Renowned historian zeroes in on ulterior White House motive as Natalie Harp saga spirals

To historian Heather Cox Richardson, the Republican frenzy over White House aide Natalie Harp isn't a scandal that ambushed the administration, but rather one the administration was only too glad to have.

The furor began Sunday, when Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) needled the president at a reelection rally.

"He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar," Ossoff said of Trump's executive assistant. Conservative media swiftly recast the line as a sexual smear. When CNN's Kristen Holmes pressed Trump on it, the White House rapid response team savaged her publicly and even invoked her children.

That reaction, Richardson argued, was the tell. Writing in her "Letters from an American" newsletter, she said the administration leapt at a chance to "gin up a controversy that could rally the base" — one that, for once, didn't make Trump look bad. The pile-on, she wrote, pulled oxygen from his stock trading, his unpopular White House ballroom now before the Supreme Court, the faltering war in Iran, and a national debt that just crossed $40 trillion.

The theme ran through "The Jim Acosta Show," where Richardson appeared this week. Acosta shared political wisdom he said a GOP operative once gave him: "never let the staff be the story." The White House, he noted, made her the story anyway.

Cox Richardson noted the Harp saga has caught fire, taking away from coverage of Trump's disastrous war, pet projects he's funding using taxpayer dollars, and selling access to his administration.

"We're not talking about the many ways in which the administration is simply falling apart," she said, adding: "That's why I say I think the White House was like, 'Oh thank goodness we have something we can talk about that might draw eyeballs, because if you were working for that White House, what possible positive story can you put out there right now?"

If it was a strategy, it may have backfired, as the frenzy only drew more eyes to the 80-year-old president and his 35-year-old aide — including a report she went more than a year without a security clearance until Trump intervened. Allies from Eric Trump on down kept it alive by rushing to defend her.