Natalie Harp has been a joke in online circles for years for constantly being around President Grievance. She’s been called the “human printer” because she is known to carry around a laptop and a battery-operated printer to print stuff out for Trump to read. And until Monday afternoon, she was pretty much just another weirdo in the Trump orbit.
Harp has been connected to Trump since 2019 when she lied about his passage of the Right to Try Act playing a role in a cancer diagnosis and he started inviting her to campaign activities. From 2019:
Despite all this, Trump continues to present Right to Try as a centerpiece of his health-care agenda. He often cites Natalie Harp as an example of RTT’s “truly spectacular results.” Harp, a Trump supporter who has joined the advisory board of the president’s 2020 campaign, speaks and writes often about Trump and health care. As she has explained on social media and in interviews, she has a rare form of bone cancer and was harmed by a medical error in 2015 (intravenous delivery of “sterile water” instead of saline) that left her close to death. She was at first offered only palliative care, she says, but then was able to access an immunotherapy drug through Right to Try — and her health significantly improved. As she puts it in an interview on the Trump campaign’s YouTube site: “I have cancer, I’ve survived a medical error, I want to get better, I don’t want to die, and they didn’t offer me that opportunity. The Democrats didn’t, doctors didn’t, Donald Trump did. . . . Because with Right to Try, he’s like, ‘You never give up.’ ” Appearing with the president at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in June, she called him “my Good Samaritan.”
But looking closely at her accounts of her illness, it’s hard to see how she could be a beneficiary of Right to Try. The effects of the life-threatening medical error she suffered were treated before the law’s passage, for instance. As she sought help for her cancer, she says, she was ultimately given “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use” — which made the difference. However, off-label or unapproved use of FDA-approved drugs is common and permitted under rules that long predate Trump’s tenure. Right to Try specifically allows access to drugs that have not received FDA approval.
Hmmm.
I mean, everyone around Trump is a liar but her lies seem a little different. But she did catch Trump’s attention and he brought her onto his 2020 election team. After he lost, she went to work at One America News Network for a few years.
Harp evidently wrote him love letters:
However, something that caught the attention and raised the eyebrows of some within the Trump campaign, was a series of letters that the 33-year-old wrote to Trump in 2023, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.
“You are all that matters to me,” Harp wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The Times, who also confirmed their authenticity. “I don’t ever want to let you down,” read another, which also thanked Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
In another letter, she told the President-elect that she wanted to get back “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.’”
Those that confirmed the existence and authenticity of the letters, told The Times that the letters had been somewhat unnerving.
Ya think? But that’s not the limit of her weirdness:
Her fixation was an open secret—and discomfiting for all. But it existed side by side with her better-than-anyone proximity to Trump. Her golf cart had become the literal mechanism for shadowing him. At every hole, she supplied him with what she thought he might need or want to know. Equally, he told her whom to call for him, and what to post, with her composing many of his outbursts.
The summer move to Bedminster became an opportunity to deal with what was now deemed officially “the Natalie situation.” In Bedminster, she needed housing—so none was allotted. Out of sight, for Trump, was out of mind. And even Natalie would not presume to speak to Trump about her accommodation. (Who got what room at what Trump property was hard-fought politics, largely unbeknownst to Trump.) And yet, in Bedminster, suddenly there she was. She had reached out to the grounds staff at the country club and gotten herself a maid’s room. And when that proved too far from the main house to respond quickly enough to Trump’s calls, she relocated herself to the much closer women’s locker room, where, with undiminished proximity to Trump, she would spend the summer.
Are you starting to get the “rabbit in a pot” vibes, yet? No, OK, how about this:
“She became ever-present,” Haberman said. “She would join him on the golf course when he was golfing, you know, in the interregnum period even before the campaign, literally sometimes running on foot behind his golf cart.
And while I’m ridiculing the situation, there is a real problem with a person with no vetting or background check having this unprecedented access to a president and literally coloring his world view. See, Harp is thought to be behind the racist post depicting the Obamas as apes, and the one that showed Trump as Jesus. And she also controls his access to others which bypasses the normal structure of presidential offices.
And all of this would have gone under the radar if the administration and Trump himself hadn’t melted down on Monday over this line at a Jon Ossoff rally:
Ossoff says that Trump doesn’t want to do his job but wants to “travel with Natalie”
And then the administration began commenting on Twitter (always Twitter, never X) and all of the rightwing influencers started posting about it too, which seems really weird, right? I didn’t think there was anything nefarious about this weird relationship: Trump is a weirdo, his family is full of weirdos, and his staff and his cabinet are weirdos extraordinaire. But this is the thing they all melted down about so Ossoff clearly touched a live wire.
amusing to see them attempt this move. we’re all trying to find the egregious shithead pedophile president who destroyed any semblance of decency and propriety in public life
And it’s a highly specific thing too, that Harp is his mistress. Does anyone think that the elderly president who can barely walk and whose flesh is melting off of his hand is having an actual affair? I don’t. But it makes you wonder what actually goes on when the White House staff “travels” together, doesn’t it?
So if the salacious guess doesn’t seem plausible, then what exactly is Trumpworld freaking out about? Well, the Secret Service has been worried about Harp posing a security risk and the campaign staff was concerned about her during that Bedminster summer:
Natalie was now foremost among those unexploded bombs that a candidate’s staff needs to keep aware of: More and more of Trump’s moods and outbursts seemed directly connected to the clippings and reports she brought him; and more and more reliably, she was there to interpose herself in meetings with the political team, using her printer to re-direct or override their concerns. The aggressiveness of her attention, and her fury when she was denied bestowing that attention on Trump, was also of increasing concern to the security team. The Secret Service, with her letters in their possession, was now noting the strangeness of her behavior.
And although the implication is that she is a danger to him, I don’t see that as a real concern. Now could someone who is obsessive and protective of Trump as she is be a danger to people around him that she thinks might hurt him? Maybe? Her brother said she’s basically adopted Trump as her father.
Or is the secret how little control Trump has over his over his own behavior that he needs a 24/7 babysitter and if she gives off “rabbit in a pot” vibes so be it if it keeps the rest of the country from seeing just how out of it Trump really is?
Or is the real concern that this weirdo is essentially running the country by limiting contact with the president and directing his social media accounts?
Are any of these good options for the country? No. But here we are.
I’ll leave you with this: