A former Trump 1.0 staffer has lifted the lid on what the president’s fawning aide was like before she entered his inner circle.
Sarah Matthews, who worked as a deputy press secretary during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, recalled her experience working alongside Natalie Harp in an appearance on MS NOW on Wednesday.
“I actually knew Natalie Harp during my time when I was working for the administration, and before I joined the first administration, I worked on Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign for a year,” Matthews, 31, told Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace. “And Natalie Harp was a campaign surrogate for us because she was a benefactor of Right to Try.”
Trump’s executive assistant first appeared on his radar in 2019 after she said on Fox News that the president “saved” her life thanks to his Right to Try Act.
“I remember her messaging me all the time, asking how she could be more helpful, and it was very obvious to me, at that time, that she wanted to be in the MAGA world and be in Trump’s orbit,” she continued. “And obviously, over time, she has now risen in the ranks to be one of his closest aides. She is someone who has the ear of the president.”
Matthews classified Harp, 35, as one of Trump’s “gatekeepers of information.” She said that she has control over his social media, even feeds him “some of these nasty things that he has posted,” such as his racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
“She’s feeding him AI slop, in addition to lavishing him with praise and feeding him positive tweets and news articles to boost his ego,” she added. “And I think that’s why he keeps her so close.”
The former Trump staffer said that Harp is a “sycophant” whose intense devotion to the president has even alarmed the Secret Service.
“It was interesting to me to see Republicans jump to the conclusion that Senator [Jon] Ossoff was insinuating an inappropriate or sexual relationship between the two,” Matthews said.
“I just think there’s something weird going on, in the sense of her extreme devotion—borderline obsession—with the president. And I think that a lot of aides who are working in Trump 2.0 feel the same,” she explained. “Because yes, publicly they’re defending her, but in that New York Times article that Maggie Haberman put out today, it said that Natalie Harp is described as a loner within the White House.”
“And so I do think that there are a lot of people who actually look at her obsession with him and think that it’s a little odd,” Matthews concluded. “And that’s saying something for an administration full of sycophants.”
