The past decade has seen a procession of loyal and deluded Trump sycophants, often with bottle-blonde or excessively bouffant hair for full pantomime-villain effect: Anthony Scaramucci, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Pete Hegseth, Laura Loomer. Each has managed to embarrass themselves with some batshit-level obsequiousness; some have turned against their old master; but none were ever in the same league as Trump’s latest devotee. We now have the final boss in the video game. The victor holding the belt aloft. Ladies and gentleman, your champion: Natalie Harp.
The 35-year-old “special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president” – a tautological, nonsensical job title which gives off the energy of a toddler in possession of a primary-coloured rotary phone (as well as that incredible Marc Jacobs meme), Harp entered the public consciousness after Senator Jon Ossoff jibed that the president wasn’t interested in governing, and just wanted to “travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar", aka Air Force One. Political junkies on the Hill would be familiar with the dropped mononym (as one source later told the BBC: ”She's always around. Literally, always”) but for the more casual viewer this caused a “Becky with the good hair”-esque quest for identification.
Natalie Harp, ‘special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president’. Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images
While Ossoff’s clip went viral, as the soundbites of the Democrats’ future star often do, “Natalie” was not a mainstream story until, in the manner of Melania calling a press conference to declare that she had no relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the White House went full Streisand-effect and bawled out a CNN reporter for asking about Harp, thereby ensuring that the woman who writes letters to Trump in which she declares him “all that matters to her” has been in the spotlight for the past week. While Trump himself yelled at the reporter in the room, the White House press account followed up to tell her that “someday your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.”
The question in question: “Jon Ossoff said you'd rather travel with your aide, Natalie Harp, and build the ballroom than do your job as president. What is your response?” I am sure you can agree that those kids will be booking a course of therapy and heading to the deed poll office, stat.
So, what do we know about Natalie Harp? First, we know that she is referred to by some staffers as “the human printer” because she runs around after Trump with a mini-printer to provide him with hard copies of reading material: tweets of praise, articles from conspiracy sites, and, presumably, the menus for local McDonald’s. You might be thinking “runs around” is hyperbole, but no, there is footage of her – I don’t know how to make this sound any less like a cartoon – “sprinting across great distances” in pursuit of Donald Trump in a golf cart. In fairness, it has been noted that Harp carries a battery pack alongside her portable printer, which makes her at least 90% more competent than the rest of the inner circle.
One must surely be concerned for Harp herself, who, in some of her letters, writes to Trump that she forgets to eat and sleep because she is so intensely besotted with him
Second: Harp claims Trump cured her of bone cancer, which, given he once posted – although, as it turns out, was actually Harp posting – an AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus healing the sick, he probably has no trouble believing. Indeed, it was a 2019 appearance on Fox News, when Harp told the story of how she had been helped by experimental treatments, that first caught the president’s attention. Harp credited Trump’s Right to Try Act, although it turned out that her treatment preceded the passage of the act, and the medicines she received were already FDA-approved.
Nevertheless, Trump invited her to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention. Months later she was hired as a presenter at the rightwing One America News Network. By 2022, she’d made it to the West Wing; and by 2026, she was in a food cargo cart being smuggled off the aforementioned Air Force One in case of an Iranian attack. One imagines that last detail, in particular, did not come up as a possibility during her high school careers fair.
Harp has said that her “first exposure to politics” was watching Trump, a claim undermined by her estranged brother revealing that she used to write to George Bush as a child. But it’s true that Harp now only has eyes for the current president. To put this into some kind of context: I imagine Harp was not overly bothered by the food cart incident – enclosed in a constricted airless space – given that she once voluntarily rode in the boot of an SUV to accompany Trump to a court appearance rather than be left behind. This is perhaps the first known example of a self-kidnapping. As if that were not extreme enough, Harp never takes a day off; was once discovered in Trump’s “private quarters” (one can only pray this is not a euphemism); and has written many, many more intimate letters than the one excerpted above.
When asked what he thought his sister’s infatuation for Trump was based on, Harp’s brother said that he didn’t “think it is physical attraction, let’s get real”. As amusing as it is to learn of yet another spectacularly bizarre character in the Trumpverse, it is also, of course, entirely terrifying, because once again we have someone without security clearance at the heart of global power. Trump’s son Eric defended Harp as “one of the hardest working people” in the administration (surely the definition of a low bar), and it is the nature of that work which is most troubling. As well as curating the only information that the president of the United States seems motivated to look at, Harp has also been revealed as the frequent true scribe of Trump’s completely deranged Truth Social posts, which invariably read like a cat walking across a keyboard with the caps lock on. These are posts which have given rise to stock-market fluctuations, geopolitical conflict and dangerous medical misinformation. So that’s not great. One must surely also be concerned for Harp herself, who, in some of her letters, writes to Trump that she forgets to eat and sleep because she is so intensely besotted with him. Again, probably not the healthiest.
At present there is no indication where this dynamic will end, although Trump apparently has said he loves Harp like a daughter – which means something very different depending on whether you are Tiffany or Ivanka. One thing is for sure: Melania, who has been unseen since a late-stage World Cup game, isn’t thrilled with all the Harping on. Making an appearance in the Rose Garden this week, the First Lady addressed the press: “I heard you missed me. Here I am.”
Hannah Jane Parkinson is an award-winning journalist and the author of A Joy of Small Things (Faber). To order at a discounted price, go to the Nerve bookshop.