Natalie Harp, the president’s most adoring aide, is a major marker of how Donald Trump’s second term is vastly different from the first, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
Haberman, co-author of the bombshell book on Trump’s second term Regime Change, explained that while the president has always had extremely loyal people surrounding him, Harp’s unwavering fealty to him is unusual.
“She is a neon sign of why this term is so radically different than term one,” Haberman said on CNN This Morning. “For all of the belief that there were plenty of sycophants in term one, there was no one like this.”
Her comments came after the White House appeared to crop Harp, 35, out of an image that it posted on its official accounts about Trump at the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington, D.C. While Harp was visible in numerous photographs and videos taken at the MAGA spectacle, she didn’t make it into the official White House or first lady-branded social content.
When asked how others in the White House view her, Haberman explained that Harp is always “10 feet away from him in the Oval Office all the time,” and that by being so close she can manage what information the president does, and more importantly, does not, see.
“She supplies him not with all of his information, he obviously gets intelligence briefings and so forth that she doesn’t prepare, but she provides him sort of this alternate version of information, including that plays into his view of the ‘deep state,’ in his words, of his own government, of being suspicious of what he is being told, and she was one of the people who he took with him on that plane,” Haberman explained.
Harp was one of the aides that Trump picked to ride along with him as he secretly escaped Air Force One to avoid an apparent Iranian threat.
“So that’s part of why there is a focus. It matters not because, you know, the salacious implications aside that [Sen. Jon Ossoff] did and others have done, it matters because she’s in government and she’s close to the president,” Haberman explained.
Harp, a former right-wing television anchor who makes $150,000 annually as Trump’s special assistant and executive assistant, is always at the president’s side in Oval Office meetings and travels with him on the weekends for his golf trips. She even spent her 35th birthday, which fell on a Saturday, earlier this month with the president at his New Jersey golf club.
Harp has been accused of having an “unhealthy” relationship with Trump. She is known for leaving the president fawning letters, two of which the Daily Beast published in full last week, also confirming Harp’s utter devotion to her boss.
“You are all that matters to me,” Harp wrote to Trump while accompanying him on a European golf trip in 2023, thanking him for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
Her letter explained that while she was in Trump’s presence on the trip, she even forgot to eat or sleep.
“I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time),” she wrote to Trump at the time.
She shared with Trump that she was letting other people’s remarks upset her, “not because I care what other people think, but because I see myself being lowered in your eyes and good opinion. That is the fear you see, because I never want to bring you anything but joy.”
