Natalie Harp’s Devotion to Trump

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Natalie Harp is a constant presence in President Trump's orbit. She's a 35-year-old gatekeeper, deciding much of what he sees. She stays ablates with him to draft a social media post, and even texts with world leaders on his behalf. Today, I speak with my colleague Maggie Haberman about what we know about Trump's closest aid, and why people inside and outside the White House are questioning her devotion to the President. It's Monday, August 24th. Maggie Haberman. Welcome back to The Daily. Rachel, thanks for having me. Maggie, in the last week, I feel like I cannot open up X or, frankly, be on the internet without seeing the name Natalie Harp. And this is a name I wasn't super familiar with before the last week or so. So can you just do a little recap for us and explain why we're suddenly hearing her everywhere? Sure. So in our book, Jonathan Swan, and I wrote a book called Regime Change, we got more in-depth on Who Natalie Harp is, and she has been serving in the President's World now for several years. She became known by her colleagues as the human printer because she would carry around this portable printer and became a constant purveyor of positive news for him that she was seeing in various places where things she wanted him to be aware of. She is now in the news constantly because she was one of the very small number of people who were on the military jet with the President when he flew out of Turkey, when he was departing the NATO summit while the press corps and most of his aides were on what turned out to be a decoy jet. And Senator John Assof made a reference to her that was not overt. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Amir of Qatar. But he appeared to be implying that there was some kind of a relationship that went beyond just professional. And I am your guest host, Rosie O'Donnell. And then you had late night comedians picking up on it. You got to realize it's time to hang up your wig and let Natalie tuck you in. You had other references to it that have just now become part of the pop culture mainstream. Her name is Natalie Harp. Natalie Harp. Natalie Harp. It's about Trump's powerful aid, Natalie Harp. Natalie Harp continues to be in the news. Who the heck is Natalie? Thanks for reporting from Haberman and Swansea. We know that Natalie Harp has been. And suddenly you, Maggie Haberman, find yourself on basically every news channel talking about this woman. Yes. I mean, she has now become a massive focus. And it's important to understand Rachel that Trump has always had people like Natalie Harp around. He has always had people around who are incredibly obsequious. He has always had people around who provide him positive information, who don't want to give him things that are negative or will upset him as he would put it. But Natalie Harp is at a fundamentally different level in doing so. And she works all the time as around him a lot of the day. And the reason that it matters is because A) who advises a president or who is around a president. And she sits about 10 feet away from him in the Oval Office most of the time. They're significantly in terms of how a government functions, but also she helps supply him with some of the information that he gets at a time when he is pretty isolated from large parts of his government. I've talked to some of my colleagues who have covered a number of presidential administrations far more than I have, and there has never been, and they're telling someone exactly like Natalie Harp. Okay. So Maggie, who is Natalie Harp and where did she come from? So Harp is from California. She was working for One America News, which is a right wing network that positioned itself as a pure version of the MAGA base to the right of Fox News. And part of how it made its mark was around the 2020 election at a time when President Trump was promoting conspiracy theories about the election, and they amplified those. Where she became really known to the public, though, was in 2020. Good evening. I'm Natalie Harp, a formerly forgotten American from California. During the Republican National Convention, she gave a testimonial. About five years ago, I was the victim of a notoriously deadly medic layer. I survived, but only to be diagnosed with a rare and terminal bone cancer, you know? She is a bone cancer survivor, and she credits a law that the president had pushed the right to try law with giving her access to medicine she wouldn't have had otherwise. They didn't give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did. And without you, I'd have died waiting for them to be approved. And she very, very clearly credited the president with why she's still alive. For you have used your strength to make America strong again. Sacrifice the life you built to make America proud again. On November 3rd, we are going to keep America great. Wow. Okay. So crediting the president was saving her life, that must have gone a long way with a president who, as we know, from your reporting and others, values loyalty above all else, right? Like she is literally saying she owes her life to him. Yes. She is saying that she owes her life to him. And yes, that meant a lot to him. So at this point, it sounds like she's sort of out on the periphery of Trump world. And how does she actually get closer to Trump? So what happens next is President Trump leaves office because he loses the 2020 election. And so few people wanted to be around him at that point from his previous world because they got really tired of listening to him say that he had won the election. It just was impossible to have a conversation with him. Natalie Harp was one of the few people who started working for him during that period. She initially was working on press and sort of back office types of things. But she soon started accompanying him on the golf course where she would be the person supplying him with positive news. So for example, she was on a golf course in Scotland with him and she didn't have a seat in the card. I don't know why nobody would give her a seat. But she was quite literally running after the golf cart that he was in. She was so devoted to this role with him and to ensuring that she could be close in case he needed her to do something that she at one point was sleeping according to our reporting in a locker room at Bedminster. His golf course, his golf course in New Jersey. Do we know why she would sleep in the locker room at Bedminster? I don't. It didn't seem that she had an apartment nearby and that may have been why. But this was one of the behaviors that concerned the US secret service that was guarding him at the time. What exactly were they concerned about? How are they expressing that concern and what was prompting it exactly? A couple of things. But one was the sleeping in the locker room, just how fully focused on him. She was in her work. In our book, we reported on several letters that she had written to Trump and left for him in his personal spaces, you are all that matters to me. I want things to always be right between us. I also know I've been distracted all week for getting to eat throughout the days and even for getting to sleep and only catching a couple hours at a time. And the letter ended with all my heart, Natalie. I have to imagine that the people around him and around her probably had pretty strong thoughts about this sort of like ever present person who is getting increasingly closer to him, and it sounds like exhibiting behaviors that are more extreme, perhaps, than other people in his inner circle in terms of her attempts to get closer to him. The concerns were mostly about the fact that there was not proper chain of command process being dealt with. It was the fact that she could help send out, for instance, a report to reporters about alleged election interference as Trump was continuing to make his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he had won. It was that she was a conduit for information to reach him and vice versa. It was less the idea that she was dangerous, which is I think the thing that people will take away from the conversation about the Secret Service. And simply the idea that for the staff, that they were dealing with somebody who didn't engage in a normal campaign the way they were trying to run it. What about President Trump? Do we know anything about whether he shared those concerns? We don't have any reporting that he did or even frankly how aware he was of any of that. But if he had concerns about it, he has not manifested it by trying to restrict Natalie Harp's access quite the contrary. And so by 2024, she was a constant presence in his world and with him, and yet in an indicator of how complicated her relationship was with the rest of the campaign and the rest of his advisors, she came with him every day to the criminal trial in Manhattan in 2024 every single day. She provided him with reading material while he was sitting there at the defense table. But she sat. separately many of those days from her colleagues on the campaign and that is because there was this divide between her and others working there. So can you talk a little bit more than about that divide as you see it like how did that look like at that moment exactly beyond just her not sitting with everybody at the trial? She often just was described by people in the campaign as running her own program that she would be with him at Bedminster or Marlago. They would not always know exactly who he was speaking to because she wasn't informing everybody else all the time. One of the things that has become a hallmark of Trump over his two terms and the four years he was at of office is that people in his world try to keep updated on who is around him who's talking to him when he's not staffed by everyone else at all times. Natalie Harp doesn't quite do that or at least then didn't. Another example was right before the E. Jean Carroll trial in 2024, E. Jean Carroll being the New York writer who had accused him of sexual abuse and defamation. The president then candidate went on a I would say it was about 40 in an hour truth social posts attacking E. Jean Carroll and the only person sitting with him at Marlago for that was Natalie Harp. Wow. Okay, so she's clearly making inroads with the president with all this effort if not with his staff immediately. More than inroads, I think that the roads were pretty well paved. The president would tell other aids that she was the only person among the staff who loved him as much as his wife and children. And he would say that everyone else will go off and make money but she'll never leave me. And so by the time the transition comes around to the new term that was clear that he was going to bring her with him. Soon she wasn't just sitting outside the Oval Office. She was sitting inside the Oval Office on a chair against the wall for almost every meeting. We'll be right back. Okay, so Maggie, you've just explained that Natalie Harp has made her way into the inner circle, into the Oval Office and she's there all the time. Can you tell us a little bit about her role in the second administration? She's an assistant to the president. She has two titles. She makes $150,000 a year on the taxpayer salary. But her role is amorphous in terms of an actual job title. What she does is she sits on a chair that is perched against one wall of the Oval Office right next to the door that leads to the colon aid and then to the Rose Garden and she is there where they laptop for whatever the president needs. I'd play the tape for you right now. Do you want to just whip it up? For instance, when our colleagues went in to interview him at the beginning of 2026, four of our colleagues on the White House team. It was Natalie Harp who was showing the video of Renee Good being shot by federal agents in Minnesota. Renee Good had just been killed at that point. Does not look like the ICE officer has been run over there and that may be from a different angle. She provides him with video. She provides him with pieces of paper. She provides him with whatever he needs. Can you give some examples of that? What kind of information is she giving the president? She will provide him with articles from very fringe websites that can affirm some of what he wants to see. People close to the president have pointed to her as the person behind say, providing the president with a news article when he was facing indictment in Manhattan that showed a picture of the president holding a baseball bat and then the Manhattan district attorney in a picture right next to it. That then ended up as a truth social post that very much alarmed the president's lawyers. The president during this presidency posted a video featuring President Obama and Michelle Obama as apes and AIDS pointed to her as the person who got the video to him and he was said to be pretty upset by the blowback. Now it's on him to watch what's being sent to him. It is his true social feed, his name is on it, but those are the kinds of constant feed that she helps provide him. Okay, so fodder for social media posts, what else? There is another moment that we describe in the book where Howard Lutnik, the Commerce Secretary, was trying to make a case ahead of liberation date tariffs based on actual trade numbers and the president kept saying that these were BS numbers, you know, Natalie, get me the real numbers, Google the real numbers and she couldn't find whatever it was that he was looking for because I don't think they existed. But that moment, that anecdote and scene in the book really define and explain how important she is to him. Because when he is questioning what his government is telling him, she can help get him some different version of facts fairly quickly. Wow. So is the takeaway here that he trusts her more than he trusts somebody in his own cabinet? He certainly trusts that she will affirm what he believes to be reality more than people in his government always will. She has basically become in a way a gatekeeper for the kind of information the president is getting it sounds like. In her case, she is a channel. She is somebody who provides him information and then helps him connect to the outside world, particularly those he sees on television defending him who he may not know but wants to know. She'll help find a number for them. She'll text them and say the president wants to speak to them. Sometimes foreign leaders, as we've reported and others have reported, will reach out to her if they're trying to reach the president. She is a channel to get to president Trump quickly and that is really, really important to a lot of people. Okay. If we think about Trump term one and Trump term two, I am reminded that he is frequently surrounded by a lot of people who tell him what he wants to hear and who flatters him and basically acts in a way that he likes and maybe doesn't push back in the way that other presidents have expected of their aids. I just wonder if it wasn't Natalie Harp. Do you think it would be somebody else? Is she singular or is she just a product of other people in the environment? She just got to the front of the line. Now, she is unique just in terms of the extent of it and the willingness to basically spend all of her life just on this job. There really has not been somebody quite at the level of Natalie Harp this way with him, although I understand what you're saying certainly about gradations. She's also Rachel emblematic of how different this term is, how radically different this term is than term one. The people who fill the Natalie Harp specific type function, they really weren't in the government last time. I know that some people in the conversations around Natalie Harp have pointed to Hope Hicks who was very close to Trump. She was a press secretary on the campaign in 2016 and she went into government. She had never worked in government before as an analog. It's not really the same. It is absolutely true that she was a channel by which people could reach. The president, it is true that she very fundamentally believed in him, but she also recognized realities of the government. Natalie Harp just appears to exist mostly as someone connected to Donald Trump as opposed to the presidency. So given the fact Maggie that she wears all of these different hats that she is around the president at all these different times fulfilling these different roles, how are we and how are you thinking about her importance and sort of what the implications are for the role that she has. Who helps provide a president with information is always significant, but when it comes to president Trump who has shown such a willingness to put out information that is false, that takes it to a different level. And when we have a president who communicates through social media the way this one does so often, somebody who has control over that aspect of his presidency or at least a huge involvement in it is important. You have talked to us a lot on the show about how this president can sometimes feel really disconnected with the reality on the ground. That's especially felt true with the Ron War and how the Ron War is going and how America is doing in this war. And I feel like the relationship that you have explained between him and Natalie Harp really helps get at why the president might actually be living in a different reality. Is that sort of the right take from this? What Natalie Harp is is a living breathing exclamation point of how different, radically different, this second term is from term one. As much as it might have looked like there was somebody like Natalie Harp last time existing in the government as an official in the Oval Office, there really was not. This is just so different and it is the degree to which his belief of what is happening and this unreality bubble that he exists in has been created and sustained. Maggie Habermann, thank you so much. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Canada has promised to retaliate "dollar for dollar" against American goods after trade talks with the U.S. collapsed late Friday night. The failure of the talks, which had sought to stave off punishing tariffs from the Trump administration, further cemented a growing gulf between the once-close allies. Good morning, everyone, Vol. Tumon. I'd like to take this opportunity to update Canadians on developments in our trade negotiations with the United States. I'm going to go through why we're walking away from a bad deal and what comes next. In a powerful speech to Canadians on Saturday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he had suspended the talks because the American side had introduced last-minute terms that were, quote, "unfair, un-economic" and called into question the reliability of any deal. The gap between partnership and competitor, unfortunately, has remained too wide in recent days. We cannot accept what they've offered and we will not give what they've asked. Carney said Canada was under attack by Trump and was, quote, "at war with the United States." Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us. And I promise that that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise. Early Sunday morning, President Trump responded on social media, saying that Canada wanted the, quote, "benefits of being a state without being one." The President's tariffs on Canada went into effect on Saturday. Because retaliatory tariffs are set to go into effect on September 8th. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Nat and Michael Simon Johnson, with help from Adrienne Hurst and Alex Stern, who was edited by Rachel Quester and Michael Benoit, with help from Mark George, and it contains music by Rowan Nemisto, Dan Powell, and Marion Luzano. Your theme music is by Wunderly, this episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams, see you tomorrow.