Kos on Daily Kos writes, “Two big stories have dominated attention this week. The biggest is the hysterical reaction from Republicans over Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia including three simple words in this sentence about President Donald Trump: ‘See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.‘” So, what the heck? Let’s rub their noses in it a bit more! Kos says, “The GOP lost their minds because they know that White House assistant Natalie Harp, who writes love letters to Trump, is just freakin’ weird. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said on MS NOW that Harp is ‘his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it — a comfort blanket.” Jeff Strobinsky, on his podcast, asked, “And Melania stays in the marriage because…?”

Ossoff accused Trump of “lying a nation into a war, treating citizens as fools, and those who serve as pawns,” pointing to the sailors on the USS Lincoln who have been on the aircraft carrier far longer than is normal for an assignment, and suffering shortages under wretched conditions due to lack of supplies. “He fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, sleeping through meetings,” says the senator, being more concerned about stock trades, building self-aggrandizing monuments, and golfing. The Trump/Harp relationship came into sharper focus when it was learned that the two hid in the catering truck as the president’s entourage ‘escaped from Turkey‘ a few weeks ago, due to a supposed Iranian shoulder-fired missile assassination threat. Left behind to travel in the ‘sacrificial decoy aircraft’, were Secretary of State Rubio, Treasury Secretary Bessent, and White House adviser Stephen Miller. Nobody is more deserving than our president to have a young, platinum blond, taxpayer-funded, emotional reassurance companion for the tense flight!

And shame on those who make comments about Natalie’s resemblance to daughter, Ivanka, questioning whether or not Melania and the Trump kids love the old man! One commenter calls them “bit players in his reality show” — he doesn’t care about what they think, only caring about how they fit into his construct. We don’t see Melania tagging along with Donald in all his sojourns — not like Natalie who was seen jogging alongside a lengthy queue of golf carts in Scotland, as she attempted to stay abreast of Dear Leader’s cart. Attorney Seth Abramson suspects there is far more to the relationship than is currently known, saying, “Anyone else starting to feel like there’s a scandal hiding behind all this? The White House lost it today just because Natalie was mentioned in public. The whole nation’s ‘Spidey-senses’ should be tingling.”

Ms. Harp claimed that Trump saved her life from bone cancer, in her address at the 2020 Republican National Convention, by allowing her to be in clinical trials for an unapproved chemotherapy. “Not so,” says Edith Olmstead in The New Republic. The drug had already been approved by the FDA for trials long before Trump was in office. Liar Trump’s eventual Right to Try law, was actually a massive failure, though he claims it saved thousands of lives — six approved drugs saved thousands? Oh well, as long as Natalie believes it as well — birds of a feather.

Mike Nellis writes on Endless Urgency that we are undeserving of the ire directed toward us by the MAGA Minions — we have a right to question those who work for we the people. Not because of salacious gossip, but in Harp’s relationship with the president she might be a threat to our national security because of her extraordinary access and influence. ‘Who has the power in this White House?’ is a legitimate question. Natalie Harp feeds Trump his information — she’s called his “human printer,” constantly shaping his world view from her portable printer and boosting his ego by handing him favorable, flattering comments, reviews and posts. Nellis affirms he has zero sympathy for the MAGAts who are screaming from the rooftops about the mentions of a female staffer — where was their outrage while defending The Don’s blatant sexism and abuse of women in the past?

“Apparently, their concern for the dignity of women begins exactly where Donald Trump’s humiliation does, since they’ve spent a decade cheering while Trump attacks women, humiliates them, and weaponizes their personal lives for political gain,” charges Nellis. Jon Ossoff’s throwaway line in a Senate speech hit a nerve, angering Trump, angering Melania, a blow “below the belt,” which Nellis finds hilarious since that’s the way Trump punches. The entire White House pinball machine is on ‘Tilt,’ as some jealous staffers are leaking tidbits to the press to sabotage the relationship; however, the president is as devoted to her as she is to him — they need each other. Harp shapes Trump’s worldview, controls his narrative, controls his time, controls his mind, the mind of a man in serious cognitive decline, making this a very scary moment. This is no time to ignore this situation — they work for us, so ignore the temptation to ‘look at the bunny in the corner’ as they continue their diversion tactics.

President Barack Obama advisor, David Axelrod, finds the Trump/Harp relationship “a deadly serious issue” with it going on for more than a year, and her without a security clearance. Having access to official documents, and to Trump’s Truth Social account, his primary mode of communication, seems a bit sketchy as she decides what he reads, and which foreign leaders get access — or not? Trump biographer, Michael Wolff, is of the opinion that Harp’s closeness to Trump “is not a relationship that should exist in a professional setting,” touching on “a revolt” among Trump’s staff, unhappy with her proximity to him due to her lack of experience. Wolff thinks Harp is convinced that she’s the president’s “higher purpose bride,” but that all came crashing down when First Lady Melania Trump resurfaced after being absent for almost a month — a paid visit in all likelihood?

Melania held a press conference, emerging from the White House, holding hands with her husband, as she spoke about the expansion of her Fostering the Future Initiative in the Rose Garden — no sign of Natalie the Harpy who would normally be a feather’s throw away. Michael Wolff opines that the two women are locked in a secret power struggle, with Melania refusing to show up if Harp was present, particularly during the 2024 presidential campaign. A recent report that Harp was the leading advocate for the demolition of the East Wing of the White House — traditionally housing the Office of the First Lady of the United States — might have spurred last week’s visit…oops! She prefaced her press conference remarks with, “I heard you missed me. Here I am! Welcome to the White House.” The First Lady’s appearance didn’t quell the chatter about the affair, making it only louder. Let the battle begin!

A Mike Luckovich political cartoon shows two word balloons above the White House. One reading, “Natalie, my protector! You are a godsend! Thanks for making my life bearable!” The other balloon reads, “You’re welcome, Melania…”

Lisa Needham writes on Daily Kos that Harp is rumored to be Karoline Leavitt’s replacement as the White House mouthpiece — the gift that keeps on giving! “Normally, you’d think the sort of attention Harp is receiving would actually catapult her all the way out of the White House and into orbit, but you’d be wrong. In this administration, the fact that Harp, who currently serves as a sort of combination helpmeet, mental fluffer, and cheerleader for Trump, that getting on TV more is very important,” says Needham. Of course, she has no press-secretary-type experience, but why would you want relevant experience for any job in this administration? “It’s hard to conceive of someone worse than Leavitt, but Harp would be it,” maintains Needham. “It’s a terrific way to run a country.”

It should be noted that Natalie actually showed up at the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in DC on Sunday, as did Melania who had dibs on the president. Natalie had to console herself by chatting it up with Eric Trump as they watched Donald and Melania cruise the track in a motorcade to launch the day’s event. But rest assured that somehow, someway, the salaried executive assistant was earning her $150,000 paycheck honestly — all without running alongside the president’s limo.

Alix Breeden of Daily Kos reports that Melania will get another shot to bore us to tears, thanks to Jeff Bezos and Amazon MGM Studios. Alix asks, “When it comes to movies, everyone knows the sequel is never as good as the original. But what happens when nobody liked the original to begin with?” Rather than put a stop to any future installments, First Lady Melania’s self-titled documentary is an apparent exception, so full steam ahead for more punishment on Prime Video this fall. To be billed as a “totally different experience” and “completely new,” the retry was shot during the first 20 days of Trump’s current presidency, and will reveal a side of the former model that “hasn’t been seen yet.” That should interest Donald, you think? And, according to him, the film is “selling out — FAST.”

Getting down to brass tacks, we know that for the first movie, Bezos spent $40 million for the rights to the film, then dumped in another $35 million for marketing, then grossing a paltry $16.6 million worldwide. Melania’s return wasn’t too bad, however, netting her $10.71 million. No estimate on what she will make for the new docu-series, but we can count on the Trump Family Crime Syndicate to enrich themselves even further in this Bribery By Tech Giants scheme. Posted comments flourished on social media sites when the news broke about the impending release: Apple Bonker wrote, “Please…let’s not be so tough on Melania. After all, she has proven immigrants WILL do the jobs Americans find too gross.” Romaragazza posted: “I hear the sequel will be called ‘Some Like Them Young’.” Radders questions, “How can this be the ‘First Lady’? If she hadn’t met Epstein, she’d still be standing under her lamp post on a city street corner.” A disinterested Tony Situ posted: “I really don’t care. Do U?”

Former adviser to Trump in his first term, Anthony Scaramucci, feels that Melania’s unprecedented absence in the president’s second stint has left him “more unhinged.” Until last week, she had been present only 38 days this year, serving as First Lady in name only so as not to embarrass the president. The Mooch says, “When she was more friendly with him, she would tell him to tone it down, and he would actually listen to her. There’s very few people that Trump listens to.” He believes that Trump has actually become more emboldened with the First Lady no longer “reining him in,” leading to his instability. It’s lonesome at the top!

Hayes Brown writes on MS NOW that President Trump has a list of some of the most powerful and feared men in human history as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan mention in their book ‘Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.’ Prominence is given to Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin, all of whom are outranked by Trump with his power and his capacity to change the world — this according to the so-called historian who made the list for the president. Haberman and Swan describe the “untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear, drawing no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed.”

“The president’s megalomania helps explain some of the wildly reckless decisions of his second term, and is seeming indifference on domestic issues, as Trump appears to be dreaming of reshaping the world in his image and imagining he can do so without paying a heavy price,” writes Brown. In an interview with Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show‘, Haberman and Swan describe Trump as seeing himself as a Napoleonic figure even as he ignores the humiliating rise and fall of the French emperor who ended up in exile because of his overreach. The president was asked, following his invasion of Venezuela, what limits there are to his power. His classic Trumpy reply was, “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

He has managed to convince himself that he is a unique figure in world history, saying he is the most powerful person to ever live, and wishing to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, through “sheer power and force of will.” It’s unlikely that Trump will be brought back to earth soon, having surrounded himself with ‘yes men’ and sycophants. “The seeming absence of people who might check him is dangerous,” wrote journalist Michael Kruse in 2016, “In the mercurial life of Donald John Trump, here is one great truth: When he’s riding highest, he is also at his most frenzied, his most volatile — his most self-destructive.”

Trump’s cavalier approach to the Iran war, and the ongoing conflict, has tempered his aura of invincibility, dramatically weakening his poll numbers as he tries to slough off any blame, and presaging a lack of the same unfettered use of power in the second half of his term as a lame duck. Brown suggests another name for Trump’s list of the powerful — Pharaoh Ramses II, the powerful ruler of ancient Egypt, who is recognized as the subject of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias.’ In the poem, Shelley describes a ruined, broken monument, surrounded by empty desert, atop a pedestal inscribed with the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Brown goes on to say that the common thread that unites Trump with those on his list is hubris. “The unbounded pride and willingness to place themselves above all others, even the gods, has been the downfall of enough mortals that the Ancient Greeks framed it as a king’s greatest sin. Trump apparently sees himself as mightier than any man who’s ever walked the globe. His belief based on flattery and self-deception, is a combination that has felled more would-be tyrants and despots than any one list can hold.” Regretful that we have to share his world with him!

Trump’s long-time thorn-in-the-side, Rosie O’Donnell, guest-hosted ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!‘ last week and she didn’t hold back, suspecting that the president would be tuned in every night. Her final monologue brought down the house, with her version of ‘Donny Boy,’ based on the Irish tune, ‘Danny Boy‘: “Oh Donny boy, it’s Rosie, Rosie calling. From Hollywood, the Jimmy Kimmel show. Drop that Big Mac that we all know you’re holding, because my dear, I worry for you so. Poor Donny boy, your polls, your polls are falling. Your reflecting pool is green as Mountain Dew. Your wig’s a mess, your ballroom is appalling, and with Iran you bit off more than you can chew. But there’s a way to end this drama. It’s time to use that stable genius brain. Since we all know you’ll never be Obama, why not resign and make this country great again?” Daily Dose of Democracy calls one Rosie comment a whopper: “You gotta realize it’s time to hang up your wig and let Natalie tuck you in.” Toupée!

Tom Engelhardt writes on Nation of Change, “If only we could walk out on him the way he recently walked out on NBC’s Kristen Welker in the middle of an interview, when she challenged him over his wild claims of election fraud in California’s primaries. But no such luck, of course.” Tom says that with two and a half years to go, “Trump is undoubtedly going to give decline (and fall) a new meaning. It’s true that all great powers invariably go down in their own fashion, but never, I suspect, quite in the fashion of Donald J. Trump’s America.” Pronouncing Trump as uncontrollable, even by himself, he has set himself up as president, ruler, king, and dictator of a (dis)United States of America.

Trump has failed to notice that since WWII, the greatest power on earth has been unable to win its wars of choice against countries whose power bore no relation to America’s, and now Iran has become all too typical in his disastrous “excursion.” Even the elected officials and other leaders have blithely followed along, ignoring the painful lessons in the years since 1945. Only China seems to have taken note, its leaders avoiding war, aside from minor skirmishes, with Russia following in the footsteps of the US as it continues to waste its resources in Ukraine. Engelhardt credits the world’s military with having refrained from use of atomic weaponry, however, he feels that we are in a slow-motion version of atomic warfare called ‘climate change.’

He says that Trump is at war with this planet, big time, calling this mild all-to-slow-motion reality a hoax, a scam, a con job. In a true Trumpian statement, the president has insisted that the Earth is “cooling as a planet,” even as heat indexes continue to rise annually. Even the Environmental Protection Agency had stated that any actions to deal with climate change will be “futile.” As the planet continues to heat up, the powerful nations of the world worsen the situation by adding disconcerting amounts of fossil fuels to the atmosphere. Engelhardt apologizes by ending his piece on a grim note, asking us to think of Donald J. Trump as our end times president.

A post on The Intellectualist says, “A third world war is not inevitable. The conditions at issue are not a predictive checklist. They are mechanisms through which conflicts that begin separately can start changing one another. The danger is not simply that several wars are occurring at once. Regional wars can be extraordinarily destructive without becoming direct great-power wars. They remain regional when outside great powers — even while supplying weapons, intelligence, financing or political support — and do not enter sustained direct combat against one another.” The piece says that both world wars crossed that boundary because the leading powers fought one another across multiple theaters — scale does not determine the category, only the identity of the combatant does. The warning here is that the distance between regional war and great-power confrontation is narrowing by the day.

Doug McKinnon, a former White House and Pentagon official, in his opinion piece in The Hill asks, “Is the US already in WWIV — and losing?” He recalls Einstein’s dystopian vision statement: “I know not with what weapons WWIII will be fought, but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones.” McKinnon doesn’t view it that way, speculating that weapons of mass destruction will be substituted with cutting-edge systems created and perfected for WWIV. No nuclear warheads, ballistic missiles or mushroom clouds — only mouse pads and joysticks! Military operations fought with debilitating cyber-attacks to shut down water supplies or electrical grids would be far-reaching and more effective.

Panic would ensue if financial systems or investment accounts were hacked and zeroed-out; hacking transportation computer systems for commuter trains, air traffic control systems, or self-driving cars would cripple all travel. And orbiting satellites would be endangered, paralyzing a wide array of informational sources. This is not fantasy or the stuff of science fiction — such cyber and social manipulation systems have been years in the making, with regular testing, especially with AI gaining prominence. We have recently seen the evidence with Iran hacking into water systems in at least 12 states. McKinnon says, “Advancing technology is a miracle, right up until the moment cyber-criminals or cyber-warriors learn how to exploit it.” The warp-speed progression of AI and robotics is meant to take human beings “completely out of the box.”

“A largely automated military, a digital currency, driverless electric vehicles with ‘kill switches,’ AI-controlled utilities — all of these conveniences also make us more vulnerable, in addition to whatever they do to worsen unemployment. Despite our perceived advances, and often because of them, adversaries, rogue states, and terrorists have entirely new avenues by which to manipulate and weaken us,” writes McKinnon. And despite the warnings of our growing vulnerabilities being relegated to white noise, we stay on the path toward empowering AI and robotics, with the smart money on our continuing to ignore the threats. What if, on its own, Artificial Intelligence concludes that humans are standing in the way of its destiny? Doug leaves us with the proverb: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.” Picture the “2001: A Space Odyssey” computer named ‘HAL’ and its one ‘eye’!

The bone spur afflicted, draft-dodging Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image a couple of weeks ago, casting himself as a battlefield leader portraying him as a general, flanked by generals Patton and MacArthur of WWII prominence. Trump displays four stars on his epaulets, whereas the two outranked generals are showing only two stars — well below Patton’s actual four, and Mac’s actual five. Perhaps Trump’s fantasy image of four stars represent his deferments for education — he could have added a fifth for the bone spur. His chest is bedecked with countless ribbons and medals, resembling some Russian general’s photos we are probably familiar with. Missing is an eye patch for our One-Eyed Donny.

Trump’s brush with soldiering came when he was attending the New York Military Academy, earning the rank of cadet captain, hardly enough glorification for his military résumé. Problem solved by adding to his AI general persona, the Medal of Honor — conspicuous gallantry, indeed! In April, The Wall Street Journal reported that he was considering awarding himself with the coveted medal, all because his plane flew into Iraq to visit troops, landing on an unlit runway during his first term as president. “I flew to Iraq and was extremely brave. In fact, so brave I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor,” he was quoted at the time. Perhaps he should be encouraged to have his plane land on an unlit runway in Iran to add credence to his claim of bravery.

Posts by readers in reaction to the brave AI general quickly followed: “Four student deferments? With a documented GPA of 1.2 from Fordham University, and graduating 364th in a class of 366 from the University of Pennsylvania (part of public record). How was it possible for him to receive one II-S, let alone four?” Another posted, “I could also point out that both Patton and MacArthur were relieved of command for insubordination. Eisenhower relieved Patton for his resistance to denazification in Germany, and MacArthur was relieved by Truman for his insubordination regarding statements of policy contrary to Truman, and his overtures about using atomic bombs on China.” Suppose it will take an AI five-star general to remove this doofus?

Expatriate Robert Harrington offered, “That image is physically sickening…and shows how twistedly sick his mind is. That image is an absolute disgrace and insult and disrespect to our military and those who serve(d) and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. That image of HUMPTY is a textbook example of ‘STOLEN VALOR’…a persistent, strange, psychological behavior when an individual who has never served in the military claims to have performed heroic deeds and thus earned/deserved medals for their deeds (there is even a federal law regarding Stolen Valor since 2005). Every person, military and nonmilitary, should be sickened and appalled by this image, and it’s time to call out HUMPTY’S despicable behaviour.”

Appropriating humorist Jack Handey’s Risky Situation joke: “He knew he would be taking a chance by signing the Declaration of Independence. But he signed anyway. ‘Hey, what are you doing, Mr. Trump? That’s the Declaration of Independence,’ said the museum guard, chasing after him.” Doesn’t sound so far-fetched, does it?

A Bob Dylan quote gets the last word: “Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.” Our president is soaked to the bone by now!