A top White House correspondent has revealed that Donald Trump’s blonde aide has so much influence in his administration that she is even screening world leaders who can’t reach him any other way.
Natalie Harp, 35 and more than four-and-a-half decades younger than her 80-year-old boss, makes $150,000 a year as special assistant and executive assistant to the president. Her habit of carrying a portable printer to reel off nice tweets for Trump to read earned her the early nickname “human printer” among other aides.
New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has since suggested that “human binkie,” given that Harp’s effectively become the aging president’s “comfort blanket,” would be more fitting.
The veteran D.C. correspondent spoke with CNN on Wednesday night about mounting public scrutiny of a relationship so close that it’s freaking out the president’s own security detail—and even led to a power struggle behind closed doors with his actual wife.
“She serves a specific purpose,” Haberman told host Erin Burnett, noting that, formally, Harp’s responsibilities should not include providing him with daily briefings, handling the flow of documents, or managing media requests.
Haberman then said that Harp is nevertheless “a channel by which foreign leaders try to reach him, if they can’t some other way,” and that she is “a channel by which he reaches people that he sees on television, when he likes what they are saying.”
“She is with him so much of the day during those meetings,” the correspondent went on. “She is talking to him throughout the evening about social media posts. So, she is a specific channel of information, but she is one that he considers very important, and so do other people.”
Politico further illustrated the sheer breadth of Harp’s less-than-official portfolio in Thursday’s edition of its Playbook newsletter. The president often “jokes that if Natalie were ever to leave, he’d have to hire 10 people to replace her,” one White House official told the outlet.
Amid reports that she once traveled in the trunk of an SUV to attend court with him, Harp’s relationship with Trump was thrust into the spotlight over the weekend.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff told supporters at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job,” and instead that he just “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie.”
The furious backlash from Trump, who savaged Ossoff as a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike,” did the rest.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
