How we talk about censorship and critical race theory

On a Sunday night in August, Senator Jon Ossoff told a campaign rally in Atlanta that President Trump would rather build his ballroom and “travel with Natalie” than do his job. He never used her last name. He did not need to. Natalie Harp, the White House aide known to colleagues as Trump’s “human printer” for trailing him with a portable printer and transcribing his social-media dictation, had become a punchline before most Americans knew who she was.

The backlash arrived within hours. White House officials accused Ossoff of insinuating an affair; Republican Rep. Brandon Gill noted that Harp survived bone cancer only because the Right to Try Act, which Trump signed in 2018, let her seek an experimental treatment outside the normal approval process, and dismissed any other reading of the moment as unfair. Weeks earlier, Harp had been at the center of a far more consequential story: in July, she was one of a handful of aides, alongside the defense secretary and two senior staffers, chosen to accompany Trump on a covert switch of aircraft as he left a security summit in Turkey after officials detected a credible Iranian threat, while most of the traveling delegation stayed behind on a decoy plane. That is the real proximity Ossoff's line was needling. Then came a detail that complicated the story further: Trump had personally given Harp and several other aides cash gifts of $45,000 apiece, which a former federal ethics official called troublesome, since money on that scale can leave a recipient feeling indebted to whoever signs the check.