clearandpresentdanger.blog

This is what Natalie Harp and Trump posted online early this morning, likely after she finished . . . well, after she finished . . . well, you know, finished whatever a young, good-looking 35-yr-old blonde and an 80-yr-old philanderer would be doing at 2:00 AM.

There are times when silence speaks very, very loudly.

Donald Trump was met with total silence by NASA scientists as he bragged about his non-existent accomplishments in the space sector.

The president visited the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday to award the Artemis II space crew with the Space Medal of Honor, but he also used the trip to fish for approval from the crowd of NASA scientists. President Trump claimed the agency was “crawling” just before he made it to the White House, claiming that he achieved a lot for them and the nation.

“We had an interlude for four years and it was limping along, and now I’m back. And we’re doing more than limping. Eight years later, these dreams are really coming through at a level that nobody ever imagined,” he said to a completely silent and stone-faced audience.

 

Dolly Parton died at age 80.  She was the wrong 80-yr-old to die.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Department of Homeland Security has been unable to substantiate its claim nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada more than one month after it was alleged, the New York Times reported Friday.

The Trump administration claimed exactly 15,903 noncitizens in Nevada were part of a group of 278,000 who were allegedly registered in four states. “But during a meeting last week with state election administrators, Homeland Security officials said they had identified just 185 potential noncitizens in the state so far, according to emails as well as recordings of the meeting obtained by The New York Times,” the newspaper noted.

In the same meeting, “federal officials told Nevada that the nearly 16,000 they had originally identified represented “the ceiling” of potential noncitizens,” the Times also wrote. But the list that officials ultimately shared with the state is “incomplete” and is “nearly impossible to verify” because it has no names on it.

Phantom noncitizen voters have been behind President Donald Trump’s impetus to urge Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require all voters to offer proof of citizenship when they register to vote and to provide a photo ID at the ballot box. This is despite the fact that citizenship is already a core requirement of voting.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/report-reveals-trump-admin-still-can-t-prove-its-claim-15-903-noncitizens-were-registered-to-vote-in-nevada/ar-AA2aGfXt

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Link to NYT REPORT (gift link)- Homeland Security Made a Big Claim About Noncitizen Voting. Now It Can’t Prove It.

Link to Democracy Docket REPORT – ‘Bulls**t’: Nevada election chief blasts Trump’s noncitizen voter roll claims after DHS walks them back

 

OK everyone has been having a great old time with this Natalie Harp story but:

(1) She’s nuts

(2) Her origin story — miraculous cancer survivor — is sketchy in several different ways

(3) Her security clearance consists of Trump waving her through without anything having actually been done.

(4) She’s 35, acting like a 13-yr-old girl with a crush on a rock singer.

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People magazine has a detailed article about this troubled young woman.

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Most Americans probably hadn’t heard of Natalie Harp before this week, but the close Trump aide has been in the political spotlight in recent days.

The 35-year-old’s official title is special assistant and executive assistant to the president, and she is frequently seen at President Trump’s side, by all accounts unwavering in her support and known for being quick to provide printouts of positive news coverage for his perusal.

It was Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat running for reelection, who focused attention on her role during a Sunday campaign rally. Ossoff said the president wants to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” rather than focus on his day job.

The remark prompted pushback from the president.

“You mean Pee-wee Herman? Pee-wee Herman look-alike?” the president replied about Ossoff when a reporter asked him about the comment Monday in the Oval Office.

She’s one of the president’s most trusted aides

Mr. Trump, 80, often dictates Truth Social posts for Harp to type out and post. She became known as the “human printer” during the 2024 presidential campaign, as the New York Times reported at the time, because she carried a portable printer to quickly get positive news to the president. Mr. Trump often prefers to read physical copies of social media posts and news stories, rather than off screens.

Harp started working at the White House as a presidential appointee when Mr. Trump took office in January 2025.

Mr. Trump has taken note of Harp’s loyalty. In their book “Regime Change,” New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that the president remarked of Harp to staffers, “All of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me.”

The White House has taken issue with Ossoff’s remarks, with White House communications director Stephen Cheung calling Ossoff the biggest “loser in politics,” among other things.

“Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told CBS News in a statement, calling Ossoff’s rhetoric “cringeworthy.”

Harp was among the few aides who traveled with the president on a secret plane from Turkey

As CBS News reported earlier this month, Harp was among the few aides who were transported in a catering truck and then a secret plane with Mr. Trump as he departed Turkey in July.

Sources say the Secret Service adopted the ruse to protect the president after U.S. intelligence detected a possible Iranian plot to fire a missile at his plane as he left Ankara.

Only a few others joined the secret flight, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House aides Walt Nauta and Dan Scavino. Several top Cabinet members were left on the decoy plane along with other staff and the press corps.

Harp’s background before the White House

Harp worked at One America News Network in 2021 and 2022, hosting a TV show. On the pro-Trump network, Harp repeated Mr. Trump’s false claims that he had won the 2020 presidential election.

Harp delivered a laudatory speech at the Republican National Convention in 2020 about the president’s signing of the Right to Try Act, a 2018 federal law that lets patients with life-threatening illnesses try experimental treatments. Harp, a bone cancer survivor, credited Mr. Trump with saving her life.

“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” she said in her address. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”

However, the Washington Post reported Harp has also spoken of being treated with an FDA-approved immunotherapy given off-label, which would not have required “right to try” since it was already approved for some uses.

Harp, a California native, earned her bachelor’s degree from Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012, and her MBA from Liberty University in 2015.

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Harp is nut.  She’s 35 years old, and gushing about Trump like a 13-yr-old with a crush on a rock singer.

Harp grew with a mother who was a bible-thumping, psalm-singing fundamentalist christian.

Natalie Harp was born in 1991 and raised in California.  Her father, Robert Harp, was a real estate broker who founded a consultancy for travel companies; he died by suicide in July 2020. Her father had a Master of Theology Degree from Dallas Theological Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. He was executive director of the office of innovation at Biola University. In 2019, he joined the Lausanne Movement.   She and her older brother were homeschooled by their mother Jill Harp.   Her brother has said they were taught American exceptionalism at home.   She is a devout, evangelical Christian.  Harp graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012, and from Liberty University in 2015 with an MBA.

Clearly., Harp sees Trump as the father who deserted her to kill himself.

She’s nuts.

On Saturday, August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S.

The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century. Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%.

But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. While they extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed without a single Democratic vote—they refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford healthcare insurance in the ACA marketplaces.

The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of healthcare insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.

They were unsuccessful, and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June 2026 showed that at least 5 million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about 13%. For those remaining, premiums have spiked: the editorial board notes that a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could pay an additional $3,500 a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts. Deductibles also jumped this year by about $1,000 a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.

Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about $1 trillion over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid. In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a “work requirement” on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.

But, as the editorial board notes, the “work requirement” is really a “paperwork requirement” that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork. As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.

They estimated that up to 15 million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, will force hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to cut back services or close. Although still legally required to provide services to everyone, they will not be reimbursed for the cost of such care and will drop labor and delivery services, for example. Those closures will not just mean poorer health care, they will mean lost jobs.

As the New York Times editorial board noted, Republicans deliberately put off the implementation of most of the Medicaid cuts until after the 2026 midterms.

New York Times reader KAM from Marin County, California, noted in a comment on the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defines onerous paperwork differently than Republicans in Congress. Bessent recently announced the Treasury will no longer require shell companies to disclose even the name, address, and identification of people who own an interest of more than 25% or who exercise “significant control” over the company, as Congress required in the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act. Congress designed the law to combat money laundering, but Bessent says the paperwork puts an undue burden on businesses.

In 1883, sociologist William Graham Sumner published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, concluding that the answer was: nothing. In a time when unregulated industrialization was making fortunes on the one hand and driving down wages on the other, creating extremes of rich and poor, Sumner turned on its head the traditional idea that the economy of the United States would provide a living to any man who worked hard. Instead, Sumner argued that anyone who did not succeed in the United States must be “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Not only was it unfair to make “the industrious and the prudent” responsible for such shiftless men, he wrote, it would ruin the country by destroying individual enterprise. Sumner called for a “laissez-faire” world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty and die to keep the U.S. from becoming a place where lazy people wanted a handout. In the end, such people needed to be purged from society for the good of the nation.

At the time, those succeeding in the industrializing economy nodded along with Sumner. The Republican New York Times editor wrote that even though Sumner’s “views are singularly hard and uncompromising, it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one’s finer instinct hurt by their apparent cruelty.”

The Trump administration seems to have embraced Sumner’s belief that the nation depends upon the survival of the fittest.

As microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole reported last year in Ars Technica, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to believe that the key to health is not to rely on the vaccines proven to prevent infectious diseases, but rather to have a strong immune system fortified, as he wrote in a 2021 book, “through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those who support vaccines of misleading the American public for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry.

This seems to explain why he has claimed—without evidence—that the Texas children who died of measles were malnourished and that “[w]e don’t know what was killing” the 83 Samoans who died in the country’s 2019 measles epidemic, during which Kennedy associated with members of the anti-vaccine movement there. It would also explain why he promised to turn away from promoting vaccination to exploring new treatments for measles, including vitamins.

And it would help to explain the effort to change the vaccine schedule for children by separating the MMR vaccine into single-disease vaccines. Rather than two shots, requiring two doctor’s visits, the vaccine series would require six. Experts say such a change will mean poorer children will not get the whole vaccine series, putting them and their communities at risk.

If overall health can fight off germs and illness, then measures like the pasteurization of milk and the tracking of foodborne illnesses are unnecessary.

The U.S. is experiencing a particularly bad wave of foodborne illness. It’s driven both by hot weather that nurtures food contamination and by federal funding cuts that scaled back the ability of federal agencies to conduct food inspections and provide grants to state and local health departments that used to be able to trace outbreaks quickly.

Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that so far this year, the U.S. has reported about 10,500 cases of foodborne illness. Between 2021 and 2025, the annual average was about 1,500 cases. At least 9,481 people in 17 states have fallen ill with cyclosporiasis carried by lettuce from Taylor Farms, and thousands more cases are being investigated. It’s the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, spurred by cuts of more than 40% to food safety detection systems.

It’s not just lettuce. Frozen organic blueberries sold in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia have been recalled for E. coli; fresh jalapeños from Taylor Farms have been recalled for salmonella; 1.5 million dozen eggs sold in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico have also been recalled for salmonella. Anna Skinner of Newsweek notes that while the focus has been on produce, in fact, FDA records show what she calls “a steady stream of recalls” that includes “prepared foods, salad dressings, soups, bakery items and ready-to-eat products,” potentially contaminated with salmonella, Listeria, or foreign materials, including pieces of metal.

As former U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in USA Today, “You cannot effectively focus on chronic diseases while you’re being repeatedly overwhelmed by acute infectious outbreaks.” He called for restoring the mandatory tracking of all eight pathogens that were covered by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) before the administration cut the surveillance down to just two, and for filling the leadership positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that are currently vacant. He called for inspectors to prioritize high-risk foods and imports and for the Department of Health and Human Services to reaffirm that vaccines are safe and effective.

In the 1890s, the determination of those like William Graham Sumner to keep government out of society in order to promote individualism had undermined public health and safety. Producers adulterated tuberculosis-carrying milk with chalk and formaldehyde, decorated candy with lead paint, and scooped melted ice cream off the bottom of the vat to refreeze for sale the next day, and what was in sausage meat was a terrifying mystery.

In the early twentieth century, middle-class Americans demanded regulation of the food and drug industry, ushering in the reforms that we now call the Progressive Era.

On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a Department of Commerce “report” that claims more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election. That sounds bad, right? At least, until you hear the response.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, the president and CEO of Fair Fight, put it like this: “This is a bald-faced lie.”

Marc Elias called the report “dodgy,” and his Democracy Docket explained that “the analysis the president cites relies on an incomplete commercial voter file and record-matching methods that raise serious concerns about the accuracy of its conclusions.”

NPR reported that the supposed “Census Bureau report” wasn’t actually produced by Census Bureau staff and “has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank.” The full report, which is seven pages long, is presented as an official document here. But NPR says “the team behind it included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump’s first administration.” It’s not just the Justice Department that has been politicized to serve Trump’s political purposes.

Trump can’t stop claiming the 2020 election was rigged, no matter how many judges, including many he appointed, say it’s not so. Still more damaging is the way he may use this to justify imposing measures that make it more difficult for eligible Americans to vote in the name of preventing fraud.

To people like me who’ve spent decades working on voting rights in the Deep South, this is a familiar approach. In order to justify restrictive measures, state and local officials would claim there was voter fraud—dead people voting, people voting more than once. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter; it was used to justify all manner of restrictive measures that made it more difficult to vote, disallowing practices like early voting or mail-in voting.

Trump has a history of blowing up the narratives around voter fraud into previously unseen proportions, falsely claiming it’s responsible for his 2020 loss, and looking ahead to set it up as an excuse when his party does poorly in the midterms. When it comes to these new allegations, even the right-wing media ecosystem hasn’t been pushing them hard, because of the obvious flaws. But we know how Trump works. It’s a tailor-made excuse for his 2020 loss and a justification for urging states to adopt more restrictive measures now. Trump posted about the report on Tuesday, claiming: “The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records. On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!” Then, to keep it simple, he posted some little graphics, including this one, which make claims that aren’t backed by fact.

Secretary Lutnick has been in the press in connection with Jeffrey Epstein of late, including a trip up to Capitol Hill to testify and revelations that he visited Epstein Island with his wife, children, and nannies in tow despite claiming he had cut off all ties with Epstein years earlier out of disgust with him. Now he’s currying favor with Trump on one of the issues that is the most important to the president, backing his claim that he won in 2020. But this isn’t Lutnick’s first outing assisting the president with his efforts to federalize our elections.

When Trump issued his March 2026 executive order to restrict mail voting, Lutnick got a major role. The order directed the Secretary of Commerce to coordinate with DHS, the SSA Commissioner, and the Postmaster General to implement it—Lutnick was Trump’s point person. Lutnick was the one to brief Trump on the contents of the executive order before Trump signed it. (If you thought Trump devised it on his own, no dice.) That order is, of course, on hold, after a federal judge ruled it was illegal.

So it’s no surprise Lutnick has found a new way to push Trump’s goals, even if that meant bringing in ringers from a pro-Trump think tank to author a report that supposedly came from the Census Bureau. Experts note that the Census Bureau does not even collect the information necessary to be able to publish definitive findings about alleged noncitizen voting. The data used in its report are modeled population estimates.

But none of that will keep Trump from using it, so it’s important for us to be prepared. The claim itself sounds shocking. But it’s a fabrication, and we need to be prepared to say so. Protect Democracy identified some of the most egregious flaws in the report. Expect Trump to gloss over them entirely. But the report uses stale citizenship records that misidentify, for instance, people who have become naturalized citizens. And since the Census is prohibited by law from asking citizenship questions, it does not hold and cannot verify any citizenship records. The study Lutnick offers uses private commercial vendor files, not voter rolls maintained by Secretaries of State, and that data is demonstrably flawed for the purpose it’s being used for. There are other issues, including flawed matching algorithms and demographic bias. Suffice it to say, this is another instance where someone who needs to remain in Trump’s favor has manufactured something to support his claims, despite the absence of facts to back them up.

A former Census Bureau employee pointed to the report’s irregularity: “My biggest concern would be there’s no author attached to the report, which is not common practice within the Census Bureau,” says Misty Heggeness, a former bureau economist whose work is cited in the report. “Usually there are layers and layers of rigor and testing because the Census Bureau is a neutral statistical agency. They want to make sure that they’re getting it right and understanding the data. The fact that there’s no author on this report leads me to wonder whether or not that did happen.”

The report is just another indication we are living with a desperate administration trying to convince Americans not to trust their own elections. Their goal: create cover for rejecting 2026 election results if they don’t suit Trump. What they’re doing here fits a pattern we’ve become used to, where the administration makes claims about elections that aren’t true, that don’t withstand scrutiny by the courts. But they make them nonetheless and it’s done as though they are gospel. But they aren’t. With Trump, they never are. It’s our job to be prepared to push back against the excuses they’re preparing for the 2026 election, the challenges they’re trying to set up now, because they know they’re going to lose if it’s a fair fight.