Who is Trump aide Natalie Harp… and why are Democrats targeting her?

**Justin Webb** (0:00)
Again and again in his political career, Donald Trump has been on the ropes and has managed to fight back. Is he in a situation now from which he cannot escape? Is there no fight back possible for him? The war in Iran is stuck, it seems, and there is a sense among some Americans that he really is out of ideas this time. The Democrats sense an opportunity.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
So he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

**Justin Webb** (0:34)
Ouch on many fronts. That was the Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, the White House reacting pretty angrily to what he said, particularly about the president's executive assistant, Natalie Harp. It does feel as if the White House is under siege at the moment. Can he get out of this scrape? Welcome to Americast.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:58)
Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:02)
We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This is a big cover-up and this administration is engaged in it.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:10)
This guy has Trump's arrangement syndrome.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:12)
I have four words for you.

**Sarah Smith** (1:21)
Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau.

**Justin Webb** (1:24)
And it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of Americast in London, England at three o'clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, London time.

**Sarah Smith** (1:31)
And Justin, it's with some trepidation I want to start a conversation about what's going on with Donald Trump and Iran because although there's bits of news every day coming out, it's so difficult to get a real grip on what's actually happening and what direction we're going in. And the more I kind of angst about how to analyze this, how to express it, the more I'm realizing, I think, that Donald Trump doesn't really understand where we are or where we're going either. So let's try and explore that and see if we can make some sense of what the strategy, if there is one, is that's going on right now.

**Justin Webb** (2:07)
Yeah. And if there isn't one, then that's also important, isn't it? Because that's a commentary. And I think we're going to come to this as a sort of theme of this episode. If there is no strategy, if he really is flailing about, and if his people are unable properly to explain what he is doing, then that is quite a serious moment. And it's worth saying right at the top, isn't it, Sarah? This podcast has always treated Donald Trump seriously. We've taken him seriously and occasionally literally as well. In other words, we have treated the things that he has wanted to do and his extraordinary political abilities as real because they are real. And we've also treated his supporters as real supporters who have a genuine desire to see things done in the United States. So this podcast has not been a place where we've just endlessly been laughing at Donald Trump and suggesting he is about to fall and to fail, which is, I think, the important context for what we are about to say now.

**Sarah Smith** (3:05)
Yeah, it's getting more and more confusing what he's saying, and it's more and more contradictory as well. Throughout the course of the conflict with Iran, he's often made some quite optimistics, maybe the generous way of putting it, statements about being close to a deal. Quite often he said them. It appeared in order to kind of boost the markets a bit if they were getting the jitters about the oil price. But it's more erratic now what he's been saying. Let's just go through the last couple of days. On Monday, we had him threatening to bomb Oman, a US ally who's talking to Iran at the moment about trying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He was going to bomb them to S, he said, if they got in the way of a deal.
On the same day, he said that he had backchannel negotiations going on with the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was denied by Iran. Then on Tuesday, he says there's no talks going on with Iran at all, contradicting himself, insists that the Strait of Hormuz remains open, it's not. Ships have been fired on this week, somebody's been killed this week, trying to get through the Strait of Hormuz. And he's been posting some rather bizarre things on social media, including a graphic that claimed that the Strait of Hormuz was now American territory. And that's before, Justin, we even get into what he's been saying about other countries as well around the world.