CARPE DIEM

Why so many ridicule or criticize Natalie Harp so harshly?
Everyone is endowed by Nature with a combination of certain abilities. She, like her critics, just wants to use them to gain the most benefits. She swoons over Donald Trump the president of the United States, the guy who wagged his finger and half of the White House complex, the proud symbol of America for years, disappeared, or even kisses his ass, so what? What wrong with it? Honestly, nothing wrong with it.
In life, especially fast-moving American life, where to aim your arrow is essential for success. If luck gives you a chance and puts you next to the president of the United States, if you pay attention to your detractors and are reluctant to kiss his ass (and kiss it publicly if that gives you more benefits) that would be a fatal mistake of your on-the-make-life that would kill your one-in-a-life chance to succeed – to find your place in the sun as Sammy Davis had hollered for years.
Look at the big boss. Didn’t he know he did not say correctly about a lot of things? Of course, he did but why should he care if his lies are pleasing like singing an oldies song to the ears of the over-65-year-old voters? Are you, righteous critics, sure that sticking to the high road with ethical and moral principles is the sure way to success? Since 2026, or even before, MAGA has shown you that to be wrong. They saw them as unimportant or have probably turned them into being unimportant. Nothing succeeds like success and if you fail to gain power, I repeat, you are irrelevant.
Criticizing success is, frankly, nothing but jealousy babbling. If Ms. Harp succeeded in banning some media outlet from the White House press corps as rumored, it would be euphoria and proof that she is competent in doing what she has been doing – dropping effective words into power’s ear and moving the world. And lugging the duffle bag next to the big boss only enhances the perception of being powerful.
I have said it first, proudly, before Peter Thiel, in a post on X that the president’s people, many of them, have exhibited incompetence. So, when the billionaire/investment genius/political thinker/social and political influencer/advisor-to-president Mr. Thiel said the same thing on September 24 on MD Meet podcast, then there is a common observation of such incompetence.
But somehow, such incompetence blends in well with the current American
political landscape and makes incompetence normal and acceptable. Imagine the mistakes committed by the intelligence agencies and the defense department under, say Leon Panetta, it would have caused uproars so deafening that heads would have rolled off those agencies instead of walking about nonchalantly.
MAGA has determined for itself that the U.S., or even the world, should not be what it has been. They don’t want to improve it. They want to remake it into something different. So, incompetence may be unimportant or perhaps the weapon to achieve the goal of turning society upside down, destroying it to build a new one just like bulldozing the East Wing to build a new what-ever.
Putting the name of President Donald J. Trump on a building specifically built and named after President John F. Kennedy to commemorate him was clumsy and weird but has served the purpose of whoever wanted to do it: as long as MAGA is the boss of the town, the Kennedy Memorial apparently stops being one; clumsy or not, three to four years may help the public to forget its name.
Caveat populus: you have a choice with your votes: to enable and continue the MAGA world where there is no such a thing as human society but only mortal combatting clans, and act like a true MAGA member: everyone for themselves. Or ask like John F. Kennedy what you can do for your country but not what your country can do for you – your clan.
JOHN P. LE PHONG
(This article appears on X, Facebook, and thelephongjournal.com)