President Donald Trump had a wonderful time on his big trip to China. After all, what’s not to like?
In a series of meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Trump delivered a stunning highlight reel of flawless international diplomacy, breathlessly praising the competing global superpower at every turn while largely brushing off contentious issues like trade, cybersecurity concerns, Taiwan’s right to self determination, and China’s support for Iran. The art of the deal in action.
The Chinese, for their part, have proved that they know exactly what the president likes. Xi kicked off Trump’s visit with a rapturous welcoming committee outside of Air Force One, cheering for Trump as he strode down a very literal red carpet.
The next day, the Chinese kept that vibe going with a surreal public spectacle that included dozens of schoolchildren jumping up and down, cheering ecstatically for the president, who grinned his head off as he passed.
“I was particularly impressed by those children,” Trump said during remarks at the bilateral meeting. “They were happy, they were beautiful.”
After the warm welcome, Trump and Xi settled into their talks. The White House characterized the negotiations as a “good meeting,” with productive dialogues on international trade and the war in Iran. Trump managed to get in a few lines about the issues that he really cares about: fast food restaurants. “Chinese restaurants in America today outnumber the five largest fast foods in the United States — all combined,” the president marveled. “That’s a pretty big statement.”
He’s right, of course: many Chinese people do love blue jeans and basketball — and in turn, Americans love their food.
In some ways, Trump’s behavior is not unusual for a head of state or foreign dignitary. There’s always a certain amount of pomp and circumstance that come with a major diplomatic visit, and playing nice with rivals and allies alike is part of the job. You could even make the case that it’s one part of being president where Trump succeeds — for better or worse, the man loves to have a good time.
But what’s vaguely concerning is that Trump’s China trip is another example of how the person leading our nation is uniquely susceptible to flattery and spectacle. You don’t have to be a China hawk to feel uncomfortable by this. Xi Jinping is the leader of the most powerful foreign nation in the world, and while Trump’s cheerful demeanor certainly seems to keep everyone at ease, it raises questions about whether he’s capable of correctly threading the many needles of international relations.
The end of Trump’s tour through the Chinese century also reinforced this. On Friday morning, Trump released a surreal statement exonerating Xi for his supposed comments on the decline of the U.S. — something that would normally be a major sticking point for an egomaniacal leader like Trump — and basically deflecting the reasonable line of criticism onto the Biden administration.
“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump wrote. The president earlier on Friday lauded Xi as “an incredible guy.”
Xi’s personality blitz, then, appears to have been incredibly successful. This has cropped up in basically every public statement that’s come out of the White House since. Here’s Trump aboard Air Force 1 being asked if he thinks Xi is a dictator.
Immediate pivot to Biden, no answer to the question. And sure, “Do you think [insert leader of major U.S. rival] is a dictator” is not exactly the most incisive or useful question in the White House Press Corp’s repertoire. Its answer is basically irrelevant to the greater goals of the United States and really only serves to let any given U.S. official calibrate how much of a hawk or dove they want to appear to be. Still, responding by bashing an American president isn’t ideal. Trump’s answer also included a very funny mistake about who was actually in charge of the Iran nuclear deal, which, when it was pushed through by President Obama, not Biden, was one of the most successful points of U.S. diplomacy in decades.
Still, there was another more relevant question in that gaggle as well: How is Trump handling China’s repeated cyber attacks against U.S. assets? “I did [talk to him about it],” Trump said. “He talked about attacks we did in China. What they do, we do, too.”
Again, this is an honest answer — we do spy a ton on China. But it’s not exactly one that makes an impartial viewer feel confident about the president’s ability to trade in actual leverage with a rival power (particularly when Trump also gave a relatively noncommittal response on whether he intends to follow through on the congressionally approved defense arrangement with Taiwan).
Trump’s breezy posture and chumminess with Xi is aggravating even some of his most staunch rivals. Here’s Sean Hannity, becoming visibly annoyed when Trump refuses to actually engage with the realistic position China holds in regard to the Iran war, instead dismissing their influence over Iran by reasoning that at least “they’re not coming in with guns.”
As we’ve seen in the past, Trump’s mood can turn on a dime, turning routine negotiations into tense debates and creating impasses on issues where a smarter leader would find a compromise. It’s funny, sure, to watch our big galoot of a president and members of his administration goggle at the trappings of Chinese power (Trump’s first Truth Social message after leaving on Friday was about the fact that they have a ballroom). But it only reinforces the creeping suspicion that in one of the most important diplomatic relationships in history, the only adults in the room are sitting on the opposite side of the table.
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.