Jen Psaki Asks Jon Ossoff About Curious Reference to Trump and Staffer: ‘Why Did You Invoke Natalie Harp?’

 

MS NOW host Jen Psaki pressed Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) on Monday about his decision to invoke President Donald Trump’s close aide Natalie Harp while attacking the president at a campaign rally over the weekend.

Ossoff, who is running for another term in the Senate, mentioned Harp during a Sunday rally while criticizing the president over the extended deployments faced by sailors aboard U.S. aircraft carriers. “He golfs and trades stocks,” Ossoff said of Trump. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job; he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie to their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

Harp was among just three aides who accompanied Trump during a secretive plane swap in July prompted by concerns about a potential Iranian assassination attempt, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and members of the White House press pool were left behind. Trump responded to Ossoff’s criticism Monday by mocking the Georgia senator as a “Pee-Wee Herman lookalike,” while White House officials Steven Cheung and Davis R. Ingle launched their own personal attacks against him.

Psaki asked Ossoff on Monday, “Why did you decide to invoke Natalie Harp specifically?”

The Georgia senator responded:

We’re in wartime. The commander in chief has mired us in this geopolitical disaster. People have lost their lives. Our naval logistics are frayed. The global energy system is in crisis, and he retreats into this bubble of West Wing aides who are his security blanket to make him feel good about himself, to reassure him that he’s doing a great job, to help him while he designs his new ballroom, and he adorns the Oval Office in gold and picks the interior decorations on this new luxury flying palace he received from a foreign prince, when every single minute of every single day, what the president of the United States should be doing is bearing his most solemn burden of care for the sailors and Marines and aviators and all service members deployed on his orders, on the basis of his lies, to this disaster in the Middle East.

And just like the West Wing is full of sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear and enable him, so is the United States Congress — Republicans in the House and Senate who still lack the spine to tell this president what he doesn’t want to hear.

After Psaki pressed further on Harp, Ossoff added:

Well, I’ve heard this particular aide referred to as his security blanket. And I think we could say that about any number of the senior aides in the White House. They’re not telling him what he needs to hear. They’re telling him what he wants to hear. And the nation is at war, and we cannot afford that. We need a team in the White House. We need folks at the State Department, at the Defense Department, in the United States Congress who take their jobs seriously.

Those sailors out on the Lincoln, they do their jobs with excellence and dedication every single day. They didn’t sign up for luxury. They signed up to defend the country. And the president, surrounded by enablers in the West Wing, is playing golf, is trading stock, and is decorating his ballroom. It’s a disgrace. All while American families in Georgia and across the country pay more for just about everything as a direct result of his failed economic policy and his failed foreign policy.

Watch the full clip above via MS NOW.

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