[Update at 11:52PM ET on 8/20/2026: Natalie Harp’s creepy letters to President Donald J. Trump have been revealed in full, though it remains possible that many others are yet unseen.}
You may think you already know all the ways in which Natalie Harp—an attractive 35-year-old blonde woman who looks somewhat like the very Donald Trump daughter the president has long openly lusted after (see here, here, here, here, and here) and who appeared out of nowhere praising Trump on Fox News at a key moment in the 2020 presidential campaign season—is an unprecedented national security threat.
You don’t.
This remains true even though, over the last week—ever since Americans learned that during Operation Orange Chicken the president chose to save his new personal aide’s life instead of either the United States Secretary of State (Marco Rubio) or the United States Secretary of the Treasury (Scott Bessent)—many Americans have been worried about how Harp came to be at the center of the people’s business in the White House.
As those questions have mounted, the White House hasn’t been able to answer them.
In fact, it hasn’t even tried.
It won’t make Harp available for interviews; has attacked anyone who mentions Harp with shocking viciousness; and responds to queries about her only with hagiographic praise that wouldn’t be out of place on a government-run Pyongyang bathroom stall.
It won’t even clearly state what the official position is that Donald Trump has now given to an inexperienced young person—Harp was in her mid-20s, and had only just recently finished her schooling in Business Administration at two religious schools, when she entered Trump’s inner circle—even though it’s we taxpayers who are paying $150,000/year to Harp, which notably is about 250% over the 2026 U.S. median salary.
Sometimes the White House says Natalie Harp is Special Assistant to the President.
Sometimes the White House says she is Executive Assistant to the President.
Sometimes the White House says she’s the White House Appointments Secretary.
When she worked on the 2024 Trump presidential campaign, Trump declined to give her any title at all.
For her part, Harp refers to herself a “self-employed entrepreneur” on LinkedIn—thereby erasing her massive government salary and her employment by America’s taxpayers.
Sometimes the White House implies that it’s been grooming Harp to be White House Press Secretary, though besides being telegenic and having briefly worked on-air for a fake-news organization, it’s not clear what would qualify her for that position, either.
Sometimes Harp is merely said to be the leading “gatekeeper” to the President of the United States—i.e., to get to him, you must (rather inexplicably) go through her, first.
What’s clear is that none of these jobs have to do with any of the subjects Ms. Harp studied in school. Nor—far more oddly—does any of it apparently have to do with anything Harp actually does on a daily basis. As readers will see in the list below, nothing Harp does in the White House appears to be worth any salary at all—let alone the well over half a million dollars Harp would earn over the course of a four-year presidential term—for major-media reports unanimously establish that what Harp does is no more than a series of things Trump should do himself or no one should:
She types out social media posts that Trump dictates. Given that Trump and his doctors have consistently said that he’s in excellent physical health, and given that his fingers work and he’s literally sitting beside Harp as she types out his social media posts, and given that most of those social media posts do nothing more than diminish the Office of the President and the standing of the United States in the world—truly, you’ve got to read them to believe how deranged they are (see here, here, here, here, and here)—it would surely be the general consensus of mental health experts, former diplomats, attorneys, and politicos that Trump ought to either stop using social media altogether or else type his own posts. His doing so would presumably reduce their number, force him to consider his words and their number far more carefully than he does when he can simply project his bile directly onto Harp’s furiously typing fingertips, and reduce $150,000/year in federal waste and fraud—exactly the task he set Elon Musk and DOGE to in 2025 but appears only to believe in if it doesn’t effect his own daily routine.
She prints out deranged internet content that sends President Trump spiraling in dangerous ways—and much of what she hands to him is farcical, made up, misleading, disinformation, factually impossible, or mere conspiracy theory. The President of the United States should spend, under his Oath of Office, exactly no time each day surfing the web for the latest crackpot content online, but neither should we be paying $150,000 per annum for someone else to do that. Why? Because the end result is the same: an alternately comical and dangerously misinformed stream of presidential declarations born of a man spending much of his day reading the dregs of the internet in printed-out format. Vanity Fair reports that anything Harp hands to Trump fits into one of three categories that are broadly classifiable as “satisfaction, validation, and jubilation.” So either Harp is deliberately appealing to Trump’s worst psychic demons, getting him to stew daily over his enemies’ comeuppance with a grim, devious satisfaction; or trying to find obscure sources to validate whatever he already believes, which given his native ignorance on most topics and penchant for conspiracy theories means she’s trawling low-quality websites and anonymous digital screeds to pander to the president’s limited digital and/or media literacy; or she’s encouraging him to read about his own victories, which is a waste of any president’s time as it does no more than stroke his ego. None of this constitutes the work of a U.S. president, and none of this is healthy for anyone—let alone a man obsessed with vengeance, adulation, and disinformation.
She ensures that the President of the United States doesn’t read anything of value. As established in Proof of Collusion (2018), Proof of Conspiracy (2019), and Proof of Corruption (2020), Donald Trump infamously doesn’t read his daily intel briefings (the “PDB”), insists that all presentations to him be oral, and when he must read anything demands it be bullet-pointed and no more than a page long (even if the document it summarizes is hundreds of pages). He’s regularly said, by those who’ve worked closely with him, to be functionally illiterate (see here, here, here, and here) as well as someone who—and Trump actually admits this—reads only “about myself.” Putting aside that this likely should disqualify him from any leadership position, let alone the presidency, it’s true that it’s conventionally been the role of a POTUS’ special assistants to bring him the manageable number of newspapers he reads daily, even if, as would surely be the case with Mr. Trump, he reads only their headlines. Harp appears to have exactly the opposite role. She gives the president zero newspapers, magazines, or briefings—ever—but instead creates the appearance of informing the President of the United States about current events by presenting him with squibs written by trolls and cranks. So Harp must be dinged here not just for what she does do, but for what she doesn’t.
She acts as his moral support and “human binky.” This isn’t a slur—this is the reporting that has come from Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, a Trump biographer and White House Correspondent who says that in the White House it’s a settled and accepted fact that Trump needs Harp around for moral support—someone who’ll praise and validate him endlessly, beyond the normal human bounds of such effusive goosing. Haberman is the one who described Harp as a “human binky” and confirmed that White House staffers likewise see her this way. While it’s beyond the scope of this report to say whether someone who needs as much second-to-second validation as Donald Trump does—and while it’s beyond the skills of this author to state definitively what he suspects is true, which is that such a need indicates Trump lacks an internal sense of self-worth—can ably serve as President of the United States, what’s certain is that Trump should be paying Harp to be his binky, not us. Moreover, and as importantly, this role should not be commingled with other, actually administratively urgent roles that a POTUS needs filled. Certainly, Harp-qua-binky should not make it her business to keep away from Trump other White House officials who might be doing something other than fluffing his shattered ego. Her acts of obstruction are undoubtedly counterproductive to any person running one of the world’s superpowers with skill and adroitness.
And yet, having said all the above, I’ll say too that if you thought this was the worst of the Natalie Harp Situation, you’d be dead wrong. You’d be wrong because the full scope of the problem here can’t be readily conceived of; in fact, it’s so unthinkable—by way of being so unprecedented—that it would be astonishing if any American, at least without first doing a deep dive on Harp themselves, would think of it on their own.
So let’s start with the basics.
We begin this lengthy report with simple, core realities that are nevertheless unusual and unsettling:
Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp is in closer daily physical proximity to the President of the United States daily than anyone on Earth.
Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp has more regular access to the often classified information received by the President of the United States daily than anyone on Earth besides the president himself.
Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp, who has no background in any arena that’s relevant to the presidency or her current government job—Law, Journalism, Intelligence, National Security, Military Studies, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Political Science, Sociology, or Public Policy—is the chief decider of what information the President of the United States receives. And thus far her decision has been to “play into the less productive and more troublesome parts of his nature, putting things in front of him that aren’t vetted”—meaning that, by volume, Natalie Harp is the leading misinformation agent in the White House, evem as her sole victim is the leader of the free world.
The President of the United States deems Harp so mission-critical to his life and political career that he not only says she’s the only person in the world who “loves [me] as much as my wife and children,” but chose her—and not his Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Deputy Chief of Staff (Stephen Miller), chief spokesman (Steven Cheung), or chief speechwriter (Ross Worthington)—to survive the “enormous” risk of a missile attack against Air Force One in Turkey last month. This means that Trump is treating Harp as emergency personnel in the White House when (see supra) there’s no evidence she does anything of any value.
From the foregoing, we’d at least assume that Natalie Harp is the most studied, vetted, tracked, generally known-about person in the White House. After all, one can’t, surely, be in the closest proximity to both Donald Trump and all the information he receives daily—especially under circumstances in which he appears to trust you and care about you more than almost anyone—without having being thoroughly checked out, right?
Well, keep that thought in mind, as you’re going to be more than disappointed.
What value Natalie Harp brings to the White House isn’t the only mystery at the heart of her presence mere feet from the President of the United States wherever he goes.
Far more importantly, Harp’s entire life is a black box almost no one has seen inside.
Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp did not undergo any security checks whatsoever for the first year-plus of her time in the White House.
Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp was the reason these security checks did not occur; in other words, she refused to agree to them, and issued refusals over and over without being willing to offer a reason for them.
Reliable major-media reporting reveals that Harp came onto Trump’s radar when she very publicly said (in 2019, during a Fox News interview) that he had saved her life by signing a so-called “Right to Try” bill in 2018 that let her get experimental treatment for her bone cancer. The problem? Medical experts years ago debunked this lie by Harp, confirming that she would have been well aware when she got her cancer treatments that Trump and his bill had nothing to do with them or her cancer remission. (There is much more on this infra.) In other words, Harp’s whole MAGA “origin story” is a lie.
Harp’s own words establish that she lied, as in a 2024 campaign documentary she can be heard saying (falsely) that Trump was the first politician she ever became interested in and (also falsely, if her “Right to Try” story were at all true) that she became invested in Trump because of his political acumen: “Politics was never something I liked. When I was sick, I started watching the Republican debates. He was my first exposure to politics, and I loved it. Like, this guy, he gets it.” In fact (see infra), Harp’s family reports that her obsession with Republican politics began when she was a child. Yet Trump actively participated in Harp’s cynical ruse, pretending that he hadn’t already come to know her extremely well when he introduced her as a political prop at the 2019 Faith & Freedom Coalition “Road to Majority” Summit (which fell in the midst of his presidential campaign and his ardent wooing of Christian evangelicals). “They were preparing her for death. Her name is Natalie Harp, and because of ‘Right to Try,’ she’s now living, and I think doing phenomenally well. And somebody said she’s here. Are you here, Natalie? Where’s Natalie? Will you come up here, please?” No, “somebody” didn’t casually tell Trump, “she’s here.” Trump operationally transported Harp to a spot on stage where she could used as a premeditated campaign setpiece at a time he was getting bad press for having made fun of evangelicals behind their backs. And as we’ll see infra, he also knew his bill had nothing to do with her recovery.
Harp’s father committed suicide in 2020, and she thereafter lied to everyone about how it happened—a plot her mother supported, suggesting some possible mental instability in Harp’s remaining parent even putting aside what we now know (as is discussed much more, infra): there is a very real possibility that Robert Harp’s death was linked to Donald Trump’s domestic policies in a way that Natalie Harp might have felt required her to lie about it in order to stay in Trump and his team’s good graces during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign she wanted desperately to be a part of.
The foregoing alleged scheme to lie about a parent’s death is troubling because the parent apparently willing to go along with it—Natalie’s mother—was the one who homeschooled Harp for many years, and is now said by her son Preston Harp to be not just “extremely conservative” but obsessed with giving Natalie a “Christ-led education.” That terminology raises the possibility that Harp’s textbooks as a child were religious texts, and that her knowledge of contemporary civilization is therefore minimal.
Harp did not leave her “Christ-led” schooling to begin non-religious schooling at any point—as in fact she’s never received any non-religious schooling. She went right from her “Christ-led” homeschooling to religious-school study at Point Loma Nazarene University and then a religious-school master’s at Liberty.
Reliable major-media reporting confirms that inside the White House Harp is known as a “loner” who “forgets to eat and sleep” because her devotion to Trump as a pseudoreligious figure (see infra) is so extreme as to be nearly monastic. More than once, observers in journalism have written that Harp appears to consider Trump the Second Coming of Christ, an observation buttressed by the fact that when she had a vlog on the fake-news website OANN she would close out each episode with either a Bible quote or a Trump quote—appearing to treat these two discrete categories of citation as literally interchangeable.
Ms. Harp is estranged from her brother Preston in part because, unlike her, he escaped his mother’s nefarious influence and Natalie didn’t. Natalie now won’t speak to Preston, having been indoctrinated by her mother’s thesis of “American Exceptionalism,” under which thesis she for years tried to feed Natalie and Preston the “delusion” that “[her thesis] is the [sole] correct way of looking at things—that the United States is the boss of the world, and that slavery was normal back then [in the 1800s], so people weren’t bad because they had slaves.” Yes, that’s right, Natalie Harp was raised in a slavery apologist home. Worse still, there’s evidence that the other reason for Preston’s estrangement from Natalie and her mother may have to do with Robert Harp’s death—and may therefore be, also, connected to Natalie’s unhealthy obsession with Donald Trump (more infra).
Harp never revealed to Trump that she has a history of becoming obsessed with GOP presidents and trying to get near to them by inappropriate communications. Her brother describes this as an “obsession” of hers that has lasted for decades.
Needless to say, at this point the sheer volume of red flags here is enough to, going forward, keep Harp out of the White House forever. Ex ante, it would have ensured that she never worked there in the first instance. We can now see why she might have refused in the first instance to fill out security-clearance paperwork or have a deep background check conducted by security professionals inside the federal government.
—Natalie Harp, lying on national TV at the 2020 Republican National Convention
So Harp’s origin story is a lie; she refused to let any experts look into it; and yet she wanted to have the closest proximity and access to the President of the United States of anyone on Earth after a quarter-century of religious education had allowed her to transmute a lifelong obsession with GOP presidents to a belief—shared by Donald Trump, worryingly enough—that Trump himself is God’s “Chosen One” on Earth.
Harp’s relationship with Trump is thus revealed as not just delusional and toxic but mutually parasitic, as she feeds Trump’s dangerous delusion that—despite being a serial rapist, convicted criminal, draft dodger, lifelong con man, serial adulterer, and so on—he’s been personally chosen by a God he doesn’t actually believe in to rule the world…
…even as he, in turn, by accepting this heretical premise, feeds Harp’s delusion that she’s now become a latter-day Apostle.
It’s no wonder that it took complaints by numerous White House officials—political and intelligence and security staff alike—for President Trump to be willing to step in and force a security check for Harp, which fact of course only means that the one that was ultimately done (which she passed) was pro forma. It was, that is, conducted by men and women who already understood the result the president wanted from them.
So it would be folly to submit that Natalie Harp received an unbiased, professional, careful, thorough security review. She almost certainly didn’t—or at least no more than Jared Kushner ever did. In other words, Harp was seen as a security risk by all the people in the White House who are expert at spotting these things—to include spotting someone so mentally troubled that she might lash out with violence if she were suddenly torn from a man she likens to Jesus—and Mr. Trump overruled them because he likes being likened to Jesus and can’t fathom the massive personal danger to himself that definitionally accompanies such a third-party delusion.
More to the point, Trump has a history of grudgingly agreeing to basically rushed and fake security checks on his favorite people. He fundamentally has no belief or interest in the security-clearance process, which is why he stole dozens and dozens of boxes of classified documents from the American people in 2020 and 2021. Nor does the man have any abiding trust in those who conduct the checks, which is why he treats them as necessary only when public relations considerations force his hand. (As we’ll see below, Trump largely picks as agents people he knows wouldn’t pass background checks, which is another reason he’s largely eschewed them in his political career.)
And now here’s where things start getting really bad.
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