Natalie Harp has been impossible to avoid in the news this week. The 34-year-old aide to Donald Trump became a flashpoint after Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff called out the president over her role, and the scrutiny hasn’t let up since. There’s the story of the decoy plane in Türkiye, where Trump reportedly took Harp and a few staffers on his secret aircraft while leaving Marco Rubio and others behind on the plane that might have been the target. There are the notes and letters she leaves him, some of which have started leaking to the press. Colleagues have taken to calling her “the human printer” for the way she carries a portable printer and laptop everywhere, feeding Trump a steady diet of favorable coverage. There are accounts of her literally chasing his golf cart across the course, laptop in hand, so he can get real-time updates on how he’s playing on social media.
Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tried to capture the dynamic on the Times’ Daily podcast this week. Harp, she said, functions as a channel — someone who feeds Trump information and connects him to people he sees defending him on television but may not personally know. She’ll track down a phone number and tell the person the president wants to speak with them; sometimes even foreign leaders reach out through her to get to Trump quickly. Haberman’s larger point was about what it means for someone to control that channel under a president as willing as Trump is to spread falsehoods, especially given how much of his communication runs through social media. She described Harp as emblematic of just how different this second term is from the first — evidence of “this unreality bubble” that has been built up around him.
That’s the political story everyone is telling. What’s gotten far less attention is the religious subculture that produced Natalie Harp — and I know something about it, because I grew up in it. This week I discovered I grew up closer to her world than I’d realized.
Harp grew up an evangelical Christian in Southern California, which is also where I grew up as one. People hear “California” and assume liberal, secular, progressive. That’s true in a lot of ways, but the state also has real pockets where evangelicalism runs deep and shapes entire communities. People also assume evangelicalism is a White, Southern phenomenon. Sometimes it is, but Southern California evangelicalism tends to be far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and just as institutionally powerful. This is the region that produced Saddleback Church, once the largest church in the country, and Fuller Theological Seminary, one of evangelicalism’s most influential institutions. Evangelical colleges, universities, and megachurches are everywhere here.
Within that world sits a subculture that shaped Harp directly: homeschooling. I won’t get into the full history of how homeschooling became such a force in American evangelicalism — that’s a topic on its own — but it’s worth understanding as a hyper-conservative, sometimes paranoid current within an already conservative movement. Families choose it less for practical reasons about school quality and more because they don’t want what they see as a secular government educating their kids.
I was homeschooled myself in kindergarten and first grade before moving into private evangelical school through the end of high school. Many of my cousins and extended family were homeschooled too. There’s a whole infrastructure around it — co-ops, support groups organized through churches, curricula that circulate through these networks and often distort history and science.
Natalie’s mother homeschooled her and her brother Preston at home in the San Diego area. Preston is now estranged from both his mother and sister, and his break from the family is dramatic — he rebelled against the homeschool upbringing and now lives among communist groups in Nicaragua. It’s a striking reversal for someone raised in conservative SoCal evangelicalism.
That contrast — one sibling rebelling completely, the other becoming a true believer — is actually a recognizable pattern within this subculture, without stereotyping every family that goes through it. Homeschooled kids often struggle to socialize outside their households, having been raised and taught primarily alongside siblings. They can be remarkably intelligent and academically successful, but they tend to fixate narrowly on one interest early — an instrument, a cause, a hobby — and go deep rather than exploring broadly. Rigid gender roles are common, with fathers cast as breadwinners and heads of household and mothers as the household’s teachers and managers, alongside strict expectations around sexual purity. And without a lot of external reference points, kids from this environment can end up going in wildly different directions: total conformity or total rebellion. Preston went one way. Natalie went the other.
Preston has since given interviews describing what the household was like. He told the Daily Mail that his mother’s version of Christianity centered heavily on hellfire, and that she made him throw away his Pokémon cards because she considered them demonic. It’s a household portrait that will feel familiar to a lot of people who grew up in similar families — where anything foreign, anything not explicitly Christian, was treated as a threat.
Natalie went on to Point Loma Nazarene University, an evangelical college in San Diego, then earned an MBA at Liberty University, the school founded by Jerry Falwell that’s grown into the largest Christian university in the country. This trajectory is also common for homeschooled kids: they often excel academically, having already developed the self-directed work habits that come from learning without a teacher constantly checking in. But they tend to feel most comfortable in evangelical institutions rather than secular or religiously mixed ones, which keeps them inside an insulated evangelical world even as adults.
Harp’s public rise began with her criticism of the medical establishment. She has said she developed stage two bone cancer in her twenties and experienced medical malpractice that left her in severe pain, and she credits Trump’s first-term “Right to Try” policy — which allowed people in serious medical distress to access experimental treatments — with saving her life. Recent reporting, including from the Washington Post, has raised serious questions about the timeline and accuracy of that story. Whatever the full truth turns out to be, the underlying instinct — a deep suspicion of mainstream medicine, alongside mainstream education and mainstream media — is itself a recognizable feature of homeschool culture. It was her outspoken criticism of the medical system that made her a rising star in MAGA circles and brought her into Trump’s orbit in the first place.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t a story about poverty or isolation in a remote, rural sense. Many homeschooling families I knew, including Harp’s, were upper-middle or upper class, with college-educated parents in white-collar careers who could afford to homeschool on a single income. Homeschooling, in this context, is a luxury.
This is where the story became personal for me this week. Natalie’s father, Robert “Bob” Harp, had studied to become a pastor at Dallas Theological Seminary before moving into business, where he found real success as a real estate broker and taught adjunct classes at Christian business schools. My own father attended Talbot Theological Seminary. And toward the end of his career, Bob Harp became a full-time administrator at Biola University — the Bible Institute of Los Angeles — where my mother also worked and knew him personally. When I called her this week to ask about him, she described him as one of the nicest men she knew: generous, kind, well-liked by colleagues and students alike.
Which makes what happened next even harder. In the summer of 2020, amid COVID isolation and the Black Lives Matter protests, Bob Harp died by suicide. According to multiple news reports, Natalie and her mother initially tried to keep that fact private, telling people he had simply died in his sleep. That instinct toward secrecy, toward protecting family dignity above all else, is itself very much a product of the evangelical and homeschooling culture they came from. It was Preston who eventually broke with that story, refusing to go along with the cover version — a decision that appears central to why he’s now cut off from his mother and sister entirely.
Less than a month after her father’s death, Natalie Harp stood on stage at the 2020 Republican National Convention, telling her medical story and praising Donald Trump. That appearance was her breakthrough. Shortly after, she and her mother relocated from Irvine, California to Palm Beach, Florida, positioning her near Mar-a-Lago and setting her on the path to the role she holds today.
I’m not a psychologist, and I want to be careful about that. But I do know this specific evangelical homeschooling subculture, because I came out of it too. Put the pieces together — an upbringing with limited exposure to mainstream culture and peer socialization, deep suspicion of professional medicine, rigid patriarchal family structure with fathers positioned as protectors against a hostile world, and a culture that rewards conformity and punishes rebellion — and it becomes much easier to understand how someone shaped by all of that could end up exactly where Harp is now.
By most accounts, she’s become utterly devoted to Trump — so devoted that he has reportedly joked everyone else around him will eventually leave to pursue their own careers and money, but she won’t. She appears to genuinely believe she’s doing God’s work by promoting him. She was raised, it seems, to distrust the institutions — media, medicine, mainstream knowledge systems — that underpin a functioning liberal democracy, and she’s had a personal experience of one of those systems (medicine) failing her in a way that reinforced that distrust at a deep level. Her father’s suicide, arriving right as she moved into Trump’s orbit, appears to have been the catalyst that pushed her fully into this new chapter of her life.
Last week, the Daily Beast published excerpts from letters Harp has written to Trump, and reading them alongside everything above adds another layer. In one, she describes losing her focus after “dwelling on the past and the pain of losing my dad,” and writes that she fears being “lowered” in Trump’s opinion — not because she cares what others think, she insists, but because she never wants to bring him anything but joy. She thanks him for being her “Guardian and Protector in this life,” language that echoes almost exactly what evangelical girls, especially those raised homeschooled, are taught to seek: a guardian and protector against a threatening world.
A second excerpt has her asking Trump to tell her when she fails, telling him he has “the absolute right” to reprimand her when she deserves it, because no one else knows or cares about her more. She references a promise he made her “after losing my dad,” and thanks him for making sure she got to visit Scotland and Ireland, trips her father had always wanted for her. Once again, her father’s death surfaces directly in a letter to Trump — with Trump cast, unmistakably, in something like a surrogate father role.
Both letters carry an undertone of isolation within Trump’s broader circle — there have been reports that many people around Trump find her presence strange and have leaked this material partly to embarrass her — alongside an intense, almost devotional focus on pleasing Trump specifically.
I understand Harp, and I can even sympathize with her. We came from the same world, navigated similar churches and schools, and it turns out our parents even knew each other. None of that changes the fact that someone shaped this way probably shouldn’t be the person controlling and filtering the information that reaches the president of the United States. Any world leader needs to be confronted with reality, not shielded from it. It seems clear that Natalie Harp is dealing with real difficulties, that there’s something unhealthy in the dynamic between her and Trump, and that she has played a significant role in insulating him from reality during this second term.
More broadly, this is another instance of a pattern I keep coming back to: American evangelical culture has done more than any other force in American life to build Donald Trump’s political career, sell him to the right, arm him with theological and culture-war language, and wall him off from reality. Individual people like Natalie Harp sit right at the center of that story.
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