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Apparently, he likes to say her name with a French accent. “Na-tah-lee!” the president cries out, in that affected tone of faux-formality that one might use with a person they love but do not quite respect, and she comes running, her thin legs teetering on her heels. Natalie Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old “executive assistant”, was an odd recurring character in the latest blockbuster Trump administration book, Regime Change, by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. In the book, Harp features like a silent sentinel, ever present but eerily quiet as Trump rants and raves. It’s not exactly clear what the scope of her responsibilities are; though, as Jamelle Bouie points out, the fact that she evidently helps run the president’s social media accounts, which can sway markets and influence his foreign counterparts, makes her one of the most powerful people in the federal government. But the dignity of Harp’s character does not often seem to equal the gravity of her influence: once, she was caught on video sprinting across a golf course on foot, chasing the golf cart that was speeding the president away to the next hole. For a while, she was called the “human printer” among Trump aides, in reference to the portable printer that Harp carries around with her: one of the primary ways she spends her time appears to be searching for flattering news stories and social media commentary about the president online, and printing it out to nourish his self-regard. But from Haberman and Swan’s reporting, it was not always clear exactly what Harp was thinking. Though many Trumpworld insiders are clearly identifiable as off-the-record sources in their book, Harp does not seem to be among them. But recently, more of Harp’s own words have come to light. The Daily Beast published the full text of two letters from Harp to Trump, whose existence had previously been reported by Haberman and Swan. In the letters, Harp is rapturously worshipful, sycophantic, almost slavish. “You are all that matters to me,” she wrote to Trump. She called him her “Guardian and Protector in this Life”. (The capitalization is in the original.) It’s long been known that Trump prizes devotion among his underlings, that he seeks out flattering commentary about himself, and that he is surrounded, particularly in his second term, exclusively by the kind of people who will never tell him anything that he does not want to hear. Still, the spectacle of Harp’s obsequiousness – her willingness to debase herself for an 80-year-old man whose vulgarity, misogyny, racism, narcissism and impulsiveness have damaged her country in ways it will likely never recover from – is disturbing and grotesque. Still, Harp herself might be less unsettling than the near certainty that there are others like her – White House staffers and federal bureaucrats and petty functionaries of the Maga machine – who have made flattery of Trump a large portion, if not the entirety, of their jobs. Likely, few Americans would ever have heard of Harp if it were not for Jon Ossoff, the Democratic Georgia senator running for re-election and widely assumed to be mulling a presidential bid, who mentioned Harp in a pointed barb in a campaign stump speech in Atlanta. Trump, Ossoff said, doesn’t want to do the job of president; he wants, instead, to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie”. We do not need to be stupid: it strains credulity, and discredits the considerable savvy of Ossoff’s team, to claim that this remark was not meant to arouse salacious suspicion about the nature of Harp’s relationship with the president, and speculation that it might be sexual. Ossoff’s wording retained plausible deniability; still, I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Ossoff, in his campaign, has styled himself as firm-minded, resolute, and morally ambitious – an inheritor to Barack Obama. But in this remark, he diverged noticeably from Michelle Obama’s famous mantra “when they go low, we go high,” which has long been a shibboleth for the kind of Democratic politicians who have preferred dignity over effectiveness in the Trump era. Ossoff was going low. It is shocking how well it worked. The evocation of Harp in Ossoff’s speech triggered a slew of news stories about the aide, delivered by White House reporters who seemed almost giddy to be able to cite as newsworthy something that before had been merely creepy. Asked about Harp on television, Haberman referred to her as Trump’s “binky” and “comfort blanket”, infantilizing him in humiliating terms. Trump surrogates were dispatched to defend Harp with a ferocity and insistence that couldn’t help but suggest that the president himself was angered. Ossoff, it seemed, had struck a nerve. At the beginning of Trump’s rise to power, many in politics gawked at his seemingly sui generis ability to dictate the news cycle: to say outrageous things, or make bizarre provocations, and send reporters, commentators, surrogates, and his opponents into a frenzy trying to respond to them. The effect was that Trump determined the subject of discourse; everyone else responded to him. Ossoff turned the tables, and he made it look easy. One of the allegations that Trump’s aides spewed in their responses to the remark was that in insinuating that something inappropriate was afoot between Trump and Harp, Ossoff was being sexist. Those on the left rushed to discount this: no one, after all, really believes that Donald Trump, he of “grab ’em by the pussy”, is leading a movement that has serious or sincere concerns for women’s dignity. But to say that Ossoff’s remark contained no misogyny would be naive, if not dishonest: if his suggestion was made deliberately, then he was using Harp’s gender to undermine her professionalism, and to evoke a sex scandal. Of course there is misogyny in this gesture, the suggestion that a young woman is not entirely serious. That Harp’s character and conduct suggest this much more than her sex does need not force us to pretend not to see things that we do. What is the moral consequence of this kind of sexism, the kind that Ossoff evoked – obliquely, subtly, but definitely – with his remark? For my part, I do not see any equivalence between the misogyny imposed on American women by the Trump regime – or, for that matter, the misogyny imposed on American women by Trump personally – and the minor distastefulness of Ossoff. It’s like comparing a dropper of water to the Pacific Ocean. Every woman, every feminist, knows that she has accepted things out of necessity or convenience that the most stringent adherence to principle would require her to reject. And I confess, I am more encouraged by Ossoff’s pugnaciousness than I am put off by the gendered undertones of the remark. After all, it is a grim reality of our gendered world that wherever there is a straight man who esteems himself to be godlike and extraordinary, there will be a straight woman somewhere not far behind who inexplicably believes him. We must work on building a world where this is not true. The first step might be getting this guy out of the White House. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist