Sen. Jon Ossoff knew exactly what he was doing by invoking President Trump’s “travel with Natalie” the other day.
Google searches for Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp spiked by 5,000%. News outlets hurried to meet the demand for information by publishing new stories about Harp.
Liberal commentators cheered Ossoff while conservative commentators condemned him. Tuesday afternoon on Fox News, a bemused Jesse Watters remarked, “This is the first time we have covered Ossoff on this show in six years.”
That’s hard to believe, but it amounts to a victory for Ossoff, 39, who is running for re-election in Georgia while some Democrats dream about him running for president in 2028.
His “travel with Natalie” line — part of a broader but still just TikTok-length argument that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of president — showed a sophisticated understanding of the social media environment.
The comment at a rally last Sunday titillated, provoked and enraged different audiences simultaneously, all but guaranteeing saturation news coverage and even more attention.
Video clips of the comment were approvingly shared on X and other sites by Trump critics who had previously questioned Trump’s working relationship with Harp, 35.
“Pod Save America” co-host Tommy Vietor wrote that Ossoff was “winking” at the subject, and “the question now is whether this will kick up a round of actual reporting by news outlets.”
It did, in part because audiences were hungry for more information, and in part because of the White House’s aggressive pushback against Ossoff.
On Tuesday morning, an article titled “Who is Natalie Harp?” ranked as the most-read story on CNN’s website.
Some of Ossoff’s newfound fans know him mostly from clips — one or two-minute-long videos that travel wide and far on social media platforms.
Candidates are increasingly thinking in terms of clips when they deliver speeches and appear on TV shows, but some are obviously much more comfortable with the so-called “clipping economy” than others.
Ossoff is a natural. Clippable moments from his campaign speeches have repeatedly taken off on social media platforms and garnered millions of views.
Earlier this summer, veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin, now a columnist and host for Politico, said “the Ossoff model” entails a “weekend rally, clips delivered for social media and a tight corruption focus.”
Ossoff’s most recent viral moment also emphasized alleged corruption: His full sentence invoking Harp was, “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
“Travel with Natalie” led some on the right to accuse Ossoff of sexism, which in turn led some on the left to invoke Trump’s own track record, and on and on it went — just the type of political bickering that’s amplified and incentivized by social media algorithms.
Watters, on Fox, seemed to see through it all. “To suggest that Trump surrounds himself with attractive women — yeah, he’s done that his whole life, I don’t think he’s very upset about the comment,” he said.
The Fox host went on: “Am I fazed by this comment? No. Has Trump said so much worse, so much more sleazy things against other people? Yes. Have I defended those things? Absolutely. So I’m not going to pretend I’m all hot and bothered about it. And the president doesn’t care.”
But Fox proceeded with a full segment about it anyway, further amplifying Ossoff’s message.
Amanda Litman, president of Run for Something, which works to get young progressives elected, said “younger candidates, at basically every level, are fluent in the internet. They understand the lingua franca. They know their strengths and they lean into them.”
For Ossoff, she told CNN, that’s delivering speeches “that can be clipped up, because that’s really his strength.”
Litman said she senses that winning candidates are thinking more about social reach and attention versus individual TV hits or other one-off media appearances.
At rallies, she said, “It’s not just what’s happening in the room, it’s what the room can be cut up into for later use.”
The strategy is evident all across the political spectrum, not just among Democrats like Ossoff. It calls to mind something that Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres said about Zohran Mamdani back when the New York City mayor was running for office last year.
Torres told reporter Astead Herndon that Mamdani had mastered the “three threes,” meaning a 30-second social media video, a three-minute television segment and a three-hour long-form podcast.
