Kathy Gannon Substack
Where does the story of Natalie add value to our understanding of the news, of the events that shape our world? No, instead we get an obsession with a young woman who is infatuated with Donald Trump.
The media’s obsession with Natalie Harp is humiliating and just wrong.
For the few who do not know Natalie Harp, I admire you. She was one of a few who travelled with the US president on his decoy plane, after Israel suckered the CIA into believing there was a threat from Iran.
The story of the CIA being suckered, Israel’s audacity to intentionally seek to trick its closest ally, dropped almost immediately from the headlines.
There were no investigative media stories into intelligence sharing with an ally who feeds you lies. Nor were there answers to so many questions: How could the CIA be so gullible? How was the false information fed to the CIA? What was the purpose? Does Israel routinely seek to dupe the United States? What kind of an ally does that? How much did it cost the U.S. taxpayer to operate a decoy plane, carry out the transfer, while all along keeping the original plane full of journalists unaware of the transfer?
So many unanswered question but no, the media was chasing stories like “Who is Natalie Harp? Or “What you need to know about Natalie Harp”.
And shame on the New York Times for your demeaning description of Harp as a “platinum blonde geyser of positivity”. Was that supposed to be clever? It wasn’t. It made you sound like a cheap tabloid stuck in an era where attacks on a woman’s person were fodder for male sleaze- filled jokes that demean and humiliate women __ oh that’s right it appears that era is still with us
The media can barely find the words to cover with depth the brutal killings of Palestinians by Israel, the assault on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, but the media can’t find enough words to say about Natalie Harp, an aide, whose impact on national affairs is zero.
It certainly clarifies what is news these days. It is gossip and if it involves a woman, even better, and if she is young and pretty, the media are all over it. Please don’t say it is because it involves the president. The man has made no secret of the type of person he is, whether in his dealings with women, with his employees, or even with his allies.
Unless there is anything at all that links her to America’s national affairs, it’s not news. It is cheap gossip.
Harp’s misfortune and seemingly the only reason to be grabbing headlines is because she was on the decoy plane with Trump and she is young and pretty.
But there were several other people on that plane and yet the media has given them only passing attention and we barely know their names, except for Trump’s former Fox News person and today’s Secretary of Defense (War) Hegseth, another stellar example of lecherous men.
But what about some golf buddy who was also apparently on the plane. Who was he? Why was he on the plane? Was he making secret financial deals with the president of the United States? Is Trump secretly gay?
Inquiring minds want to know.
But no the media zeroed in on Harp. Why? Because she is young and pretty and Trump is a lecherous old man.
National security be damned or the monumental implications of the CIA being duped, made a chump of by its ally Israel. No, the media has to do a deep dive investigation into Harp, an intrusive one that Harp neither deserved nor should have been subjected to.
They dug up letters and notes she wrote revealing with smug grins excerpts of those letters (nothing of which were of national significance) but only revealed a young woman infatuated with Trump.
The story has absolutely nothing to do with news, nothing to do with international affairs. It does not even have anything to do with what transpired in the decoy plane.
Those notes to Trump belong to Harp. They are none of our business. They have nothing to do with news and please don’t suggest it gives us any previously unknown insight into Trump. Twice America elected Trump, a convicted felon with a lecherous and criminal past he quite openly brags about.
Natalie Harp is being dragged through the mud, plastered all over the news because the news media wants to run salacious stories of a pretty young woman with a lecherous old man by the name of President Donald Trump.
I am ashamed.
Natalie Harp doesn’t deserve this, just as Monica Lewinsky didn’t deserve the horrific media coverage she got because of a former U.S. president’s deeply shameful behavior, taking advantage of a young intern.
Trump, like Clinton are barely touched by these scandals. They are allowed to move on, retain their social positions, hardly impacted by the media coverage, while the women will be forever linked to these scandals, thanks in large part to the media.
Gen David Patraeus, the author of some of the worst U.S. policy in Afghanistan, gave away state secrets to a woman with whom he was having an affair, and went on to lie about it to the FBI and today news outlets feature him as one of their expert talking heads, we are expected to believe.
What is the matter with us? It is 2026 and we really have to be better than this.
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