NATALIE HARP IS A SYMPTOM, NOT THE PROBLEM

Jamelle Bouie thinks the real Natalie Harp scandal isn't the fact that she's a conventionally attractive young blonde who appears to be an aging, doddering president's most trusted aide -- it's the information diet she feeds him.

Bouie quotes a New York Times story by Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman:

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful.

Bouie writes:

... the reason [the Harp story] matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.

He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear....

Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.

But Trump has always rejected information that contradicted his upbeat viewpoint. He's always wallowed in happy talk. If Harp weren't the one telling him what he wants to hear, it would be someone else.

Remember 2019, when he fired pollsters because they told him he was on his way to losing swing states, and thus the 2020 election, to Joe Biden? That was years before Harp became a Trump aide. Trump did go on to lose that election. However, he subsequently leveraged that election loss to create a stolen election myth that is accepted as truthful, or at least possibly true, by an overwhelming majority of Republican voters. This "lost cause" myth probably won him the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and possibly the election.

No matter what happens, Trump believes that things will work out (at least for him). In a New York Times interview in May, Tucker Carlson recalled a conversation he'd had with Trump about the president's decision to go to war with Iran:

... he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is.

In a June Truth Social message about the Iran war's critics, Trump wrote:

But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively “chirping,” at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!

This isn't happening because of the influence of one sinister personal assistant. This is who Trump is. He's a lifelong believer in the Power of Positive Thinking.

And to some extent it's understandable. It all has worked out for Trump, more or less. The reason is that he's operated in arenas where people like him get multiple additional opportunities when they screw up.

Our plutocracy, particularly in the post-Reagan era, allows well-off people who fail to keep going until they're not failures anymore. Even when you're a billion dollars in debt, someone will lend you money or provide you with opportunities to recoup. The system is rigged in favor of people who've attained a certain level of wealth -- it's nearly impossible for them to completely fall through the cracks, the way an ordinary person with $20,000 in medical debt might. It's also nearly impossible to beat the rich in a court of law, no matter how illegal or lawsuit-worthy their actions are.

Now Trump operates in another field where the game is rigged for people like him: Republican politics. If you're a Republican with enough voter appeal to win elections and you're a congenital liar, our political culture will keep you afloat even as you continue to lie. Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media will back up your falsehoods -- about election fraud, about the glories of your failed economic policies and failed war, about how evil your enemies are -- and the rest of the media and the opposition party, cowed by decades of Republican ref-working, will never fully challenge you. A supine GOP Congress and a Supreme Court rigged for the Republican Party will let you get away with things no other president was ever allowed to do.

At long last, Trump may have come up against troubles he can't outrun: a dug-in Iranian regime, a bond market that's tired of his economic nonsense, restive voters in a heretofore solidly red heartland.

But until now, Trump's delusional positivism has made a horrible kind of sense. Things always did work out for him. Maybe only now, at age 80, is his luck running out.