Inside politics
Harp: “practically untouchable”. Aaron Schwartz/AFP/Getty
The aide who never leaves Trump’s side
When the Democratic senator Jon Ossoff said recently that Donald Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” than do the hard work of being president, “everybody in Washington knew who he was talking about”, says The Wall Street Journal. The Natalie in question is the 35-year-old presidential aide, Natalie Harp, whose “omnipresence” at Trump’s side has made her a figure of fascination for both the left and the right. She spends more time with Trump than any other staffer and sits at a desk immediately outside the Oval Office. During meetings, she’s hovering over his shoulder with a laptop and multiple phones so she can get the president any information he needs in an instant.
Lurid insinuations aside, Harper is both a “buffer” and a sounding board for Trump, with some insiders saying that the shortest path to getting something on the Resolute Desk is through her – her phone number, they say, is “even more precious than Trump’s”. White House officials claim she hasn’t taken a single day’s holiday since joining the administration and is in “constant contact” with the president, sitting in on meetings in the Situation Room, the Oval Office, and aboard Air Force One. At Mar-a-Lago she accompanies him to the golf course, printing out articles from a golf buggy. Crucially, she is one of very few with direct access to Trump’s Truth Social account. She brings him stacks of printed-out draft posts for approval, lets him dictate posts to her and then publishes them on his behalf from her own phone, having learned to mimic his “cadence and unique punctuation”. In return for her devotion, Trump views Harp as “part of his family”, which, as administration officials say, makes her “practically untouchable”.
Property
THE RIVERSIDE HOUSE This four-bedroom home on Lock Island near Marlow is the UK’s “first amphibious house”, says Country Life: it’s on fixed foundations, but should the Thames rise and flood the grounds, it is designed to rise up in its own wet dock and float. On the ground floor are two bedrooms, a shower room and a large open-plan kitchen, dining and living room with floor-to-ceiling bi-fold doors opening on to a terrace. The lower ground floor is home to a third bedroom and a large home cinema and games room, while the main bedroom is on the first floor, with a dressing room, a bathroom and a steam room. A footbridge provides easy access to the road, and Marlow is a 15-minute walk. £2.5m. Click on the image to see the listing.
Global update
Fedorov: the man to save Ukraine? Stringer/Anadolu/Getty
Wartime elections would be a disaster for Ukraine
When the former Ukrainian defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, called for a wartime election this week, it was the “most serious” challenge yet to Volodymyr Zelensky’s leadership, says Owen Matthews in The Telegraph. To many young Ukrainians – thousands of whom protested his recent “murky” sacking – he’s been the stand-out political figure of the conflict. An imaginative military innovator, he is one of the “godfathers” of Ukraine’s drone revolution, and a prominent campaigner against government corruption. In his “laudable” nine-minute address, he spoke of the fight to remain a “free European state” and of not allowing democracy to be “held hostage by Russia”. For many, he’s the only many who can “save Ukraine from disaster”.
Fedorov is a formidable force, says Marc Champion in Bloomberg, but his call for an election is “reckless and wrong”. Roughly a million men and women are mobilised at the front, and as many as seven million are displaced outside the country, meaning voting is a logistical nightmare. Besides, with Russia firing near-daily barrages across the country, even the thought of civilians gathering outside polling stations should be enough to “end all discussion”. A wartime vote would also answer Vladimir Putin’s prayers, sowing doubts about Zelensky’s legitimacy, exposing (admittedly rampant) corruption, and driving division between citizens. “Ukraine cannot afford these distractions.” Having been on the front foot of late, Kyiv is now heading into what will be the “most brutal winter of the war”. It has all but run out of missile defences, meaning it is powerless to stop much of Russia’s relentless destruction of Ukrainian electrical, transport and water infrastructure. Within months, numerous Ukrainian cities could be uninhabitable. Rather than organising elections, Ukraine should be “preparing for that challenge”.
Zeitgeist
A case of canine coddling. Getty
“There has never been a better time in history to be a dog”
Not so long ago, says Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman, dogs had jobs. Border collies wrangled sheep while Great Pyrenees guarded them. Basset hounds tracked game, the curly lagotto Romagnolo dug for truffles, and the yappy Jack Russell flushed out rats. During World War One, the Red Cross trained Airedale terriers to courier first aid to the front line. What on earth happened? Today, some 90% of dog owners don’t consider their pooches as pets at all, but rather as “members of the family” (some even say “pet” is derogatory). You’re far more likely to find a Labrador sleeping in his owners’ bed than retrieving fishing nets in Newfoundland.
Put simply, “there has never been a better time in history to be a dog”. They’re treated to luxury products, like Hermès’s £68 Natural Dog Shampoo; food subscription services consisting of “human quality meat”, which can cost £125 a month; and swanky day care, like the £925-a-month WagWorks in Putney. Worldwide, the so-called “pawconomy” is set to reach $500bn by the end of the decade – as big as the entire global cosmetics industry. Some pampered pooches are even stuffed into human-like clothing – tutus, bow ties, Barbour coats – for “birthday parties”, and many have their own social media accounts with thousands of followers. A lexicon for “irony-immune” millennial owners has also emerged – “pet parents”, doggos, smol, hooman, the ghastly “furbaby” – and many owners now talk about their hounds so much they have to clarify when they switch back to talking about actual humans.
The Knowledge Crossword
Comment
Western civilisation at its peak: Thomas Cole’s The Consummation of Empire (1835)
The threat to the West
The West rests on four pillars, says Mathias Döpfner in The Spectator: Athens, where democracy was born; Rome, the cradle of the rule of law; Jerusalem, where Judeo-Christian values placed the “inviolable dignity of the individual” at the centre of everything; and the Enlightenment, whose great thinkers in London, Paris and Königsberg established individual civil liberties and the division of church and state. It was Herodotus who observed that Athens only outgrew its neighbours when it threw off tyranny. Once every man was fighting for his own freedom – not a master – he was motivated to give his utmost. In this observation Herodotus captured the essential argument for self-determination and liberty, and the core insight that defines the West.
Today, open societies based on liberty, the rule of law and human rights are under threat. According to the Freedom House think tank, global freedom declined in 2025 for the 20th consecutive year, deteriorating in 54 countries and improving in just 35. Most damningly, just 21% of the world’s population now lives in countries classified as “free”, compared with 46% two decades ago. The number of countries designated “not free” has risen over 20 years from 45 to 59, and autocracies have grown more numerous, more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad. The West also faces a fearsome threat from within, most notable in the rise of anti-Semitism, which has become a kind of “pop-cultural zeitgeist”. Partly this is driven by idiotic anti-colonial ideology, but it’s accelerated by uncontrolled migration from the Muslim world, which not only contributes to the West’s cultural abandonment, but fuels the rise of extremism on both the left and, by reaction, on the right.
📚🕋 Michel Houellebecq articulated the dystopian vision for this in his 2015 novel Submission, which describes a France where the Muslim Brotherhood has taken power. Women wear progressively longer dresses; shoddy white men rejoice at the chance to enjoy multiple marriages with underage wives; news of Islamist terror attacks is gradually suppressed so as not to alarm the populace. The “exhaustion”, in other words, of Western society. “Reality appears to be mimicking fiction in the most gruesome fashion.”
Quoted
“Science is organised knowledge. Wisdom is organised life.”
Immanuel Kant
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