretend to be all hot and bothered by it.”
Watters is an outlier, though. No matter what the charges, Trump will always have his protectors in the GOP, some more loyal than others. In recent years, Natalie Harp has been more loyal than anyone else.