President Donald Trump’s wife, First Lady Melania Trump, is reported less than pleased at the amount of attention her husband has feted on his ever-present assistant, Natalie Harp. Yet even as the Republican Party seethes at people like Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) who call out Trump’s unorthodox relationship with Harp, anti-Trump conservatives are speculating that the First Lady likely has more that she wants to say on the subject.
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“I want a Melania press conference so bad,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller said on Monday. “That’s all. I just want another one.”
His colleague Jonathan V. Last replied, “Yeah? You want another one where she talks about…”
Miller cited the First Lady’s earlier press conference in which she denied her confirmed relationship with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, prompting Last to impersonate Melania saying “I do not know who this human printer is.” Yet as the two men noted, there is a more serious undercurrent to the potentially lurid Trump-Harp story.
“It was interesting to remind them, but they all were in unison,” Miller said. “‘How could you, you called her a whore,’ one guy said. And it’s like, did he call her a whore? I don’t know, you seem to be thinking that. And, you know, I mean, Donald Trump over the years, whether it be ‘Quiet Piggy,’ ‘You’re bleeding out your whatever,’ I mean, Donald Trump has accused so many people of his wives and staffers of being ugly and having affairs, that like we even, all of us even had a colleague Donald Trump accused falsely of having an affair with a political, with a politician.”
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He also added that, during the 2016 presidential election, Trump joked about how Sen. Ted Cruz’s wife was supposedly less attractive than his own. He then contrasted their forgiveness for Trump’s behavior with supporters referring to Ossoff as a “bottom feeder,” claiming it was sexist to imply Harp is having an affair with Trump simply because he is her boss or responding “shame on him.”
“That’s the main point of it all,” The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger explained. “It’s just to try to drag everything down to a ‘your side does it too, your side does it too,’ you know, get rid of any possible comparisons to what’s happening. I mean, what do you even say about it?” He added that Ossoff never technically accused Harp of having an affair with Trump but merely said that he likes to travel with her, which has been confirmed.
“The idea that he is denigrating her character any more than, like, any of the pieces of reporting that have come out about how sort of slavishly devoted she is to this guy and how she just spends her entire life in this sort of state of high adulation toward the president that she works for, I don’t really get why that would be any more salacious than any of that,” Egger continued. “But, I mean, Ossoff is a guy who is seen as, like we were talking about yesterday, seen as potentially a frontrunner for the 2028 nomination. He’s the kind of guy, if you’re going to be able to stick in a knife and start dinging away at him now, you’re going to do it. And so I think that’s motivating a lot of this, too.”
Last then speculated that “this was such a little storm that it feels like it must have been coordinated. Right. I mean, somebody must have said, the boss really doesn’t like this. Somebody showed it to him. Go out and go out and punch back against this. Because everybody came out and said the same thing.”
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