President Donald Trump was seen seemingly yelling at his close assistant Natalie Harp, with whom he reportedly has an unusually close relationship. While the media has focused on the jarring image of Harp plastering a smile on her face for the cameras while Trump points at the ground near her with a scowl on his face, one Trump expert noted that the president is notorious among aides for his abusive behavior — so much so that they've developed a code for managing his moods.
“Everybody takes abuse,” Trump biographer Michael Wolff told his podcast co-host Joanne Coles, according to a report by The Daily Beast's Erkki Forster on Thursday. He added that everyone who works for the president will eventually find themselves on the receiving end of his tongue lashings.
"Wolff, who has written four tell-alls about Trump and spent time in the White House during his first term, revealed that aides devised a secret phrase to tip one another off about what awaited them before seeing the president," Forster wrote. "'People around Trump would say, ‘How’s the weather?,’' the author recounted, a discreet shorthand to find out, 'What’s his mood?'"
Forster quoted Wolff as adding, “This is a man who is wholly unfiltered. There are no restraints here... If he feels it, if he thinks it, he expresses it, and his powers of expression are... blunt force. That’s it. You’re going to get it. It’s going to come at you.”
Wolff also said that women who work for Trump are in for a particularly tough time.
According to Wolff, “And let’s remember, these women around him... they are there... in the most abject capacity... There’s no pretense that they are there for any other reason but the succor of Donald Trump. They are there to be his comfort blanket.”
Forster also pointed out that Harp, who leaves loving letters to Trump at various places in the White House where he can find them, included in one of those letters comments that seemed to be a plea for forgiveness for unspecified actions which angered him.
“If there is anything else I have done to cause you trouble, please forgive me,” Harp wrote.
In July, Anthony Scaramucci — who briefly worked for Trump as his White House Communications Director — said that no one who works for Trump sincerely likes him because of his mean-spirited behavior.
“Getting fired after 11 days was brutal, but there was also a genuine sense of relief,” Scaramucci posted on X. “Yes I had a shortcoming. I failed at the job. There was humiliation in it, but there was also relief.”
He added, “Here's what I've observed about everyone around Trump. Nobody likes him. I don't think his family members like him. I don't think his cabinet members really like him. They kiss his a—— because he's powerful.”
Scaramucci finished his point by saying, “The people who genuinely like him are one or two electron orbits away, close enough to feel the warmth, far enough to avoid the heat. I don't know a single person in his inner circle who came out unscathed.”
Speaking to AlterNet in September, Scaramucci observed that people who know Trump and are aware of his personality flaws stick by him out of fear.
"We started this interview by me saying that they only care about themselves and their own personal power, and they've become cowards," Scaramucci told AlterNet. "If they were not cowards, they would've sought Donald Trump's removal. If they were not cowards, they would've convicted Donald Trump in his second impeachment after the ridiculous, and I want to emphasize the ridiculous, Matthew, the ridiculous insurrection and the fomenting of that insurrection. If they were not cowards... But they're cowards."