The Daily Beast Podcast - Secrets of Trump's Blonde Companion, 34, Exposed

Episode Date: June 27, 2026

Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty unpack one of the strangest weeks yet inside Trumpworld, from explosive new questions about the president's unusually close relationship with aide Natalie Harp to the bizarre FEMA official who claims he was "teleported" across Georgia. They also break down the MAGA state fair flop, Trump's ongoing obsession with crowd sizes and Washington's reflecting pool, JD Vance's eyebrow-raising embrace of Richard Nixon, and the Supreme Court ruling that could reshape Trump's immigration agenda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go save the world. I got your back, chosen one. Disney's Moana. Boots Nick. His name is Hay-Hey. His name is Yum. When he goes in my tum-tum. In theaters July 10th.

She is fueling his delusions. She is providing him with endless praise that she prints out of random social media. And then it's all been put out in public. And she is with them round the clock. We also have a mystery that he is with her more than any of the other aides. She is absolutely with them later at night than other people. The White House is refusing to give us any details, any comment on this in this situation. If a woman of 34 has access to truth social and truth social is the most important way to uncommunicate for the president, then who's in charge?

We don't know. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast and we have so much to get through today. Who is the mystery blonde that's been traipsing after Donald Trump, waving a sheaf of papers? How many people have actually turned up at the state fair? clue. It's not what Donald Trump is saying. What's happened to those janky bits of rubber from the reflecting pool? And what about that guy who said that he was teleported? Yeah, you know, the guy that was running FEMA, the federal emergency program, well, he's kind of disappeared. It's all spooky. Who better to dissect it all with than Hugh Docky. Our story.

Scottish executive editor who knows more than anybody else about almost everything, actually. But he certainly knows about the blonde babe that's causing a lot of raised eyebrows at the White House. So, no time to waste. Please, if you haven't, remember, subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast. We're almost at 700,000. We want to try and get there by the end of next week. And it's how we bring you these episodes of conversations that really you don't have anywhere else. So let's get into it. Hugh Dockney.

Hugh Dockney, I'm so glad to see you. It's been far too long. Joanna, it's amazing to see you. I detect that you might still be in France, possibly even in Paris. It looks like you are in some sort of artist garret. And I hear things are hot. It's incredibly hot. I think it was the hottest place on earth officially yesterday. It was so hot. I cannot begin to. to tell you, but today I braved my way down to the Sen to the Pont Neuf, which has, for those of you who know the artist Christo, it's been wrapped, Christo famously wrapped the Pont Neuf in sort of gold fabric. And there is a new installation there by the artist, J.R., who has turned the Pontneurth, which is one of the bridges that leads to Notre Dame,

into a sort of snow cave. It's really extraordinary. I hope we can show some pictures of it. So I went down there today, and who should I run into also poking around there? Oh, let's see. Can we guess? Was it Charles Kushner, the United States ambassador to France? Interesting question.

It was not Charles Kushner, though I wonder if he's seen it. It was not. It was George Lucas. and Farrell Williams, the creative director of Louis Vuitton. Farrel is, and George, obviously, better known for creating the Star Wars Bar, which looks a bit like Trump's cabinet. It sounds like it was busy at this incredible installation. And it just made me think of another capital with another installation that is celebratory

and maybe isn't so busy that I think we want to talk about. Oh, so I think we should definitely. I've got so many questions for you. I definitely want to talk about audience size at the State Fair. No problem here. I want to talk about the blonde who's trailing Trump, and it's all, according to her brother, somewhat inappropriate relationships.

I'm very curious to hear about that. And of course, J.D. Vance, who else would J.D. Vance feel sympathetic to? But let me guess. Oh, the only president who's ever resolved. The only American president who's ever resigned, Richard Nixon. So, Hugh, where do we begin? Can we begin with the mystery blonde?

Well, the mystery blonde is just the most extraordinary story. I should just do a tiny bit of scene setting here that on Tuesday, the authors and New York Times reporters, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published regime change. And this has become an instant bestseller. And it has a whole load of insights and revelation. about what goes on in the White House. But the thing that is really exploding this morning, as I'm speaking to you,

is this 34-year-old blonde assistant who trails Donald Trump everywhere. She is somebody that I know you and Michael Wolfe have discussed before, Natalie Harp, aka the human printer. But what we are getting at, what we have got out of this book is incredibly, like just the unbelievable amount of time. that Donald Trump is spending with a woman who is almost 50 years his junior,

who other aides are really worried about, who the secret service were worried about, and now whose brother has come forward to say that he is concerned about what he calls an unhealthy relationship. An unhealthy relationship. So what does that mean? Because we know that she was writing him notes where she was saying, you are the most important person in my life. We know that he has said that other people will leave him,

but she will never leave him. So what has the brother said? Because it's the brother's revelations that have caused such consternation, correct? Exactly. So we've got the book and the brothers revelations together in the space of a couple of days, which have just exploded this whole issue. So her brother, Natalie Harper, as I said,

is 34. Her brother, Preston Harp, is four years older, and they've become estranged. And in a sort of tableau of a divided nation, maybe, he has actually quit the United States to go and live in Nicaragua, which, as we know, something of a communist-ish, you know, sort of far-left regime. Anyway, he has spoken out, he spoke to the Daily Mail, I have to credit them here, to say, to give an insight into their upbringing and their background. And what he says about their relationship is he can't understand why anybody in his family is even near Donald Trump, that this relationship is very unhealthy. It's a national embarrassment.

And he says, just to quote these correctly, she's just like his fan club. He explains that this is a family that was brought up. Their mother was a very devout and a powerful. fairly intense Christian. Their father was seemingly a more relaxed person about matters. He was a Christian, but he was, you know, much less intense about it. And rather sadly, their father died in late, I believe, 2018. And what's kind of astonishing is that a month after their father died, and again, rather tragically, by suicide, she was on the stage. I'm sorry, I've got to the date right, I said, 2080, I met 2016. She was on the stage at the Republican National

Convention praising Donald Trump and talking about how he had been, he had enabled her being cured of cancer. So it's a very strange background story. And now, she is now one of his key aids. She has the aid that's closest to him all the time. She has the password to his truth social. she appears to be the person that posts many of his truth socials, or at least cures them up for him, and he then posts them. And she provides printouts to him. When he asks for printouts, he often, you know, he's provided with bits of paper, you know, it's called a beautiful mind of this, all these papers are spread out before him. And one of the really worrying things that we learned about from this Haberman and Swan book is he has, he has. has officials in, including Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, Howard Lutnik, the Commerce

Secretary, Fraser Greer, the trade representative. And he, Trump says your numbers are BS. Get me the right numbers. Get me the right numbers. And he turns to Natalie Harp to overrule the representatives of three different departments of the United States federal government to provide the right numbers. So she is fueling his delusions. She is providing him with endless praise. that she prints out of random social media, and then it's all been put out in public, and she is with them round the clock. It is an extraordinary story.

We've chronicled it in great detail, the limited amounts of time that he appears to sleep between truth social. So when we're saying that she's with him 24-7, are we suggesting that she's in the White House bedroom with him late at night and in the early hours of the morning, truth-socialing for him?

Well, we don't have any evidence of that is the case, but we also have a mystery that he is with her more than any of the other AIDS. And we don't, there are, you know, it's very clear that there are no witnesses who are being, who are in a position to say exactly when their interactions stop. She is absolutely with them later at night than other people that we know. What then happens? How does, how does, how are they interacting? We're unclear. We know that Donald Trump will pick up the phone to people in the middle of the night. Little Marco Rubio has complained about this, that he gets calls from Donald Trump. He saw this as proof that Trump was somehow, you know, really commandingly energetic. Other people may say that he just has unhealthy sleep. But that means we know he's active. We know he's, I'm going to use the word working because I'm struggling to find another verb here. others may come up with a better description, but he is doing things. And it appears that she's at his side a lot.

So putting two and two together, it's entirely possible. The White House is refusing to give us any details, any comment on this in this situation. They didn't really elaborate on it to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who asked about it. And one of the things that's worth pointing out is the reason that she has become such a prominent character in the sort of the, book in the launch and the rollout of the book is because she was in the room when they interviewed Donald Trump and it was her, Caroline Levitt and Stephen Chung, and that was it. So it shows just how intensely close to the inner circle she is. And I'll just say Susie Wiles, who is the chief of staff, clearly has very great concerns.

She learned about the letters that Natalie Hart was sending to Donald Trump, which said things like, you are all that matters to me. I don't ever want to let you down. And they appear to have gone through some sort of emotional journey. I want to bring you joy to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk work. Suiting Weil's reaction according to the book, where am I? So, Huey, is there an argument that actually, given that Melania is not in the White House very often. It's actually better for Trump to have a friend than to not have a friend. That said, his sleep does seem very disordered and his truth social seem ever more erratic. So it's also a suggestion that perhaps Natalie Harp is making up policy on the go, which is frequently

what his truth socials are. And as we have written it in the beast, cabinet ministers wake up in the morning, go to truth. social to find out what on earth the president has got in store for them today? Well, I think there's a number of things that that sort of raises. First of all, yes, Melania is rarely at the White House. We know this. Michael Wolf has chronicled this. Michael Wolf has been to court over this. Secondly, who is running the Donald Trump inner circle?

Who is making the policy decisions? One of the things that this book makes a point of is it's a very small, number of people, it's maybe five or six, key people are not in the loop. Scott Besson, who I just named, didn't know key elements of the Iran war before it happened. He's the Treasury Secretary, kind of important. So who's making these policies happen? Incredibly good question that we do not know the answer to. And you mentioned the disordered sleep. There are clear questions over the president's cognitive health and his physical decline, which we don't get answers to. And I'm just going to give an extreme example of Woodrow Wilson and his wife, that his wife essentially ran the government

and towards the end of his administration after a stroke. The thing that was thrown at the Biden administration by the Maga side, by Trump himself, was that Sleepy Joe was not in control. Who was? Who was? Who was? Who was? Who was the auto pen? Well, there's a lot of questions here that sound a bit like that. If a woman of 34 has access to Truth Social and Truth Social is the most important way to communicate for the President, then who's in charge? We don't know. So what does the reaction been of, do we know, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio to these revelations, did they know all along that Natalie Harp is hanging out at the White House long after they've

gone home to the Observatory and wherever Marco Rubio lives? There has been an absolute absence of reaction to that. I mean, there are so many questions that need to be asked of Marco Rubio when he's on tour in the Middle East. There's so many questions. J.D. Vance, not somebody that lets himself get in front of reporters too often, although I know we're going to talk about

what happened when he got on a stage. But neither of them so far have reacted in public. It's obvious that everybody in the White House has been talking about the presence of Natalie Hart. That's why she is so prominent in this book. I go back, Michael Wolf chronicled her extraordinary presence at that trial, riding around behind Donald Trump in a golf cart with a portable printer. So everybody knows about this. Everybody knows that she's there. And there are very,

very good questions for them to answer, very legitimate questions for them to answer. I would very much like someone to follow me around and print things out. I wonder if Natalie, I mean, I wonder if that's a new kind of job, human printer that, you know, in the days of AI. I We know we're all supposed to be super digital, but sometimes just much more efficient having loads of pieces of paper in front of you. So I think it's an interesting job. Human printer. I think we should apply for one for the day.

We should advertise for one at the Daily Beast. We can't get a golf cart in the office. If you're okay with one outside. We could get a golf cart in the office. I don't know. We could definitely get a golf cart in the office. Maybe. Okay.

Or we could get one of those child's toys. I could ride around in one of, oh, they could ride around behind me in one of those. All right. So, or the other thing that they could do, the other thing they could do here is teleport themselves. Oh, wow. Like Greg Phillips, I am obsessed by this story. Greg Phillips, head of FEMA, who said on a podcast that he had been teleported several times, once outside a church in Georgia, another time to a waffle house.

And even Donald Trump, even Donald Trump, when presented with the idea that one of the leaders of FEMA, which the federal emergency unit, which is incredibly important for people who've had hurricanes or terrible storms tearing through their states and have to rebuild. And it's a desperate situation, often for thousands of people as the weather seems to get more and more extreme. Even Donald Trump said he didn't know much of. about teleporting and he was going to find out more about it, clearly thinking, who is this strange person that we have hiding out at FEMA? So can you fill me in? He's gone, he's gone missing, right? He's obviously been teleported. He was employed at FEMA by Chrissy Gnome Ice Barbie. And he's a very strange, I mean, he's a very strange man.

who gets teleported. I just have to read out his words because they are epically fun. I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was going to go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House.

This was in Georgia. And I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was. There is an important caveat here. Teleporting is no fun. It sounds super fun. I mean,

it sounds great. Yes, who would be teleported and say it's not fun? Yeah, it's not fun. It sounds fantastic fun. It's too warm in Paris. You can go, oh, I'll just teleport to somewhere cooler. I would love to teleport to the beach right now. That's where I need to be.

I mean, who would not rather be at the beach? Unfortunately, it does seem that the teleporting had not necessarily the happiest of endings. The next time it happened because he was dropped in a ditch near a church. So I don't know. He fell out with the teleporting. He didn't pay enough, who knows. So what do we think? Is this a case of someone having hallucinations?

Do his colleagues think that he was taking some kind of mind-altering substances? What do we think was actually going on here? Because he seemed to, I watched the podcast that he was on. And as you say, he ended up at a Waffle House in Georgia. And when he called his kids and he said, hey, guys, I'm at the Waffle House. And they were like, well, which Waffle House? and he was like the one in Georgia, they were like, well, that's not possible. You just left.

And he was like, I've been teleported. I mean, what do his colleagues think? Do they think that he's barking at the moon? What do we think? Well, I think the charitable thing that one could say is this is a 65-year-old man who is a born-again Christian. And I'm kind of assuming that there is some faith-based element of his beliefs here that is in some way engaged. However, it was very clear that people within FEMA did not really want to interact with them, that he was obviously a strange appointment, and that he was very, very much isolated and left well alone.

And the incredibly lucky thing for FEMA is, as you just said, Joanna, people absolutely need FEMA when we think about hurricanes, about floods, about appalling natural disasters. I was going to say by the grace of God perhaps, but maybe that's who was doing the teleporting. By chance, there actually have not been significant national disasters during Greg Phillips' time at FEMA, which means that now that he's out, we luckily do not know what the teleporter would have done in this situation. So perhaps we have in fact been teleported away from crisis. It's such an important agency and it seems like a lucky escape. Well, I want to say to any people out there who've been teleported, I mean, please write and give us your comments on YouTube. Listen, if you've been teleported, it doesn't matter, way you've been teleported to a Waffle House,

kind of strange to get teleported to a Waffle House of all the restaurants you could go to a Waffle House isn't the one I choose, although I do like occasional waffles. There's one thing worth saying about Waffle House and FEMA. The Waffle House Index is one of the most important ways that people are able to find out when disaster is approaching because Waffle houses are always the last to close. And when they start closing, that is when you need to evacuate. So it may be that he was on to something here. Okay, the Waffle House teleporting index.

Okay. So Hugh, what? maybe he's teleported himself to the State Fair? He might have. Unfortunately, not a lot of people have teleported, not a lot of people have taken the train, not a lot of people have even turned up. Well, I was going to say he'd be very visible at the State Fair

because there's no one else there. There's no one there. And there's no Waffle House. So the great American State Fair, it is almost July 4th. We are about to mark 250 years of the United States. And I just say that maybe, Maybe these celebrations have gone slightly Trumpy, maybe a bit maga.

And one of the celebrations that was actually predated Trump was supposed to be a state fair but for the whole nation on the national mall. And to be honest, sounds pretty good, right? Who doesn't love the state fair? There's butter sculptures. There's deep fried stuff. Everybody's, it's crowded, it's busy. It's summer.

There's games. There's shows. Unfortunately, it got it got. got sort of taken over by the Trump lot. And I'm afraid I have to tell you, it's not been well attended so far. And there was quite literally a meltdown at it. A meltdown. Well, first of all, I think lots of states haven't taken part.

Correct. The democratic states haven't taken part. Many of the democratic states. For example, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, has just said that he was aware of it. and there was very little interest from businesses in his state and taking part because it had become partisan. It had become Trumpy. And what business wants to be associated with just one bit of political division? Right, because customers come from both sides, right?

So what was the meltdown exactly? I have a feeling I know where this is going. The literal meltdown was that they lost power in the food tent. And what do you want to get at a state fair on a warm day? you want a nice ice cream cone or a nice tub of ice cream, the ice cream melted. Oh no, the ice cream melted? The ice cream melted. And, you know, many people have pointed out that if Joe Biden was still president,

there's no way ice cream would have been allowed to melt. Well, he would have dropped it, though. Do you remember how Joe Biden was always dropping his ice cream? He did drop his ice cream. Although there's something so nice about a president admitting he likes ice cream. Although we know Donald Trump likes ice cream because he leaves cartons of it around his bed. or tubs of it round his bed. So is this an embarrassment and a humiliation for Donald Trump,

this sort of state fair that's nobody's going to? I mean, I saw there's a big ferris wheel. I mean, it sort of looks like it should be fun. It should be, you would think. There is a big ferris wheel. There is also a kind of miniature version of the Ark de Trump made out of plywood and looking kind of a bit tacky. And I know you are near the Ark de Triumph.

So you've got the real thing. and all it's Parisian, I should say, for Americans, magnificence. This one's kind of tacky. It's plywood. The gold's not quite right. The other attractions are basically people aren't there. There's no sign of really a crowd.

And the whole thing started, it was opened on Wednesday night by who would you get to open this than none other. Of course than Donald Trump. Oh, of course, Donald Trump. Actually, I was going to say Lee Greenwood. Well, you were right. You were right. And Lee Greenwood, I'll just say, I discovered today he's only 83, so slightly surprising. But there was Lee Greenwood.

There was Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary. And I'll just say it was tone, to say it was tone deaf, I'm, you know, I'm not an events organizer. But this was the event that was supposed to have, we will all remember, 80s and maybe a 90s charitable acts, including Millie Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, Bustamove, and if you remember, all but Vanilla Ice pulled out when they realized that the whole thing was MAGA. So Sean Duffy opened it, Baggetti up on stage and saying, oh, we've got the Marine Corps band here. Obviously, they don't get to pull out. You know, they may have their views, but they're stuck there.

And he said, aren't they better than those libitards that cancelled? And I just want to say this is a phrase that's used on the right a lot. But when you break it down, really pretty revolting, liberal retard, horrible words. And I just say the hypocrisy of this is awful. Sean Duffy is the very proud father of an eight-year-old daughter who has Down syndrome. And he has spoken often about that. He and his wife, who is a Fox News anchor, because obviously in Trump world, that's what you are, have spoken about their love of their eight-year-old daughter,

and they are very prominently anti-choice, and have made that a thing. And then he gets up and uses this phrase, which calls back to the worst sort of prejudice against people with Down syndrome and with all sorts of other conditions that they and their families deal with. Anyway, that was pretty bad.

Lee Greenwood sang, obviously, and that was what you expect. And then Donald Trump got up and we know, because we saw the pictures, the crowd just started to melt away, rather like the ice cream from the back. And it was the same usual Donald Trump spiel that we have all heard. So not an auspicious opening. Donald Trump has been raging on truth social about how this was the biggest crowd possible. There were 45,000 people there. There were not.

and none of them left before the end. That's the thing that has really angered him. He's back to obsessing about crowd sizes on the National Mall. So crazy. And do people have to pay to go to the state fair? Or is it free? It is free but ticketed and you cannot take in anything. I presume in case you vandalise it

because obviously that's been a problem with the reflecting pool. So let's talk about where we are with the reflecting pool. as we know, it's not reflecting or it's reflecting badly on Donald Trump. A lot of people have suggested that this is the perfect modern day example of narcissus. He said, and he got caught out, and we wrote about this by Caitlin Collins after he'd said that the pool had been vandalized and it had a sort of rubber bottom that it was completely unfandalizable. And then it turned out, he said that some people had snuck down at the dead of night and managed to avoid any CCTV cameras and they'd slashed it and slashed it. And there were bits of the bottom sort of floating up. And then Caitlin Collins of CNN very smartly pointed out to him that he'd specifically said this thing was unslashable.

It was unvandalizable and that it was the best, the most incredible, nothing ever. Nobody's ever seen anything like at bottom of the. reflecting pool. And in fact, we know it's had algae. Ducks have died swimming around because they've put such harsh chemicals in it. People are going down to see it because it's become a perverse tourist attraction. They're getting arrested if they put their hand in the water. So where are we now? Have we drained the reflecting pool at this point? Or what's happening to it? We've drained the swamp. This reflecting pool as of as we speak still has water in it. It is now surrounded by fencing so that People can't get close to it.

Obviously, they don't want people close to it. They are claiming that this is because they're preparing the National Mall for July the 4th. Nobody really believes that. It is not quite as algae filled as it was earlier in the week because they have been pumping water in and out to try to filter it. They'd the lucky break of a lot of rain. And algae needs sunlight.

They did a lot of rain. That diluted it. They've been cleaning the water. But everybody knows this, algae is coming back. It's still there. It's going to grow again. Many people who are watching will have been and seen the reflecting pool. And remember, all the times I've ever seen it, it's kind of like it does have algae in it.

DC is a swamp. We all know that it's kind of Pierre Charleong Fong did an amazing design of DC. It's still a swamp. So we expect it to be drained shortly, maybe over the weekend, maybe later. we don't expect it to be fixed, quite frankly, because the company that repaired and, you know, did it up 15 years ago has been asked about whether, about what they think. And this company says, in fact, they were asked if they could come back and have another refurbishment of it. And they said, your plan is not possible. You don't have enough money and you can't do it in that timeline. So we know that it's not going to work. The people that can fix the pool, that can drain the swamp, are unavailable. So we're back to the pool guy, I fear. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you.

It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapeed denim wide leg. To what extent, Hugh, is this just a problem, a perennial problem with the reflecting pool? And to what extent is it because the contract system didn't work? It didn't go out to bid.

It just went to someone who'd never done anything like this before, but is a friend of Donald Trump's. Is it resolvable? I mean, I don't ever remember hearing about the reflecting pool having problems under Biden. Well, it's always had a bit of algae in it, right? That's just how it is. Since 1920, the reflecting pool has never been as pure as you might want, but it's been pretty reflective. Trump became obsessed, and this is, you know, I think this speaks to this current presidency, not as much as last one, this one. He became obsessed by the appearance of Washington, D.C., and he became obsessed by chucking gold on the White House, which we've heard, about hand,

gluing it, bits of gold to the fireplace mantle. And he looked at the reflite people, it was like, I wanted to look like a blue bottom and, you know, and he... American flag blue, right? American flag blue. What other color do you expect? And he wants to put his mark on it. And unfortunately, he has put his mark on it. It's a mess. It's, it's resolvable, one would expect, but it's expensive. The Obama administration spent triple digit millions on it because it is an expensive problem. It is difficult to keep water in DC that pure on that scale, 6.4 million gallons of water. A lot of water is exposed to intense sunlight. It does not move very much. Those are problems on a scale that need expensive solutions.

And one of the other aspects of this is where do you get your water from? D.C. has as the river, the Potomac, going through it, it's not actually an area with a brilliant water supply. They take the water from the Potomac, they purify it, they put it in. You know, it's what are they going to do, build an aqueduct to mountains far away? Whatever the solution is, is expensive. And Donald Trump doesn't want expensive.

He doesn't want long term. He wants immediate now and with a bit of gold, or in this case, a bit of American flag blue. I know. I'm amazed they haven't just painted it gold on the bottom. Well, that would be even better. I just point out, by the way, that the lining, the company that provided the lining, usually its expertise is not in floor lining.

It does do that, but its main business is lining flatbed trucks. Flatbed trucks where you really don't want any water at all. And it's such a shame because it's such a beautiful space in D.C. to go and have a quiet walk. I always like to try and, you know, spend some time if I'm down there and I've got a sort of 20 minute break to just actually go and walk the reflecting pool because it's such a wonderful idea that you pause to reflect. Well, we'll keep an eye on it. And the reporting at the Daily Beast has been first class on this. It's such a messy problem. And our gossip column, the swamp, which is all about DC.

The swamp was there first. The swamp was there first. And I'll say our readers of the swamp, every Tuesday, if you subscribe the Daily Beast, the Daily Beast.com, you can get the Swamp Newsletter free every Tuesday. We have exactly what is coming out of the ooze in D.C. that it's the ooze that nobody wants in the news. We reveal scoop after scoop. We are bipartisan. We revealed the Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego's extraordinary spending, just as a nod to those who would say that we only focus on Trump. But the swamp has been chronicling the ooze and now it's got arrival.

But I'm very confident that we can't drain our swamp. We will be back. That will be back on Tuesday with more green slime from the people that bring you slime. So the other thing I want to remind people is that we have the wonderful cheat sheet substack which can come to you every morning too. It's a wonderful, wonderful read of what's going on. You write it. Nico Heinz

our global affairs editor writes it and it's the joy of my mornings is my first the first thing I turn to every morning

because it's so much fun. Well that is very kind Google the Daily Beast on Substack or go to the Daily Beast. com

and you will be able to sign up for it. We put a QR code up for those who are watching on video. Sorry if you're listening on audio but QR codes

are pretty great. Yes, we are doing that twice a day morning and afternoon bringing you the latest and the liveliest of what's happening in the news. And I will say it is usually focused on the Trump administration. Surprise, surprise. Because they just keep delivering. They do keep delivering.

So we mentioned the Star Wars bar and the strange group of characters that George Lucas pulled together. And I should remind people, by the way, the Pontnerf, installation, which I was recommended, the last day is on Sunday. So if you happen to be in Paris or you feel like a sudden last minute trip to Paris, I can't recommend it highly enough and it won't be there on Monday. So you need to go down and I a tip you have to act on. Yes, you do have to act on it. Act now. It really is enormous fun. Less fun was listening to J.D. Vance talking about how actually the one president who resigned for illegal, I mean, criminal behavior, he's saying, well, if it was now, you know, Richard Nixon, the Watergate scandal,

it would have been 12 hours on social media as part of the news cycle, and we would have moved swiftly on. Not so fast. It's just amazing. And I think it's worth playing every word of this, because it really, is something. So we were talking about this a little bit backstage, but I'm actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history.

I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.

And by the way, if you look at the story, of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it's not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the First Trump administration. There is a parallel. I also just, at a personal level, you know, okay, young senator, vice president,

writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like J.D. Vance. So I'm a little, you know, I've always loved, I've always liked Richard Nixon. I've always liked Richard Nixon. And he compares himself to Richard Nixon. He's young.

He's the vice president. He writes bestselling books. He's always liked Richard Nixon. Literally the only president, the sole president, out of 47, no one's ever seen anything like it, who's resigned. It's incredible. So I would just sort of say, let's game this out. you're a young vice president who has an elderly, or not elderly, but certainly a possibly sickly

president who's coming towards the end of his second term, one who's never held elected office before, and you're wondering what to do next. And you discover that the only person that's been in this situation before is, unfortunately, Richard Nixon. Do you, A, go, oh my God, I'm never going to utter that man's name in public. People are going to then attach his name to mine and it's going to be a nightmare and I would just be crazy to do that. Or do you go on stage at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library with their name plastered behind you and say, I've always liked Richard Nixon and basically say, I'm just like him,

he's my hero, laugh about it and think that you've done a great job. And obviously, if the answer is A, you're probably kind of sensible politician. who's got a decent chance of people being persuaded that you're not Richard Nixon. If the answer is B, you're J.D. Vance, congratulations. I think Democrats who follow this thing to work out how to attack future candidates must this morning be going like, oh, great, we can take summer off. Who knows? I mean, the interesting thing, too, is he says there's been a renaissance because among some, you know,

academics and political activists, I guess you would say. The idea that Richard Nixon are open conversations with China, he tried to get the Soviet Union to come up with a nuclear deal. I mean, that's also against what Donald Trump is doing, right? So Donald Trump is not trying to do the same thing with China. In fact, he slapped tariffs on China, and he's snuggling up to Vladimir Putin. And, you know, one of the more contended elements of Richard Nixon's eventual taking of the presidency in 1968 was whether he intentionally delayed peace or intentionally sabotaged peace talks to end the Vietnam War so that he could end the Vietnam War. Nixon did end a war.

Dixon actually didn't start any wars. We can talk about his administration of the Vietnam War, but he got us. of Vietnam, kind of awkwardly, kind of badly, you know, but he didn't go and bomb Iran for fun, or whatever it was that caused Trump to bomb Iran. He also set up the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Yes, there is, there is in, I think, fair to say, right of center circles, but also just broadly, an intrigue or insight, an interest in reassessing the administration of Richard Nixon separate from Watergate.

What there is not in these circles is any belief that it's a good idea to say, do you know what? Watergate, not that bad, and the deep state did it. Richard Nixon paid people to commit a crime. That's why he had to resign. He was going to be impeached. He got a pardon because he was going to be prosecuted.

Are you sure this is who you want to be your lit motif, JD? Well, J.D. Vance is no stranger to doing 180-degree turns, is he? We know that. And again, I recommend anybody who is curious about J.D. Vance or curious about the Vance's marriage to run, don't walk. To Ushavance is story time with the second lady. I dissected it and analyzed it with Michael Wolf on inside Trump's head.

this week the second lady has her husband on, the very busy vice president who has, as we know, been negotiating hopefully peace with the Iranians, rushed back to read Winnie the Pooh. So there you have it, Hugh, a fan of Winnie the Pooh, he's a fan of Richard Nixon. What is this man not a fan of? He is the Renaissance man of, I mean, I was good to say. He actually comes from Cincinnati, so he's kind of, you know, it's a very classical background there. very high-brow interests, which seem, let's be honest, really weird. And that's one thing I think that comes across in this is it is impossible for people not to watch

this. And they are going to see this on TV ads if he runs for president. It is impossible for people not to watch this and think, this guy's weird. This guy's weird. Well, actually, we should just throw in a final note to Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, who this week tweeted out, given the SCOTUS's decision to repeal the temporary protection order for Haitians and for Syrians in this country, well, you can see what she said here. She's referring to that famous moment during the debate when Donald Trump suddenly from nowhere decided to say that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio,

were eating their neighbor's pets. Can we just play that clip? In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there. So Katie Miller, the wife, of course, of Stephen Miller, who is probably putting aside Natalie, Hart, Donald Trump's most significant and in terms of policy, powerful aid.

She is a full-time social media influencer. She has a YouTube channel, and she is prolific on X, the social media platform, who's boss Elon Musk she used to work for in a situation that became a sort of intriguing question over her relationship with Stephen Miller. However, moving past that, as you rightly say, the Supreme Court lifted, or the Supreme Court gave Trump quite an unexpected victory of saying that they could remove temporary protective status from people from Haiti and Syria.

And these are people who had fled this country, had come to the United States, because Haiti, we know, is in a bad way. Many of them settled in Springfield in Ohio, which is a sort of medium-sized industrial city. And there's about 10,000 people there of Haiti and origin. and they had this crazy vile attack on them by J.D. Vance, by Donald Trump. And of course, that was almost two years ago. Katie Miller, straight back to that clip,

straight back to this incredibly twisted racist approach to attack these people. And I'll just say that she obviously received a lot of feedback, is perhaps one word for it from people. But among those who were really, really angered by this ruling itself, where the rock-ribbed Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, who issued an extraordinary statement that this was a mistake, that's a very, you know, sort of measured word to use about the Supreme Court. But when we talk about the Supreme Court, the language is, you know, often measured and veiled. he described it as a mistake

and he said that this is not in the best interest of the United States or Ohio so Katie Miller your own party doesn't agree with you on this but this is about Stephen Miller and his fanatical deportation agenda

and as Mike DeWine the governor of Ohio has pointed out these 10,000 of Haitians in Springfield are immediately eligible to be rounded up by ICE That is what Stephen Miller would rather clearly like to do, and I believe we have a clip, which just shows you his sort of spittle-flecked effect. And we can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants from the United States. It is a momentous victory, albeit this should have never taken 10 years.

It is outrageous that we have judges in this country who continue to supplant their own radical beliefs for the democratic views and judgments of hardworking American citizens. Just when you're getting warmed up, I was starting to laugh about the definition of temporary. Ten years, that's the definition of temporary. So I think kind of mask off there, right? You perform and then you laugh and giggle about it. But this is a major problem that affects clearly these people from Haitia and from Syria. You actually cannot fly from the United States to Haiti.

The Federal Aviation Administration doesn't allow you to because it's not safe. How are we going to remove these people? And Stephen Miller is obviously thirsting over the idea that we can round them up. That's what went wrong in Minneapolis. It's what cost Ice Barbie her job. It's what Republicans who care about polls and who care about the election in November are thinking, this is a nightmare. If we see those scenes again, people are disgusted.

When they see families brought out at dawn, families march down streets, children rounded up. None of this is popular. And yet, here is Stephen Miller, thirsting over the possibility of this happening to a very specific group. Well, and you also saw him there, almost performing for an audience of one, knowing that Donald Trump is probably watching it and that he's very much still engaged. We haven't seen as much from Stephen Miller recently, because, of course, people have been focused on the war in Iran, but he's been working all along. It's always good to see you and to have an up sum of the week. I hope we can do this again next week.

And I can't wait to get back to New York. I might be teleporting to the state fair, Joanna. I'm not sure if we should risk going on the ferris wheel. If anybody's going, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure it's fine. Nothing would persuade me to get on that ferris wheel. I was thinking about that with the melting ice cream, with a reflecting pool, producing all sorts of weird gaseous bubbles.

nothing. You would get stuck at the top of it and you would never come down. That would be my fear. Hugh, excellent to know that you're in charge of the newsroom. I'll be back on Monday. We are waiting. We will have a golf cart waiting for you, Joanna, with a printer. And a printer. That's what I want. If you have been, thank you for watching us. Don't forget to subscribe to The Daily Beast. And a big thanks to our production team, John Romero, Ryan Murray, Rachel Pasa, Heather Pissaro and Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many Bee Beast tier members now. There are too many names to read out.

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