The brother of White House aide Natalie Harp believes her obsession with Donald Trump can be traced all the way back to their childhood.
Preston Harp, who has become estranged from the president’s favorite personal assistant, told the Daily Beast that an ideology of “American exceptionalism” drilled into them by their homeschooling parents is to blame for the 34-year-old’s infatuation with Trump.
Preston said that he and his sister were taught a “completely whitewashed version of history” through a curriculum produced by the controversial fundamentalist Christian publisher Bob Jones University Press.
While Preston has long since distanced himself from those teachings, he said his sister still firmly embraces the ideology and recognized it in Trump’s aggressive “America First” agenda.
“She thinks that the whitewashing of history is actually a ‘correction,’ like Trump,” Preston told the Daily Beast. “My sister and I were raised to believe in U.S. exceptionalism from childhood through high school, and that is exactly what Trump embodies.
“For me, it doesn’t seem strange at all that she is so obsessed with working with him and serving the objectives of U.S. exceptionalism.”
Textbooks from Bob Jones University Press are popular among conservative Christian homeschoolers and private Christian schools.
Among the books’ controversial and disputed teachings are presenting creationism as a scientific fact and whitewashing the legacy of slavery.
During his second term, Trump, 80, has also attempted to reshape how U.S. history is presented by issuing an executive order directing that material portraying any part of the country’s past as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed” be removed from federal sites.
Harp, a former host at the far-right network One America News Network (OANN), first came into contact with Trump when she thanked him for signing the Right to Try Act in 2019, which she claimed allowed her to receive experimental treatment for her bone cancer.
Trump later invited her to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention and asked her to be part of his next two presidential campaigns.
Since then, Harp has become a near-constant presence in the president’s life. Her devotion to Trump reportedly grew so intense during the 2024 campaign that the Secret Service flagged her as a potential security risk to him.
Harp has earned the nickname “the human printer” because she follows Trump around with a portable printer, producing paper copies of emails, news articles, and other documents for him to read rather than showing them to him on a screen.
She is also blamed for enabling Trump’s social media addiction by printing out numerous Truth Social drafts for his approval before logging on to the president’s account to reshare them late into the night.
Harp also has a habit of leaving fawning letters where Trump can find them, expressing her complete devotion to him. According to Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a new book by The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, one such letter read: “You are all that matters to me.”
Preston, 38, who now lives in Nicaragua, said he believes his sister sees Trump as “a kind of father figure” because their real father, Robert Harp, who died by suicide in July 2020, had moved away from what Preston described as the “doctrine of U.S. exceptionalism.”
“I never saw her looking up to him as an example like I did,” Preston told the Daily Beast.
“The older he got, the more I saw my dad’s social consciousness shift toward a more progressive understanding of Christianity,” Preston said.
“Trying to find out what it means to live like Jesus did instead of focusing on beliefs and judging others.”
Instead, Preston believes Harp and the president have “forgotten the words of Jesus.”
“Natalie thinks she’s helping fight ‘evil’ when she’s really helping someone who has torn thousands of immigrant families apart who were trying to make what they saw as a better life,” Preston said.
When approached for comment, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered a boilerplate response. “Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s team,” Leavitt said.
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