In July, as the President prepared to leave Ankara after a NATO summit, United States intelligence detected what it assessed as a possible Iranian plot to fire a missile at his aircraft.
The Secret Service improvised. The President was moved out of the building inside a catering cart, the kind used to load meal trays onto airliners, and taken to a second plane. The original aircraft flew as a decoy with the blinds down and the press pool aboard.
Somebody, in a very short window, had to decide who went with him.
The answer was four people. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War. Walt Nauta, the President’s valet. Dan Scavino, his social media director. And Natalie Harp, his executive assistant.
Left behind on the decoy were, most notably, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury.
Those two men are fourth and fifth in the presidential line of succession.
That manifest is the most honest document this administration has produced. Nobody drafted it for release, nobody sanded it, and it was assembled under the only condition that reliably strips away pretense, which is the belief that the aircraft might be destroyed.
It shows you who the President of the United States cannot function without, and it shows you who he can.
The four
Consider what each of them is for.
Pete Hegseth is the only Senate-confirmed official in the group, and he was confirmed 51 to 50 with the Vice President breaking the tie. Before this job he presented a weekend program on cable television. When photographs emerged this month of the food being served to sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the ninth month of a deployment, his department called the reporting fake news.
Walt Nauta carries the President’s bags. He was also his co-defendant in the classified documents prosecution, charged with moving the boxes at Mar-a-Lago, and he was pardoned. He has no policy role of any kind. I want to be clear that I am not criticizing him for that. A valet is not supposed to have a policy role.
Dan Scavino ran a golf course. He has been with Trump since he was a caddie at Trump National and he now runs the social media operation, which in this presidency is not a communications function but the primary instrument of governance, since policy is announced on a platform at unpredictable hours without interagency review.
Natalie Harp is the executive assistant. She hosted a program on One America News, where she repeated the President’s false claims about the 2020 election. According to the July staff report to Congress, she is paid $150,000 and ninety of the 410 White House staff are paid more than she is. She runs no department. She has authority over no one.
What she has instead is the thing none of the others have, which is total availability.
CNN reported this week that she stays in close physical proximity to the President at all hours of the day. She relays messages from allies, sets up meetings, taps out Truth Social posts, sends lawmakers articles and notes on his behalf, and carries printouts of favorable coverage on a portable printer with a battery pack, which is the practice that earned her the name the human printer. One source, describing the volume of it, told CNN they did not know how she managed it all. Multiple sources used the same word: omnipresent.
A White House adviser gave CNN the clearest statement of her value that anyone has produced. He likes the attention, the adviser said, and the fact that she is one hundred percent committed and loyal. She doesn’t second guess, doesn’t question.
In October 2023, outside Trump Tower, the motorcade was idling to take him to a New York courthouse and there was no seat for her. Staffers told her so. According to two sources and a photograph obtained by CNN, there was a screaming match in the lobby, in which she insisted the President had personally asked her to be there.
Then she climbed into the trunk of an SUV and rode to the courthouse in it.
I do not report that to mock her. I report it because it is the most precise available measurement of the thing this piece is about. There is no arrangement, however undignified, that she will not accept in order to remain within a few feet of him, and everyone in that building knows it, and it is the reason she was on the plane.
Now look at the group as a whole.
Not one of those four people holds a position whose function is to tell the President he is wrong. Three of them hold no position that would give them standing to try. Their qualification for being on that aircraft, in the moment when a decision had to be made about who was essential to the continuity of the American presidency, was proximity and loyalty.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported the President’s own assessment of the criterion. Of Harp, he told staffers: all of you will go off and make money, she’ll never leave me.
That is the standard. It is not competence, it is not judgment, and it is not rank. It is the guarantee of never leaving.
The one who didn’t
Now hold the other list beside it.
Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State. He is fourth in the presidential line of succession, after the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate. If the aircraft carrying the President had been destroyed, and if the three men ahead of him were unavailable, the government of the United States would have passed to him.
He was on the plane they thought might be destroyed.
So was Scott Bessent, who is fifth.
I have gone looking for a defense of that arrangement and there is a serious one available, which I want to put fairly. Continuity of government doctrine holds that you do not put everyone in the line of succession on the same aircraft. Separating principals is correct practice, and it is the reason a designated survivor sits out the State of the Union.
But that is not what happened here. This was not a plan to disperse the succession across two aircraft. This was an emergency in which one plane was believed to be targeted and another was not, and the people moved to the safe one were the President, a Cabinet secretary who used to host a weekend show, a valet, a social media director, and an executive assistant.
The men fourth and fifth in line to the presidency stayed on the one with the missile pointed at it, and so did the press corps, with the blinds down.
What the institution tried and could not do
On Wednesday, MS NOW reported that Harp declined multiple times, over more than a year, to begin the routine security clearance process that West Wing staff normally complete. The form is the SF-86. It collects prior residences, financial history, and foreign contacts, and it initiates a federal background investigation.
Two people familiar with the matter said her reasons for declining were unknown to them.
She was working, throughout that period, in closer physical proximity to the President than almost anyone in the building.
Concerns accumulated in the White House counsel’s office and among security officials. The Secret Service raised issues about her during the first year. Eventually the President himself intervened, and she filed the forms, and the clearance came through in recent months. The White House press secretary says she has a clearance like everyone else, which is now true and was not true for over a year.
Here is the part that should hold your attention. One source told MS NOW that officials had made subtle moves to limit her constant access to the President.
Those efforts failed.
The system had a safeguard, the safeguard identified a problem, the professionals responsible for it tried to act, and they were unable to. Not overruled in a meeting. Unable. The thing simply did not work, and it took the President personally deciding to fix a paperwork problem before the paperwork problem got fixed.
The channel
The same reporting describes Harp as filtering much of the information the President sees on a daily basis, and says this has caused frustration inside the West Wing among senior staff.
She has had access to his Truth Social account. Reporting in The iPaper describes her passing him printed drafts of his own social posts for approval, alongside printed tweets from supporters when he is in a bad mood. She is the aide known for following him with a portable printer and a battery pack, delivering favorable coverage on paper.
CNN, which has reported on her role extensively, describes what she has as influence through proximity, and calls her a main conduit between the President and the outside world.
Be clear about what that does and does not establish, because there is a version of this story I am not writing.
It does not establish that she is making decisions. It does not establish that she wants to. Everything in the public record is consistent with a person who is extraordinarily devoted to one man and has organized her life around being useful to him.
What it establishes is that the channel exists, that one person holds it, that the position carries no rank and no confirmation and no term, and that when the institution tried to narrow it, the institution lost.
The part nobody has written
Now put the plane together with the Constitution, because this is where it stops being a story about staff and becomes a structural problem.
There is exactly one mechanism for removing a president who has become unable to discharge the powers of the office and will not go voluntarily. It is Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and it requires the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments to declare it in writing.
A majority of the Cabinet.
The Cabinet was on the decoy plane.
Read that again, because it is the whole argument. The only people with the constitutional standing to act on presidential incapacity are, by the administration’s own revealed preference under emergency conditions, not the people who are anywhere near him. And the four people who are near him, who see him every day, who would be the first to notice anything, have no role in that mechanism whatsoever. A valet cannot invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. An executive assistant cannot. A social media director cannot.
The people who can see have no standing. The people with standing cannot see.
That gap is not new to this administration, but it has never been this wide, and until July nobody had a document showing exactly how wide.
What we can actually observe
I am not going to diagnose him and neither should anyone else without an examination.
Here is the observable record. He is eighty years old. He has described the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a ten-minute screening instrument, at least four times over six years, and across those four tellings he has named seven different animals as being on a test that shows a lion, a camel, and a rhinoceros. He did not visit a combat zone for nearly two years in his first term. He was removed from Turkey in a food cart. His approval is at 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency, and his own senators are describing his war as a mess in front of cameras.
You do not need a diagnosis. You need only to notice that the people best positioned to assess him are a valet, a caddie, a former cable presenter, and a woman who would not fill in a form for a year, and that all four of them owe their positions entirely to him, and that not one of them has any incentive or authority to say a word.
One thing I will not do
Senator Ossoff raised Harp at a rally in Atlanta this weekend, and Scott Jennings responded by saying that for Democrats she is only there because she is a pretty blonde who must be sleeping with her boss.
He is right that there is a version of this story built entirely on that insinuation, and it is being written this week, in several places, and it is worthless.
It is also a gift to the White House, because it lets them answer the easy version and never address the hard one.
The hard one has nothing to do with what anyone’s relationship is. It is that in July, when professionals had to decide who the President of the United States could not do without, they came back with a list of four, and three of them have no business anywhere near a national security decision, and one of those three had spent a year declining to be background-checked.
And they left the man who is fourth in line to the presidency on the aircraft they believed was going to be hit.
Nobody leaked that list to embarrass anyone. It happened because somebody tried to shoot the plane down.
That is the only reason we know.
One favor to ask - please do not pander to these idiots by referring to the Department of Defense as the Department of “War”. That’s a bullshit move by Hegseth to make him feel all manly. Little things like this (referring to the “Democrat” party is another example) MATTER. They signify a willingness to adapt that we simply cannot afford right now. No bending, no surrender. On anything.