Natalie Harp Is a Presidential Precedent Built From Spare Parts

Perhaps Natalie “the Human Printer” Harp has escaped your notice. The 35-year-old special assistant and executive assistant to the president had already received coverage as one of Donald Trump’s most devoted aides, but remained the lesser-known platinum head in his young blond honor guard—usually at his elbow or sprinting after his golf cart. This New York Times article moves her into the foreground.1

To say it plainly, Harp seems pretty weird. But presidential history is lousy with weirdos. The more interesting game for me to play: Where does she fit in? While I was reading the article, I thought of three: Lucy Mercer’s desk, Mimi Alford’s direct line, Missy LeHand’s private door.2

Lucy Mercer supplies the affair on the payroll. Her relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, began a couple of years after she became Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary. There were gaps, but Mercer returned secretly to FDR’s life and was with him at Warm Springs when he died there in 1945. Like most women who have affairs with presidents, she occupied his private life without controlling the flow of people or information around him.

Mimi Alford supplies the in-(White)House sex. In 1962, the nineteen-year-old unpaid press-office intern began what she later described as an eighteen-month affair with John F. Kennedy; she insists he did not take advantage of her. Obviously there is Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern whose relationship with Bill Clinton became the scandal that ate his second term. Alford’s took four decades to reach the front page.

But Mercer and Alford lacked power. Marguerite “Missy” LeHand had it all. She joined Roosevelt’s unsuccessful 1920 vice-presidential campaign and served him for twenty-one years, becoming his principal White House secretary when he assumed the presidency in 1933, but calling LeHand FDR’s secretary was a technically accurate description in the same way one might call Versailles a house. LeHand was his confidante, political adviser, gatekeeper, traveling companion, and substitute hostess. She lived in the White House, attended Roosevelt’s morning meetings at his bedside, vetted his mail, and provided a back entrance to the Oval Office. By his second term, she functioned as the de facto White House chief of staff.

The exact nature of their relationship remains unresolved. LeHand also had a documented romance with William C. Bullitt, Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1933 to 1936 and to France from 1936 to 1940. Still, she once asked a friend, “How could anyone ever come up to FDR,” leading most historians to accept that it contained a romantic element—but they disagree about whether it was sexual.

Other presidents kept the mistress, the gatekeeper, and the information system in separate rooms. If Harp is indeed Trump’s mistress, he has combined all three in one woman carrying a portable printer.

Presidential adultery has precedent. Vertical integration does not.

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“You may be getting the impression that I’m going to end my lucrative career as an Unpaid Humor Columnist,” Louie Castoria announced in QuipTide, after a 28 year run. “I hope not, but it’s not in my hands. It’s in the hands of someone called Al,” he explained. “You know, Al. Al-zheimer, that is.”

I became a fan of Castoria’s column in California’s Coastside papers because Louie co-created one of the great platonic loves of my life: Elizabeth, his daughter, inherited his inability to let a pun go unmade. And he’s shined his light on me, too, in so many ways, but this is a favorite: before he retired, he travelled to NYC often, and we’d meet at the same diner for breakfast. So here’s to Louie, smiling through all of it.

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