How do you feel about zeal? Are you comfortable with it? Can you look into the slightly too-wide eyes of someone who says they’d do anything for their beliefs without feeling a twinge of unease? I’m not talking about someone who says, “I love Ohio State football.” I’m talking about someone who says, “I would burn my home and my possessions, don long brown robes, and travel the world on foot as a simple monk, begging for my meals, to prove my devotion to Matt Patricia.” Someone who says that and means it. Absolute, unstinting fealty, whether to a person or cause, can be unnerving to be around; we’ve all met K-pop fans. Now imagine someone bringing that same drive and intensity to getting James and the Giant Peach banned from the Roosevelt Elementary School library.
Natalie Harp, the White House aide who’s currently all over the news, has made a lot of people lose their minds over the past couple of weeks. I think a major reason is that she seems to possess genuine, boundless zeal for Donald Trump. It’s as if she’s a medieval knight who’s imprinted on the worst liege lord in the universe. Drowsy, malfunctioning garbage truck, I pledge my sword to you. This isn’t surprising, exactly—narcissists always attract followers, and any sufficiently personalist political leader will generate lackeys the way pollen generates sneezing—but it’s a different vibe from what we usually see in the Trump administration. We’re accustomed to Trump being surrounded by craven opportunists, schemers, and sociopaths, which is dark but also perversely comforting: You hate to see people like that in power, but at least you know the Marco Rubios, Stephen Millers, and Mike Johnsons of the world will jump ship when the old man no longer serves their ends. A true believer, though? That’s scary in a whole different way. It’s a complicated world. You can hate backstabbers all you want; there are some backs you still don’t mind seeing them lurking behind.
But hang on, let’s rewind a second. Who is Natalie Harp, and why is everyone talking about her close relationship with the president? Why did Trump hide with her inside an airport catering container, and why is every MAGA NPC with a flag pin suddenly on TV screaming that anyone who criticizes her is a misogynist? Let’s take it point by point.
What’s the TL;DR on Natalie Harp?
She is Trump’s closest aide, possibly the person he trusts most in the White House. Trump has reportedly said that Harp is the only one who loves him as much as his wife and children. Her extreme devotion to Trump and her influence over who and what he sees have raised concerns even among other Trump staffers. Her official title includes both “special assistant to the president” and “executive assistant to the president.” Why one person needs to have both those phrases in the same title is only the first of the many, many mysteries we’re going to encounter in this piece.
Why is she all over my feed at the moment?
Because of a quip Jon Ossoff dropped at a political rally in Atlanta on August 16. Ossoff is a Democratic senator from Georgia and a likely presidential candidate in 2028; personally, I worry that he’s just another replacement-level centrist who rolls up the sleeves of his dress shirts to make himself seem relatable, but I have to respect his ability to get a bar off. “See,” Ossoff said, speaking about Trump’s laziness, “he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
Natalie? Who is Natalie? In the political world, the line didn’t go viral so much as it went nuclear. Hardcore politics junkies already knew about Harp and her intimate connection to the president; hardly anyone else was aware she existed. The name Natalie spread all over social media. Newspapers started publishing explanatory articles. The White House tried to make the story go away by running its usual Fire Every Missile Everywhere All at Once strategy. “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said, presumably right before turning to an embarrassed 14-year-old boy for a high five. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle went the same classy route, posting on X that “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.”
It turns out, however, that a high-decibel PR crashout is not the best way to defuse public interest in the bizarre relationship between an 80-year-old head of state and his 35-year-old aide. People kept digging for more information. Every new detail that emerged seemed weirder than the last.
Can you help me picture this person?
If you’ve noticed, in photos of Trump, that there’s nearly always a pale, slim, blond woman in her mid-30s standing near him, then—well, that tells you absolutely nothing, because pale, slim, blond women in their mid-30s seem to emanate from the MAGA movement like Uruk-hai from the forges of Isengard, and one or two of them are perpetually around the president. But that’s what Harp looks like. Imagine someone who doesn’t much resemble Ivanka Trump trying determinedly to resemble Ivanka Trump, and you’ll get most of the way there without seeing a picture.
Oh God, is this some kind of sex thing? Do I need to call my therapist?
Blessedly, it is not. No one is suggesting that Trump and Harp are having an affair in the usual sense. This is such a mercy. Quite possibly it’s proof that God hasn’t abandoned the world. I don’t want to imagine all the parts of Trump that would, like, melt in the throes of passion. (His hair, definitely. I feel like most of his face would end up on his neck.) Could he even stay awake long enough? What a joy that we don’t have to think about this.
So they’re just, like … really close?
Harp has written letters to Trump thanking him for being “my Guardian and Protector in this Life” and vowing, “You are all that matters to me.” She has discussed a need to break down her personality and rebuild herself “into a better version who will make you proud.” We’ll come back to this. (I’m sorry.)
I’m getting “homeschooled by a conservative evangelical family” here.
She was homeschooled by a conservative evangelical family in California. Her father ran a travel consultancy; he died by suicide in 2020. Her brother believes that the search for a replacement father figure is behind her devotion to her boss. “I think that she does see Trump as a kind of father figure because he embodies the doctrine of American exceptionalism,” Preston Harp told The Daily Beast earlier this year, citing what is obviously [????] the most important quality everyone seeks in a father figure.
Natalie graduated from the conservative Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012, then got an MBA from the even more conservative Liberty University in 2015. Over the next few years, she became an advocate for, of all things, MAGA health care policy, claiming (though experts have doubts) that her life was saved by a law Trump signed expanding access to experimental treatments.
Her advocacy led to a speaking slot at the 2020 Republican National Convention, then a spot on Trump’s staff during his presidential campaign. She left to become an anchor on the far-right One America News Network, where she dutifully spread false conspiracy theories about election fraud, calling Trump’s loss to Joe Biden “A COUP.” “We can’t talk about winning back the House and Senate in 2022 and the White House in 2024 if we don’t act on the fact that we actually did win the White House and the Senate in 2020,” she said on the air in 2021.
On January 6, 2021, as MAGA rioters stormed the Capitol, she tweeted 150 times in support of Trump. By 2022, she was back on his staff.
Why was she on Ossoff’s radar in the first place?
From the reference to the “apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar,” I’m guessing it was because of the Turkey airport incident. Did you follow that whole saga? Last month, Trump dropped in on a NATO summit in Ankara. He was supposed to fly home in the giant luxury jet that he accepted from the nation of Qatar for reasons that probably make total sense to you if you listen to a lot of talk radio. However, the Secret Service was worried because the Qatari jet lacks state-of-the-art security features, and Iran was maybe kinda sorta interested in assassinating him. Thus Trump did possibly the funniest thing he’s ever done as president: He hid inside an airport catering container, in which he was transported to a military jet that secretly whisked him out of Turkey.
The image of America’s biggest, toughest president concealing himself inside a snack trailer has been cracking me up ever since the news broke. Imagine a flight attendant looking inside and finding him, unapologetic and glowering, in his big square suit, surrounded by crinkly bags of miniature pretzels. “Doris, could you come here?” the flight attendant would say. “I think there’s something wrong with the ham salad.”
Anyway, when he pulled off this bit of sandwich-adjacent legerdemain, Trump left a whole bunch of people behind on the decoy plane—the one the people who possibly wanted to kill him could be trying to blow up. This group included the media pool; two Cabinet secretaries, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has since announced her resignation. Harp was one of the handful of people Trump spirited to safety in the catering cart while leaving the rest to die. Thank you for your sacrifice, Marco!
How are Republicans responding to all the talk about the Trump-Harp relationship?
Well, it depends. Various sources inside the White House have anonymously shared their “concern” that someone with so little experience has so much influence with the president that foreign leaders reportedly text her when they need to get him a message. Many other Republicans, however, have experienced a feminist awakening and are now deeply determined to fight against misogyny in all its forms.
I’m sorry, what?
Yes. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, for instance, 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.” Right-wing CNN commentator Scott Jennings echoed this enlightened view, saying on his podcast that Ossoff “unleashed a comment so vile against a young Republican woman working in politics that every woman in this country, no matter your ideology, ought to listen carefully and never forget it.” (You might have seen the viral clip of Jennings getting obliterated by Abby Phillip when he tried to present this view on CNN; if not, I highly recommend it.)
So the idea is that because Harp is a professional political operative, it’s somehow sexist to criticize her?
To be fair to Gingrich and Jennings—two men who would definitely provide fair commentary if the circumstances were reversed—I think the idea is probably more that it’s sexist to portray a young female aide riding to safety in a snack cart with the president of the United States as somehow inherently scandalous, because what if riding to safety in a snack cart with the president is just a normal, everyday part of her job? After all, Pete Hegseth was also on the military jet with them. Are we going to act like that’s weird, too? Are we really going to sit here and act like Pete Hegseth is some kind of dope or himbo just because Donald Trump invited him onto his special rescue flight in an attempt to save his life? Have you seen Pete Hegseth’s jawline? Do you even understand that being high-T is the best possible way to empower women? Some of you haven’t read The Female Eunuch lately, and quite frankly, it shows.
I think arguments like Gingrich’s and Jennings’s are pretty transparently being made in bad faith, but they do reflect the unintentionally hilarious right-wing assumption that the only way to show respect for women is to treat them as helpless damsels incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions. In this worldview, the more a woman abases herself before her patriarchal leader, the more noble and feminine she is; therefore, the more noble and feminist it is to defend her. Harp, who has seemingly built her whole identity around gratifying Trump’s ego, is in that sense the ideal MAGA career woman. We must grant her total freedom to do her job, her right-wing defenders seem to say, which is to totally submit to masculine authority. This outlook is so twisted it’s kind of hard to get your mind around if you haven’t been taught to think this way, but it does seem to be how Harp herself views her work.
So what’s the right way to understand Harp’s role as the truest believer in Trumpworld?
I can speak only for myself, but personally I don’t have a ton of interest in her psychological makeup, her past trauma, or her emotional life. She’s a fully grown adult who has spent much of her life working to further an extreme right-wing agenda and overthrow democracy in the United States. She’s making her own choices. They are … well, let’s look at a few of the things she’s done at work over the past few years. I’m choosing examples more or less at random here; there are (lots) more where these come from.
1. She chooses to write letters to her boss in which she says, “I never want to bring you anything but joy.”
The letters. Oh man, the letters. In 2023, Harp accompanied Trump, as a member of his staff, on a golfing trip to Ireland and Scotland. While there, she wrote her boss a pair of letters that were reportedly later discovered in a pile of old printouts by concerned Trump aides, after which they wended their way through phones of various campaign staffers before making their way to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. If you want to understand the Harp-Trump dynamic, these letters are your key. Harp apologizes to Trump for various imagined infractions, tells him nothing matters to her but him, and begs him to correct her when she makes a mistake. “When I fail, will you tell me?” she writes. “You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more.”
She expresses jealousy toward women “whose only ‘job’ seems to be to talk with you, and look pretty.” (“I want that job!!” she adds, feministly.) She declares that Trump should feel free to talk to her about things other than work. She thanks him for, I guess, a souvenir he gave her by saying, “[You] did what you didn’t have to do, and gifted me with Mementos of this Trip of a Lifetime, a Coming of Age.” (Apparently the souvenir was a capitalization manual.) She signs one of the letters “with all my heart,” perfectly normal, professional language that I’m sure we all use when interfacing with our managers at the office.
2. She chooses to follow Trump around with a portable printer so she can hand him instant hard copies of flattering things people write about him.
Her nickname among Trump staffers is “the Human Printer,” and no, I’m not making any of this up. She even refers to herself that way in one of her letters to him. Do you find this weird or unsettling? Why do you hate women so much?
3. She chooses to spread lies undermining America's constitutional order.
On January 6, 2021, the day when she posted 150 pro-Trump tweets, Harp posted one that repeated the phrase “FIGHT FOR TRUMP!” 12 times in a row. After a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol, she posted false claims that the rioters weren’t Trump supporters and that antifa activists had infiltrated the group. She’s consistently supported Trump’s lies about Democrats stealing the 2020 election. It's just like Sheryl Sandberg says: Women have to go the extra mile to get ahead at work!
4. She once chose to stow herself in the trunk of an SUV rather than be separated from Trump.
He was on his way to a court date in New York; there wasn’t room for her in the vehicle. Obviously she couldn’t wait a few minutes for another car. It’s inspiring to see women proving they can be just as deranged and sycophantic as men!
5. She chooses to post to Trump’s Truth Social account.
Harp reportedly has access to the account; Trump reportedly dictates many of his posts to her. She’s also reportedly responsible for posting both the infamous AI Jesus pic and the racist Obama video. It’s called initiative, Kevin!
What are we supposed to take away from all of this?
Honestly? I think straining for a big takeaway here would be a mistake. Trump likes being around servile young women, so he found one to be his assistant. Trump is weird, so weird things happen around him, and some of those weird things involve his staff. That’s about it.
Of course, the Harp story is full of elements that invite a certain kind of high-blown American Studies–style interpretation, and you can easily imagine how that would go: A young woman, driven by the trauma of her past, internalizes the values of the patriarchy so entirely that she becomes an indispensable assistant to the authoritarian egomaniac in whom she sees a father figure; in this role, she’s celebrated by the far right as an exemplar of the feminism she’s working to destroy.
And none of that’s wrong, exactly. It just puts the spotlight in the wrong place. It treats Harp as the main character in a symbolic drama in which her personal arc encapsulates something about the meaning of America. But thousands of people are currently in ICE detention centers. The Supreme Court is supporting Trump’s assault on voting rights. Corruption is rampant. Prices are out of control. Things are hanging by a thread, and Harp has devoted herself, heart and soul, to the team that’s sawing away at the thread with both arms. That’s what matters here. I’m sure zeal has its uses; in this case, the country could use more doubt.
