Special assistant Natalie Harp (left) peers out of the window of Air Force One as she and her boss travel to the U.S. Open for the men’s final on September 7, 2025. Photo credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons
You would have thought that MAGA influencers discovered that Natalie Harp works for Donald Trump just this week.
The latest manufactured distraction from the disaster that is Donald Trump’s second presidency came when one of the more presidential-looking Democrats on the stump this summer, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, included Harp in the list of silly things Trump is obsessed with. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said at a campaign rally. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
Forget Iran! the MAGA political consultants shrieked. Forget the economy! Forget measles infections collectively higher than those reported in the previous 30 years! Forget explosive diarrhea!
A Democrat has impugned a Republican woman’s virtue! “Jon Ossoff owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her,” Newt Gingrich, that man of honor who told his wife he was leaving her for another woman when she was hospitalized after cancer surgery, posted on X. “If a conservative Republican had attacked a liberal Democrat working professional woman the way Ossoff smeared Natalie Harp there would be cries to kick them off the ticket and reject this kind of misogynistic language diminishing and smearing someone who is simply doing their job.”
It reminds me of that moment in Evita when the fascist First Lady of Argentina fumes to Prince Fuspoli, “Did you hear that? They called me a whore. They actually called me a whore!” and the aide responds soothingly: “It’s an easy mistake. I’m still called an admiral, though I gave up the sea long ago.” Harp is not, I assure you, a sex worker, nor does she have that in her background, as Eva Peròn did.
All the same, Harp cuts an odd figure, even in a Trump entourage full of freaks like Laura Loomer, Mike Lindell, Rudolph Giuliani, Kari Lake, and Sydney Powell. Like them, she also has a self-designed job. Her title is both “special assistant to the president” and “executive assistant to the president.” But she is paid for something else entirely: to be Donald Trump’s best friend, his best cheerleader, and, as Ossoff claims he has heard, his “security blanket.”
But unlike Loomer, Lindell, Giuliani, and Powell, Harp does not immediately present as a garden troll. She presents as normal, and nice enough: at 35, she is blonde, Christian, pretty, and decently well-educated. In fact, unlike the cast is a stock female character we expect to encounter in Trump world: presidential daughter Ivanka Trump and first-term aide Hope Hicks come to mind. They all seem nice until you think about what all they actually do, which is to prop up and profit from one of the most venal, corrupt, and incompetent men to ever win the presidency.
However, Harp’s function also differs from what Ivanka and “Hopey,” as Trump called her before she testified against him in the January 6 inquiry, did. Harp’s job is not only to make sure that Donald Trump is insulated from whatever remnants of dissent or debate might still exist in the executive branch, but also to amplify and fulfill his every need. Furthermore, Hicks seems to have emerged from the “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” wing of the MAGA movement, where Trump is a sacred figure of historic significance.
A Trump worshipper and fetishist, Harp recalls Unity Mitford, described hilariously by a Hillsdale College blog writer as “a devoted Hitler groupie.” Mitford, in addition to being a devoted fascist was also batshit crazy and hung out in Hitler’s favorite restaurant until he noticed her. Similarly, Harp’s obsession with Trump began as fandom, and she appears to have reached out to him through his favorite media, Twitter (now X) and television. A minor media figure with a perch at OAN, Harp had been tweeting at him since March 2018, about how Trump’s Right to Try Act gave her access to a drug that cured her of a rare bone cancer. Finally, in 2019, Harp scored a Fox News interview that Trump saw. He invited her to tell her story at the 2020 convention, and after that, she appears to have cracked his inner circle.
(By the way, did Harp really have a rare bone cancer? I ask, not to be unkind or to suggest I know differently, but because, if she lied about the treatment, someone might want to confirm the diagnosis. People lie about being sick all the time.)
In any case, when January 6 caused most of Trump’s normie staff to flee in droves, Harp understood that a unique opportunity had presented itself and went into exile with her hero in Florida to help him plot his comeback. “I was stuck in the right place at the perfect time,” as Eva sings at the height of her political influence. “Filled a gap, I was lucky. But one thing I’ll say for me—no one else can fill it like I can.”
Before the Ossoff speech, Harp was a figure of fun among those around Trump and best known for strapping a portable printer so that she could spoon feed Trump the fawning press coverage and conspiracy theories that help him ignore reality. At one point, she was seen literally running after Trump’s golf cart in Scotland like a crazed Marine schlepping the company radio at Iwo Jima. Harp’s groveling apology note reveals that she had, of course, been deliberately excluded from the golf junket.
The subtext of these wacky, unserious antics are the constant rumors, stoked by Trump’s sexual history, his wife’s absence, and Harp’s ubiquity, that this special assistant is a little too special. This is, of course, why all the Republicans on X were yelling at Jon Ossoff, even though he never said that the pair are sexually intimate, while Mr. and Mrs. America would never even have known who Harp is, absent a storm of posts from Trump allies who brought it to everyone’s attention.
Trump’s staff and family are concerned about the optics, or perhaps the reality, of this situation for reasons that are unclear to me, but Harp is undeniably glued to the president in a way that seems obsessive. According to Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Harp’s slavishness is real. She
never takes a day off, not even on Sunday. She works out of the Oval Office and she’s got a regular seat on Marine One. She texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf. She stays up late with him drafting social media posts.
She rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.
Except for the staying up late posting thing, none of this is particularly unusual for a White House staffer. Working for the president is a brutal job even if you don’t have to run with a machine on your back or meet “exhausting” beauty standards. Although, according to the Brookings Institution, Trump has the highest year-by-year turnover rate, your average modern president loses about 70% of their “A-Team” staff regularly.
The more unusual, and more pertinent, aspect of Harp’s job is that she operates in parallel to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, a position designed to control all access to the president.
But because Harp is with Trump about 20 hours a day, she is an information conduit entirely separate from any policy process that might exist in the White House. Through Harp, who marinates in media garbage, the president
enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.
She is a platinum blonde geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough. She believes, or at least vehemently claims to believe, that he totally won the 2020 election. In the book “Regime Change,” by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump is described as explaining to people that Ms. Harp is the only one who loves him as much as his wife and children. All his other staff will go off and make money, Mr. Trump would say, but Ms. Harp will never leave him.
Let that sink in. The last person in the room, and the person who picks out racist memes for the President to post in the middle of the night, is Harp. Simultaneously, she is “the only one who loves him as much as his wife and children” and the “only one who will never leave him.”
Trump’s sense that the two of them share a special bond makes you realize that if only Monica Lewinsky had watched The Apprentice, she might have bagged Bill Clinton after all. According to Olivia Craighead at The Cut, who cites Trumpmeister Michael Wolff, “Eric Trump was confused by her presence, as were other staffers, the Secret Service even deemed her to be ‘a potential danger to herself as well as to the president.’”
Why? Well, aside from sneaking Laura Loomer in the kitchen door, Harp
is so wholly committed to Trump that she recently spent a summer living in a golf-club locker room just to be close to him. Wolff writes that when the campaign decamped to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for the summer, Harp was deliberately not given a room in an effort to push her out (others in Trump’s orbit had become wary of what was reportedly called “the Natalie situation”). Nevertheless, she appeared. “She had reached out to the grounds staff at the country club and gotten herself a maid’s room,” Wolff writes. “And when that proved too far from the main house to respond quickly enough to Trump’s calls, she relocated herself to the much closer women’s locker room, where, with undiminished proximity to Trump, she would spend the summer.”
Again, take a beat to absorb this: Harp spent the summer living in the women’s locker room at a New Jersey golf club where, by the way, Trump’s first wife is also buried. It’s so Addams family—and I am not talking John and Abigail.
That episode doesn’t just speak to her boundary-crossing devotion to Donald Trump, but also to the terrible security situation around the President, one that is periodically punctured by the man’s whims and fancies. You and I, for example, would not be granted access to any space that any POTUS was in without presenting credentials. No one had the authority to either lift her credentials, or the courage to stop her at the gate.
So, any Republican who posts about how preposterous it is that Harp and Trump might be doing the dirty boogie (to the extent the president can given his obvious exhaustion), is lying. Last year, Alex Isenstadt reported that Harp had actually been found in Trump’s boudoir—by Melania herself, no less.
This is a scene that I would pay money to see recreated by drag queens. As Isenstadt writes, “Harp didn't do well with boundaries” (another thing she has in common with her boss):
There was the time when a surprised Melania Trump stumbled upon Harp late at night in Trump’s private quarters at Mar-a-Lago, an area that was typically off-limits to those outside Trump’s family.
Harp was there to deliver Trump some documents and didn’t want to wait until the morning to give them to him."
This points to an undeniable fact about Harp’s peculiar determination to live in Donald Trump’s back pocket. Presidential body men are usually, well, men, and if they are women, they don’t have midnight working lunches in the First Bedroom. They aren’t smuggled out of Air Force One as essential staff while key cabinet members are left behind to die on the decoy plane.
If anyone is spreading rumors about a relationship between Trump and Harp more intimate than Baby and Binky—well, let’s just say that Jon Ossoff didn’t start them.
What I’m watching:
We just finished “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” (AppleTV, Amazon) which I could not recommend more. Based on a novel by Rufi Thorpe, Margo is a first-generation college student and a talented writer. She has an affair with an unscrupulous professor, and suddenly finds herself a second-generation single mother with no child care, no college degree, and no money. How does she make it work? By becoming an OnlyFans performer, of course. It’s a terrific show about class, family, and love, and it centers that age-old question: is sex work art? The cast, led out by a wonderful Elle Fanning, and backed up by—among others—Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman, does a uniformly terrific job. The courtroom scene at the end is unforgettable. The only thing I cannot figure out is why it is described as a comedy. Yes, there are humorous moments, but it’s a very serious show about women’s sexuality.
Short takes:
“The very human heartbreak of McKenna West’s surrogacy should not be tabloid fodder, and it should not be a political football,” Jessica Grose writes in the New York Times about the legal struggle surrounding a baby who will undergo three heart surgeries in the next 18 months. “But it is both, because the fertility industry in the United States is dangerously underregulated—a state of affairs that has only been further complicated by the fall of Roe.” Like most medical processes, surrogacy is regulated, if at all, by states. But what complicates how this case has been presented is that McKenna West lived in Alaska, where there was no possibility of medical care for this child’s underdeveloped heart. When West refused to have an abortion, as her contract provided, the parents actually agreed and asked her to come to California. Instead, West went to Texas for reasons that are still unclear—but were seized on by Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is in a tough race for Senate and is desperate to muster the voters who now know he is an adulterer. (August 19, 2026)
You will be shocked, shocked to learn that the Trump administration’s investigations of antisemitism on university campuses was a cynical ploy to cancel federal grants and loot endowments. According to a whistleblower, “The Trump administration’s findings that three Ivy League schools violated civil rights law by tolerating antisemitism were predetermined by political priorities that blew past the evidence and cast aside standard investigative procedures, according to a whistleblower account provided to Congress,” Ken Dilanian writes at MS NOW about a federal judge dismissing the case against Harvard doe to thin evidence. “The whistleblower complaint also accused Trump officials of telling investigators to interview Middle East studies professors, particularly focusing on Muslims, noting that one such interview of a Muslim professor was not to ‘get information,’ but instead to see ‘what he will say.’” (August 18, 2026)
“Oh, she’s running,” New York Times columnist Tressie MacMillan Cottom writes about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cottom is, of course, referring to the presidency—and she sees Ocasio-Cortez’s public egg-freezing exercise (which I am weirded out by, sorry) as part of a soft-launch strategy. “The rollout—personal, confessional and intimate—had all the social media savvy that made her a political star. It also gets ahead of the inevitable questions about how, or if, she will have children,” Cottom writes. “In short, Ocasio-Cortez has crafted a political message in which the form and content suggest that she will run as a woman but unlike how every woman before her was forced to run.” (August 14, 2026)
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.