Images made with ChatGPT. Click to enlarge to full screen
In my Substack, “Trump Is a Chaff Machine — and the Media Keeps Locking On,” I dismissed the Natalie Harp story as chaff—a cloud of gossip irresistible to the media and obscuring far more consequential things Donald Trump was doing.
I wasn’t entirely wrong. But I wasn’t entirely right, either.
The real story isn’t whether Natalie Harp is romantically smitten with Donald Trump. It is that Trump appears to have placed someone whose defining qualification is her unconditional devotion at the point through which information and access to the president must pass.
Harp may not be functioning as Trump’s chief of staff, but she appears to exercise one of that office’s most consequential powers: serving as a gatekeeper to the president. She helps determine what Trump sees, who reaches him and, at times, what appears under his name on Truth Social. Trump doesn’t drink. But if adulation were alcohol, Harp would be the aide who made sure his glass never ran dry.
Her feelings about Trump matter only because they may influence how she exercises that power. A gatekeeper’s job ordinarily requires judgment, independence and the willingness to tell a president what he does not want to hear. Harp’s letters suggest that her overriding concern is never to disappoint him. That is not evidence of a romance. It is evidence that the person filtering Trump’s world may be temperamentally incapable of challenging him.
She has gone from being someone chasing the president's golf cart to someone metaphorically riding in it with him.
May 2, 2023: Natalie Harp runs uphill behind Trump’s golf-cart procession at Turnberry in Scotland. Less than three years later, she would be sitting outside the Oval Office as one of the president’s principal gatekeepers. Tony Nicoletti/Reach Publishing Services.
My argument was—and remains—valid: the gossipy Harp coverage, prompted partly by Jon Ossoff’s taunts and amplified when Trump took the bait, diverted attention from far more consequential presidential conduct.
What I have always found significant is how seriously Trump has taken people whom no other president in history would have paid attention to. Several were among the former loyalists I wrote about yesterday in “When His Admirers Leave, Trump Builds Monuments.”
Fast-forward a little more than three years from her golf cart chasing days, and Harp was one of a small handful of aides Trump took with him on the now-infamous catering-truck ride—while Cabinet officials and other senior aides were left aboard the decoy plane.
Among those Trump chose were Dan Scavino, who began his relationship with Trump as a golf caddie, and Walt Nauta, Trump’s former valet and former co-defendant in the classified-documents case. Nauta now serves as director of Oval Office operations.
The catering-truck passenger list was revealing. When Trump believed he might be in danger, the aides he brought with him were not his highest-ranking advisers—the people one would hope were best equipped to advise him if Air Force One were attacked—but those whose relationships with him had been built on personal service and loyalty: the people who made him feel most comfortable.
That is the Natalie Harp story worth covering. Not whether the letters revealed by Michael Wolff show that she is in love with Trump, but why a president has made personal devotion a qualification for proximity and power.
How the image sausage was made: I gave ChatGPT the Virginia Slims parody concept and described the two scenes. Its first version put Trump and Harp in airline-style seats and made the supposedly abandoned officials look as though they were about to climb into the catering truck. I sent it back with two corrections: improvised seating and a wide stretch of tarmac separating the truck from the officials. The result is above.
This is what I mean when I write: The idea is mine; the artist is ChatGPT.
Update: If you don’t have a subscription to the NY Times to read this Jamelle Bouie essay… where he agrees with what I’ve written…
Here’s a summary from ChatGTP:
Bouie’s central argument is that the Natalie Harp story matters far less because of speculation about her personal relationship with Trump than because of the extraordinary influence she appears to have over the information reaching the president. Harp travels with him, spends more time with him than other aides, posts and responds to people in his name, reports only to him, and literally follows him with a portable printer supplying material she finds online. Her inclusion on the secret military flight out of Turkey — while senior officials such as Bessent, Rubio and Miller remained on Air Force One — is another indication of how central she has become. If she is effectively curating Trump’s view of events, Bouie argues, then she may be one of the most consequential people in the administration.
The larger point is about Trump’s presidency, not Harp herself. Bouie portrays Trump as having dismantled or bypassed the traditional systems intended to give presidents reliable, professionally vetted information and to protect them from isolation and groupthink. Instead, he increasingly depends on loyalists who have little incentive to challenge him and may actively feed his prejudices and preferred narratives. Harp is important because she embodies that system: a devoted aide helping construct an information bubble around a president who already rejects unwelcome facts. Bouie’s conclusion is stark — the sensational aspect of the story may explain the attention, but the real danger is a president making enormously consequential decisions while increasingly detached from dependable information and surrounded by people who reinforce his version of reality.
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