Whether sprinting around a Scottish golf course to keep up with the presidential buggy or being squashed into a car boot to ensure she didn’t miss one of his court appearances, Natalie Harp has always swallowed her pride and put her devotion to Donald Trump above all else.
After all, as the former presenter of a Right-wing cable-TV news show gushed to the US President in one of her many cloying letters expressing her fealty: ‘You’re all that matters to me.’
The White House aide, 35, is nicknamed ‘the human printer’ because of her somewhat demeaning job of lugging around a portable, wireless computer printer – with battery pack and paper – wherever he goes. It’s her role to keep him instantly updated with everything positive that is said or written about him, always in the hard copy he prefers.
Until now, mention of Harp’s name has drawn only eye-rolling from Trump critics as an illustration of his pathological need for adulation and the lengths to which undying loyalty combined with shoulder-length (dyed) blonde hair can take an attractive young woman in his administration. The President has hardly helped matters by calling her ‘sweetie’ and ‘that young, beautiful woman’.
Now, however, she has been thrust centre stage after an apparently chance remark by a Democrat politician raised questions about the exact relationship between the 80-year-old president and his constant companion less than half his age.
Jon Ossoff, a Georgia senator who has been touted as a potential Democrat contender for the White House in 2028, complained at a rally this week that Trump ‘doesn’t want to do the job [of president]’, adding: ‘He wants to build his [White House] ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.’
The White House aide, 35, is nicknamed ‘the human printer’ because of her somewhat demeaning job of lugging around a portable, wireless computer printer wherever Trump goes
Until now, mention of Harp’s name has drawn only eye-rolling from Trump critics as an illustration of his pathological need for adulation - it's her role to to keep him updated of anything positive written or spoken about him
Ossoff was referring to the fact that Harp had recently been revealed as one of a select handful of aides who, following a Nato summit in Turkey last month, had left the aeroplane donated to Trump by the Middle Eastern state and secretly moved with him – for security reasons – to a different plane.
Ossoff later said he mentioned Harp’s name because she had been described in the media as Trump’s ‘security blanket’. He claimed Harp, along with some others in the White House, are ‘not telling him what he needs to hear – they’re telling him what he wants to hear ... The nation is at war – and we cannot afford that’.
However, the fury of the Trump administration’s response to Ossoff’s remark has fuelled speculation that the Democrat touched a raw nerve.
Asked about Ossoff’s comments by CNN reporter Kristen Holmes, Trump ridiculed Ossoff and, when Holmes asked a subsequent question about North Korea, told her to ‘be quiet’.
The White House later castigated Holmes on social media, telling her: ‘Some day, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question.’
So who exactly is Natalie Harp – and how did she rise to such a powerful position?
She joined Trump’s staff in 2022 and her devotion to the president – after many had abandoned him following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol – reportedly stunned even his closest aides.
‘I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk “work”,’ she wrote in one gushing letter to her boss, revealed in the recent book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
In another she described Trump as her ‘Guardian and Protector in this Life’, while in a third she admitted that her devotion to him was such that she would sometimes forget to eat and sleep while working for him.
Trump describes Harp as the only person who loves him as much as his wife and children. According to political journalist Alex Isenstadt, author of Revenge: The Inside Story Of Trump’s Return to Power, Harp remains so determined to deliver the printed updates to Trump wherever he needs them that his wife, Melania, once found her late at night in his private quarters at Mar-a-Lago, which was normally off-limits to staff. There was no suggestion of impropriety and the First Lady has not publicly commented on the alleged incident.
Photos of the president on duties rarely fail to capture Harp nearby, staring lovingly at him – in recent weeks, she was spotted next to him at Camp David (the president’s country retreat), at his Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey and in the Oval Office.
Even before he went into politics and was a New York property developer, Trump liked to fill his office with young women who could be relied on to pamper his ego. That continued in the White House. Insiders, however, insist Harp has an influence like no one before her, often texting world leaders on her boss’s behalf.
Trump describes Harp as the only person who loves him as much as his wife and children (Pair pictured with US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at a golf course in Hains Point)
Enjoying an elaborate title and a salary of £110,000, Harp helps compose many of the wilder posts Trump puts on his social media platform Truth Social (pictured with Trump and JD Vance)
Trump chronicler Michael Wolff claims people around the president were baffled by her sudden rise before the 2024 election and, at the time, some even considered her ‘dangerous’
The New York Times described the ‘seldom-heard-from and sylphlike woman’ as ‘a one-woman conduit of information operating entirely outside the usual chain of command’.
Trump chronicler Michael Wolff claims people around the president were baffled by her sudden rise before the 2024 election and, at the time, some even considered her ‘dangerous’ given her obvious influence over him.
‘She was the most important person in his political life, and I think was then gradually becoming the most important person in his personal life, also,’ said Wolff.
The White House said in response: ‘Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s team. Michael Wolff is a professional scumbag and serial liar with s**t for brains.’
She proved her devotion in 2023 when Trump’s motorcade was setting off with him for his appearance in a New York court. There was no room for Harp in the vehicles but, following a ‘screaming match’ with other aides, she scrunched into the boot of one of the SUVs to ensure she was there for him.
A Christian from California, she was – according to her estranged brother Preston – homeschooled by an ‘extremely conservative’ mother. Preston, a self-described Communist, has called his sister’s relationship with Trump ‘very unhealthy’. He believes she’s ‘infatuated’ with the president because he embodies her conviction that the US is ‘the boss of the world’. Harp is unmarried and has no recorded boyfriends.
In 2019, she had come to Trump’s attention after she was interviewed on Fox News. Harp claimed to be ‘living proof’ of the merits of his federal healthcare changes – giving Americans the right to try experimental drugs.
Trump saw the interview and recruited her to his campaign.
She addressed the 2020 Republican national convention – only a month after her father’s death by suicide – where she cooed at Trump: ‘I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for you.’
Soon afterwards, she and her mother moved into an apartment in West Palm Beach, Florida, so Harp could be close to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago HQ, reportedly sleeping in the women’s changing rooms at his golf club so she could remain close to him, having rejected a maid’s room because it was further away.
Around the same time, she started working for the One America News Network, a Right-wing TV station accused of promoting conspiracy theories.
Enjoying the title of ‘Special Assistant to the President and Executive Assistant to the President’ on a salary of £110,000, Harp helps compose many of the wilder posts Trump puts on his social media platform Truth Social.
These have reportedly included reposting a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, as well as an AI-generated picture of Trump as Jesus Christ.
As salacious theories continue to circulate about the pair, Trump insiders stress the president regards his aide like one of his children.
But given that in 2006 he observed of Ivanka Trump that if she were not his daughter ‘perhaps I’d be dating her’, that assurance may not silence the cynics.