“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough blamed the White House for turning this week’s controversy surrounding Natalie Harp, President Trump’s executive assistant, into a national news story, remarking that the Trump administration has made “a classic miscalculation.”
Harp, who has served as Trump’s executive assistant since last year, has become a household name over the last few days. She was thrust into the national news cycle after Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) remarked at a rally last Sunday that Trump wants to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” instead of actually doing his job as president.
Harp’s name has remained in the news cycle as figures from both the Left and the Right have debated the severity of Ossoff’s comment. Scarborough, for his part, said the White House has only hurt itself.
“Nothing about this has made sense,” Scarborough said. “I’ve been in the White House and I’ve talked to Donald Trump, the president, and seen [Harp] there. Never once assumed anything inappropriate was going on. The suggestion coming from Republicans that Ossoff somehow suggested that with this throwaway line, I thought was bizarre.”
“For the White House to freak out like that, to melt down like that, they made this story, well, into something it would not have been,” Scarborough added. You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself in the video below.
Scarborough went on to marvel over how much free publicity the Trump administration has given Ossoff over the past week.
“I’ve always said that Donald Trump, he’s got this touch, political touch, whether you like it or not. He gets it. He knows how to play the press,” Scarborough remarked. “And yet, this White House operation has been trumped. They were trumped by Ossoff. They have given Jon Ossoff a week of free press on a phrase that would have dissolved in the mist by the next morning.”
“I tell people all the time when they’re about to go crazy about something Donald Trump said, I say, ‘Do what you want to do, but do understand. His political superpower is getting people to freak out and then overreact and then drive the news cycle for a week and get even stronger,’” Scarborough continued. “And that’s exactly what happened here!”
“Just a classic miscalculation from a White House that’s been doing that to everybody else for a decade now,” the “Morning Joe” host concluded.
