Hello, and welcome back. I’m still in California, and I’m proud to report I was right all along: It’s heaven, and always will be. I can finally reveal that I’m the soon-to-be buyer of Harry and Meghan’s Montecito estate, and will be moving in promptly. You can refer to me as HRH if it makes you more comfortable. Let’s get to whatever’s happening outside my palace walls.
→ Oh, no: He’s redesigning the ships.
As a person with a wife who has alarmingly strong opinions on curtain tassels: Pete Hegseth, listen to me, do not let Donald J. Trump do a redesign of our navy. You tell him sorry, the floors can’t be recarpeted, it’s the law, and you hustle him to the next room. Do not let the Liberace President gain access to our great nation’s military vessels. Don’t get me wrong, I love that we have a culturally gay president, but I don’t think he needs to bedazzle and gild the guns, too.
Speaking of a gay president, this week we were reminded that he is, in fact, not gay. The sort of old dog element of Donald J. has faded as a storyline in recent years. But then comes the case of Natalie Harp, the executive assistant to the president, who is apparently getting preferential treatment in the White House. Harp is uniquely devoted to POTUS, according to a New York Times profile of her this week. For example: When Trump sneaked out of Air Force One in a catering truck, he left behind the press corps (of course) and Marco Rubio, but he took Natalie Harp with him. And all kinds of implications are being implied. For the best insinuations and gossip that could involve illicit behavior and attractive employees, we turn to Michael Wolff. He claims that Melania won’t go to events if Natalie Harp is there. “Other than at ceremonial occasions, or in a strictly official capacity, she has given up the role of wife. Practically speaking, there is no room for her,” he says. And: “Harp superseded the White House staff and, as well, his wife and family. Nobody got between Harp and Trump. And you only got to Trump by going through Harp.” I, for one, am shocked even to consider that our dear ol’ president could behave as such. And on top of that, Ms. Harp is 35 years old, an unprecedented and honestly alarming age for an affair (Monica Lewinsky, whom I adore, was a much more appropriate 22). There’s precedent for things like this.
Anyway, Natalie Harp may well be just a devoted and great employee who is being secretly smeared by Melania’s dark arts PR team for any number of reasons (never ask why two women are fighting). Or Natalie Harp may be our next First Lady, in which case I will ready my new commemorative First Couple fine bone china. We will track this one closely at TGIF.
But back to the Navy. The sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are apparently furious to have been deployed for so long on an old warship with bad food and moldy showers, which I agree seems horrible. But then again, I didn’t sign up for the Navy. The New York Times sat down with the family members of one of the sailors, whose mother says: “They didn’t sign up to be on a ship in the middle of the ocean.” Gen Z might achieve world peace just by collectively deciding that war is cooked, and the amenities are terrible. Fair enough.
→ Dan Bilzerian is the one I should have been watching: I’ve spent the past few months looking on in horror as former Free Press contributor turned Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback went viral for his campaign, which is based around freeing the people from “goyslop” and calling his black opponent a slave (let’s just say he’s been on a journey since his Free Press days). Turns out, I missed the real story. An honest-to-god, bona fide Nazi, Dan Bilzerian, announced his candidacy to represent Florida’s 6th Congressional District in April, then did very little traditional campaigning, and still won 18.7 percent of the district. Dan’s entire pitch for himself was based around his antisemitism. He called his opponent Randy Fine a “fat Jew” and a “Satanic whore.” He posted things like: “District 6 understands the Jewish problem.” That was his entire message. And he won 18.7 percent of the vote. James Fishback only won 10.5 percent of the vote. That’s right, he was too nuanced for the electorate. The electorate didn’t need his anti-black racism. Why have anything else to say when you can blame it all on Jews? No need to argue about laws or taxes or the pros and cons of this or that when there’s this delightful, ancient scapegoat right in front of you—or, adjacent to you, throwing an over-the-top bar mitzvah in South Beach.
→ The polls are actually fake: An explosive poll last week showed that Karen Bass was beating socialist candidate Nithya Raman by double digits in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. The Los Angeles Times tried to talk to the pollsters. Turns out there were no pollsters, and it was just totally fake! Here’s what they wrote to the Los Angeles Times: “Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.”
Turns out they made a fake poll to spread disinformation in an effort to mess with voters’ heads. And they’re calling it “a short term social experiment.” Which seems to be just a sophisticated euphemism for a lie.
