Trump 'too mentally feeble' as 'crazy stalker' aide takes control: ex-RNC official

The West Wing as a Private AppA Brief on the ReportFormer RNC spokesperson Cheri Jacobus says Donald Trump is too mentally feeble to govern and that Natalie Harp, his 34-year-old executive assistant, has become the conduit for his online output and, by extension, a center of influence in the West Wing. The reporting cited in her remarks says Harp compiles material for Trump’s approval and sometimes posts to his account herself, often late at night. That is the context. The political meaning is uglier.Power Lives Where Access LivesThe real question is not whether Harp is “crazy” or “stalker-ish,” as Jacobus puts it. The question is who has access to a president who apparently depends on a single aide to feed him the world. In a functioning government, a 34-year-old executive assistant does not become the filter for the president’s public voice. She becomes that filter only when the formal chain of command has weakened into theater.That is the core fact here: institutional power has collapsed into proximity. Not law. Not process. Proximity.The Enabler Is the System, Not the SpectacleJacobus focuses on Harp because she is visible and unsettling. That is understandable, but it also risks overpersonalizing a much larger failure. If Trump is as vulnerable to influence as described, then the decisive actors are not just the aide in the room. They are the staff, family members, congressional Republicans, and senior aides who know the arrangement is abnormal and do nothing.This is not a rogue-assistant story. It is a cowardice story. The people with actual authority around Trump are allegedly choosing to tolerate an arrangement they find alarming because confronting it would mean confronting the condition that sustains their own careers: a president whose dependency they can exploit.The Frame Does the Work of ConcealmentThe weak framing here is the idea that the danger is mainly Harp’s devotion, as though devotion were the mechanism and not the symptom. The mechanism is institutional abandonment. Harp may be the immediate operator, but the deeper scandal is that the presidency can be steered through personal fixation, late-night posting, and private access without any obvious effective restraint.Calling this “disturbing” is accurate but insufficient. It is also governance by susceptibility: a presidency shaped by whoever can capture the attention of a debilitated man and package it into a post.What This Pattern RevealsThis is how authoritarian drift often looks in practice: not always through grand decrees, but through degraded standards, informal intermediaries, and a staff culture that treats obvious dysfunction as manageable so long as it is loyal dysfunction. The result is not chaos by accident. It is organized irresponsibility.The story is not that one aide is weird. The story is that a major political party has normalized a structure in which weirdness, dependency, and unchecked private influence are treated as ordinary if they serve the boss. That is not a fluke. It is the operating system. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe