How many words does it take to trigger MAGA world? Three, it turns out.
When Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said at a rally on Sunday that President Trump wants to “travel with Natalie”—implying an untoward relationship between the 80-year-old grandfather and his 35-year-old special assistant, Natalie Harp—the outrage from Trump allies was as loud as it was predictable: Megyn Kelly, Newt Gingrich, and Laura Ingraham, among others, accused Ossoff of misogyny, despite having previously defended Trump’s own sexist comments. (The word hypocrisy feels inadequate here.)
But as this debate over propriety unfolds, a dedicated swath of the Democratic base is delighted. Since Trump’s reelection, these voters have been hankering to see their leaders show, well, a little more fight. So far, most of that fight seems to have come from midterm candidates on the far left, who often target the Democratic Party itself or the so-called establishment. To hear Ossoff, a more moderate Democrat in a reddish-purple state, direct a sharp—albeit petty—jab directly at the president thrilled such voters.
Some, in fact, found it almost cathartic. “Someone finally said something,” a 52-year-old woman named Rebecca, who attended Ossoff’s Atlanta rally, told me, sounding delighted. Bring on the “smoke,” Aaron Whitely, the chair of the Democratic Party of Chatham County, in Georgia, told me. “The younger folks are looking for it. The older folks are loving it.”
Ossoff appears to know this. It’s why viral clips of the senator, who is running for reelection, seem to pop up every few weeks like zinnias in summer. It’s also why you can’t have a conversation about the 2028 presidential race without mentioning his name. But just because the base loves the smoke doesn’t mean every other Georgia voter will.
Throughout Ossoff’s reelection campaign, Democratic talking heads have credited the senator for succinctly calling out the Trump administration’s alleged self-dealing. His speech at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon contained his usual anti-corruption message: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile,” he told the crowd, “while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions.”
But this time, about 10 minutes into the speech, Ossoff threw in the comment that lit up social media and group chats. “The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “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.”
The rowdy crowd laughed and groaned. Ossoff’s speeches are typically so dense with current-affairs references that only the most plugged-in rally-goers fully understand them. In those few lines alone, the senator nodded to the ongoing Iran war, to viral footage of Trump appearing to nap in public, to the controversial gift of a plane that Trump was forced to abandon because of security concerns, and, ultimately, to Trump’s intense closeness with Harp, the aide whose obsession with the president reportedly alarmed the Secret Service. Attendees understood him immediately. “He didn’t have to make any reference to their relationship; it’s very well known,” Rebecca, who declined to share her last name for fear of being targeted by the administration, said. “It’s in the public consciousness.”
People who have scrolled Facebook or tuned in to MS NOW during the past two years—and plenty of engaged Democrats of a certain age have done both, obsessively—are quite familiar with Harp. In 2024, reporting from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan identified her as Trump’s closest aide, one who keeps the president updated on positive press coverage and social-media buzz and who once gushed to Trump in a letter, “You are all that matters to me.” This week, CNN reported that Harp had once hunkered down in the trunk of an SUV to avoid being separated from the president. Another report revealed that Harp had worked in the White House for more than a year without an active security clearance.
It’s obvious that Ossoff’s comment about Harp found its target in the West Wing, because, as that awful saying goes, a hit dog really does tend to holler. “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted. When the CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump about Ossoff’s remark, the White House Rapid Response X account called her a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and said that one day, her children would be “sickened and embarrassed” by her. Soon, it was as though a private memo had gone out—and perhaps one did—to MAGA talking heads instructing them to frame Ossoff’s words as a misogynistic smear on a woman simply doing her job. “I feel bad for your staff if this is what you think of women,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida wrote on X. “Donald Trump has done more to elevate women in politics than any other President,” CNN’s Scott Jennings, who might be auditioning to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary, offered on X.
Some Democrats were irked with Ossoff too. The comments about Natalie “distracted and detracted from the power” of his otherwise effective message, the former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote on X. On the whole, “Ossoff has gone after Trump in a tough, fair, and pointed way,” Axelrod told me on a phone call yesterday. “This just seemed a little unnecessary and a bit gratuitous.”
Axelrod’s response was dismissed by the voters and local party leaders I spoke with as too sensitive. They pointed out that Ossoff had made only a light reference to Harp—one that a listener could interpret as they pleased. He didn’t actually accuse them of having an affair! Even if he had, those Democrats said, isn’t it time for party leaders to take a break from the high road? When I read Axelrod’s quote over the phone to Wanda Townes, the chair of the Democrats of Camden County, in Georgia, she was instantly annoyed. “That softness is the reason that Trump is in office. Stop being soft,” she told me. (“There’s no doubt it was chum in the water” for people “who feel like Trump has pushed Democrats around,” Axelrod said when I asked for his response.)
Earlier this summer, I wrote about the Democrats’ frustration that their party leaders still haven’t seemed to match their voters’ rage. “We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of an Ohio grassroots Democratic group, told me then. It makes sense that she loved Ossoff’s comment this week about Harp. “If nothing else, Ossoff shed light on who this young woman is, what her job is, and the twisted relationship the two of them have,” she texted me. “I mean, who writes love letters to an 80 year old!??”
Pissed is certainly the operative word. And Ossoff has been successful lately because he sounds about as ticked off as voters are and channels that anger into clippable sound bites for social media. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly attempts to provoke Trump in an aggressive, Trumpian style. But from Ossoff, who cuts a more wholesome figure and doesn’t imitate the president, the attacks are more surprising—and therefore perhaps more effective. Videos of the senator that have gone viral this year include Ossoff referring to Trump as a “failed president and a national disgrace” and using the phrases “Mar-a-Lago mafia” and “the Epstein class” to describe the president’s allies. Last month, Ossoff repeatedly asked Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, who had won the 2020 presidential election and called it “humiliating” when Clayton would not answer.
This kind of assertiveness is refreshing to Democrats, the party members I spoke with said. “Older white ladies, older Black ladies—they’re loving it,” Whitely said. Townes described her ideal future for the Democrats: “We need more Ossoffs; we need more Jasmine Crocketts,” she said, referring to the Texas representative whose own MAGA jabs have gone viral.
There is, of course, a downside to jabbing in politics: Not every voter relishes the melee. Crockett, to use Townes’s example, lost a primary for Senate in Texas this year, at least in part because even the Democrats who loved her pugnacity did not believe that she would be able to persuade independent and moderate Texans to vote for a Democrat. Similarly, success for Ossoff will be measured not by how much he delights his party’s most loyal supporters but by how many Georgians he can win over in November.
Madison Hahamy contributed research to this report.
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