So, Like, There’s This Printer
man, it’s not even a metaphor, they just call her that
Okay so here’s the thing, man. There’s a guy. Eighty years old. Leader of the free world, allegedly. And he’s got a woman who follows him around with an actual physical printer so he doesn’t have to look at a screen. Prints out the news. Prints out the tweets that make him feel good. Now, apparently, she’s graduated to just typing his Truth Social posts directly, since a Wall Street Journal thing found she posts to his accounts on his behalf outside business hours once he’s nodded along. That’s not an aide anymore, man. That’s a human input device. That’s a peripheral. And everybody in Washington acted shocked, shocked, when this became a story, like the guy hasn’t been walking around with his own personal printer for two fucking years.
They used to call her the human printer on the golf course. Now she IS the account. Some evolution, man. Some real character arc.
The Catering Truck Job
cabinet secretaries as the diversion, dude, that’s the whole bit
So then there’s Turkey. NATO summit, credible Iranian missile threat, and the plan, and I cannot stress enough that this is a real plan the Secret Service actually executed, was to load the actual president into a catering truck. A food service vehicle. Rolled him right off the tarmac like he’s smuggling himself out of a wedding he doesn’t want to pay for.
And here’s the part that’s got the whole bowling alley talking. Who gets the real plane and who gets left on the decoy wearing the Air Force One callsign like a piece of bait? Defense Secretary, sure, makes sense, chain of command and whatnot. Deputy Chief of Staff, fine. And then aide number three: the printer. Meanwhile Secretary of State lil’ Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are sitting on the missile-bait plane with the entire White House press pool, presumably reviewing their own life insurance policies. Cabinet officials and reporters, left as the distraction, so a executive assistant with a printer could ride home in the safe car.
That is not a security protocol, man. That’s a seating chart that tells you everything about who’s actually running the show. And two days after this broke, the press secretary just up and quit. Coincidence? The Dude does not believe in coincidence when a plane full of missile bait is involved.
Then This Guy From Georgia Says One Word
and the whole apparatus loses its shit, man
So this senator, Ossoff, Georgia, running for reelection, gives a speech. Says the president doesn’t want to do the job. Says he’d rather build his ballroom and “travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace,” which, first of all, incredible bit of writing, second of all, he wrote it himself apparently, third of all he used “their” instead of “his” and that possessive is doing violence, man, quiet, structural violence.
Google searches for her name spiked five thousand percent. Five thousand. That’s not a news cycle, that’s a supernova.
And the White House response, this is the part that’s really something, the White House response was to lose their entire minds. Communications Director Steven Cheung, actual taxpayer-funded federal employee, went and called the senator “the biggest cuck loser in politics.” That’s not spin, man. That’s not messaging. That’s a guy who got dumped in high school finally getting his shot at a microphone.
And then here comes Megyn Kelly, right on cue, absolutely floored, just floored, that anyone would suggest impropriety, insisting Ossoff was “clearly implying that Trump is having an affair.” This from a woman who Trump once said had blood coming out of her wherever. The hypocrisy isn’t subtle, man. It’s not even hypocrisy at this point, it’s performance art. It’s a rug that doesn’t tie the room together so much as it just sits there, soaked, daring you to mention it.
Trump himself, when asked, called the guy Pee-wee Herman and pivoted to bragging about his ballroom. Which, credit where due, is at least on brand.
Even the Guys on Our Side Couldn’t Leave It Alone
this is a complicated case, Maude, lot of ins, lot of outs
Now here’s my favorite part, and I mean genuinely, this is where it gets good. David Axelrod, Obama’s guy, gets on Twitter and scolds Ossoff. Says the line was “gratuitous and unnecessary.” Very statesmanlike. Very above it all. Except one day later, twenty four hours, Axelrod is back online saying actually the security clearance thing, the fact that this woman apparently refused to get cleared for over a year while sitting closer to the president than anyone alive, that’s a “deadly serious issue.” So he went from scolding the joke to confirming the premise of the joke in under a day. That’s not a correction, man. That’s a guy watching the bowling ball hit every pin on the second roll and pretending he called it.
A professor named Dave Karpf took Axelrod apart for this on his Substack, and the line that stuck with me was that it takes real effort to be this wrong in so few words. Which, hell, I’d put on a t shirt.
"It takes real effort to be this wrong in so few words." David Karpf
Then over at the Bulwark, JVL wrote the piece that actually gets at the sick genius of the whole thing, which is that everyone wants this to be an affair because an affair would be normal. An affair would make sense. His actual point, and I’m paraphrasing exactly one time here because it’s too good not to, is that it would be much better if they were sleeping together. Because the real thing, whatever the real thing is, is weirder and sadder than that.
"It would be much better if they were sleeping together." - JVL
And Charlie Sykes, bless him, spent two straight newsletters covering this story and then, both times, pivoted hard into warning everybody about the DSA taking over the Democratic Party, like a guy who can’t finish a sentence about one crisis without flinching toward a different one. He called Cheung’s statement “rhetorical feculence,” which is a hell of a phrase for a guy also worried about people being too mean online.
The Whole Thing, Man
You got cabinet secretaries riding the bait plane. You got a communications director who talks like a message board in 2011. You got a cable news host performing outrage on behalf of a woman she’s never met while ignoring a decade of receipts against her own guy. You got a Democratic strategist who needed a full day to catch up to his own point. And in the middle of it, one woman with a printer, now apparently upgraded to full ghostwriter status, closer to the nuclear codes than the Secretary of State.
Nobody planned this as a metaphor. Nobody had to. Sometimes the government just hands you the rug and it’s already soaked and it already ties the room together, and all you gotta do is not step on it too hard.
The Dude abides.