Until now, Natalie Harp was known only to Washington insiders and people weird enough to read insidery books about the administration. But Harp has officially escaped containment.
She is about to be a full-fledged character in the dramedy of the Trump White House, discussed in the news and recognized by ordinary people. And while the White House and its allies are pretending to be outraged about that fact, it’s completely appropriate and long overdue. There is literally no single person who spends as much time at the side of the president of the United States as her; the idea that it should somehow be off-limits to discuss her role is bonkers. So let’s review what got us here.
At a campaign speech on Sunday, Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned Harp in a single sentence, as part of a criticism of the president for being distracted by unimportant things. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The incident to which Ossoff may have been referring was the fact that when Trump did that plane switcheroo on his way back from Turkey last month, one of the few aides huddled with him inside a catering container was not his national security adviser or chief of staff but Harp, whose job seems to consist of 1) following Trump around with a portable printer so she can produce paper copies of articles that praise him, tweets that praise him, and anything else that praises him, making him feel that everything is going great and everyone loves him, which has led her to be dubbed the “Human Printer”; and 2) typing up the Truth Social posts he dictates.
If there’s more to her job than that, it’s basically to make Trump feel good at all times; she’s his emotional support aide. Those occasional cabinet meetings in which everyone tells Trump how blessed and honored they are to be working in his service aren’t enough; he needs that validation on 24-7 IV drip, and that’s what Natalie Harp provides.
She’s with Trump whether he’s in the White House, travelling to a foreign country, or golfing at one of his clubs, a proximity that has apparently caused a good deal of unease among his other staffers. As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in their book Regime Change, “Trump had taken to telling his staff that Natalie (or ‘Nathalie,’ as he would call her, using a French pronunciation) was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids. ‘All of you will go off and make money,’ he would say. ‘She’ll never leave me.’”
Harp is neither a Svengali nor a Rasputin, but in this White House, she’s an incredibly important figure. She is the most important channel through which he receives and distributes information, and because Trump is impulsive, mercurial, and has the emotional regulation of a toddler, the person most responsible for determining his psychological state is central to the work of the administration.
I have no opinion on whether Trump and Harp are having an affair. He cheated on all his wives, and there’s no reason to believe he isn’t still doing it with somebody or other; it might be Harp, or it might not be. But given the letters revealed in a 2024 New York Times article, it certainly seems that their relationship is romantic even if it isn’t sexual, at least from her end. The kind of ecstatic devotion Harp describes is beyond the normal employer-employee relationship, or even the closest friendship:
In 2023, Ms. Harp sent a series of letters to Mr. Trump that unnerved people around him, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.
“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.
“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”
“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”
Who among us hasn’t said to our boss, “You are all that matters to me” and “I want to bring you joy.” No one? Well then.
There’s another line in Regime Change that jumps out, one about the internal reaction to the way Trump has redecorated the Oval Office in his particular chintzy Saddam-meets-Scarface style, with gold appliques slapped on every available surface: “When Trump asked White House residence staff what they thought of the glittering display, most responses were muted, but his devout aide Natalie Harp would gush with delight.”
It’s remarkable that all Ossoff had to do was say Natalie Harp’s name and Republicans immediately lost their minds. White House communications director Steven Cheung mustered all the class and professionalism for which he is known and tweeted “John Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.”
“Cuck,” for the uninitiated, has become the go-to insult on the right, including among White House staffers, because their identities are defined by sexual insecurity.
Republicans in the media chimed in with their own eruption of rage, pretending to be feminist allies defending Harp’s wounded honor against Ossoff’s horrifying attack. “What a gross misogynistic thing to say,” said Marc Thiessen. “You ow [sic] this young woman an apology.” “Who accuses women of behaving like that because he doesn’t like their boss” said Ari Fleischer. “This guy should be ashamed.”
Pardon, behaving like what? Who’s the one making assumptions here?
Did Ossoff’s comment carry an unspoken implication that listeners were invited to fill in for themselves? Sure. But that implication could just as easily be not “They’re having an affair,” but rather “Trump keeps this young, pretty, bleached-blonde, stiletto-heeled woman by his side because he’s horny for anyone who reminds him of the daughter about whom he has repeatedly expressed sexual interest.”
It seems that Republicans are the ones who jumped instantly to the conclusion that merely mentioning that Trump keeps Harp constantly at his side means you’re saying they’re having an affair. As Shelby Talcott of Semafor reports, the pushback on Ossoff from the White House was so intense precisely because “Harp’s proximity to Trump has unnerved some of his aides and sparked unfounded rumors about a relationship.”
So please, spare us the fake umbrage about how offensive it is to say Harp’s name. It’s not as though when Ossoff contrasted Trump “doing his job” with “traveling with Natalie” he was minimizing her deeply complex and substantive contribution to federal policy-making. Her job is to print things out for Trump and type out his Truth Social posts. That’s what she does. She’s an emotional support aide. He picked her for this job and keeps her in it because of how she looks and her rapturous devotion to him. The fact that she plays such a central role in Trump’s White House is exactly why she deserves much more attention than she’s already gotten.
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