With 101,000 revved-up sports fans watching a hard-fought college football battle, President Donald Trump appeared transfixed by something else entirely: his ever-present blonde aide, Natalie Harp.
Harp, 35, was captured on camera pointing something out on her laptop to the 80-year-old president at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee, on Saturday, while Trump was supposed to be watching the Tennessee Volunteers take on the top-ranked Texas Longhorns.
In a series of photos from the event, Trump is leaning over Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty to get a look at Harp’s screen. (Trump ducked out at halftime.)
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar noted that Trump and Hagerty’s mouths were “agape” at one point. Another X user observed that Harp was “flouncing about in a wee teeny skirt” at the football game.
It’s unclear what, exactly, Harp was showing Trump. But given her reputation as his personal media monitor, the laptop was hard to ignore.
Harp is known as the “human printer” because she constantly churns out positive articles she finds for the president. On Saturday, she appeared to be serving a similar function in digital form.
“Everyone in the world knows how much Trump craves attention, especially televised attention,” economist and Trump critic Robert Reich wrote on Instagram earlier this week. “After all, his political career emerged from reality TV [on The Apprentice]. He’s known to watch several television screens simultaneously in the White House. He views much of what he and his regime do through the lenses of television.”
Now Trump has Harp, who can effectively hold up a television screen mirror via her computer and reflect him back to himself.
The odd pairing has become a social media spectacle, spawning a wave of posts under #TravelWithNatalie. Harp was shown Saturday traveling to Tennessee with the president, then trailing after the slow-moving Trump as he departed Air Force One.
Attention around Harp has grown considerably in recent months as more details have emerged about her unusually close working relationship with Trump. She has been described as one of his most trusted aides, and her access to the president has drawn scrutiny because of the extent to which she helps determine what information reaches him.
The Washington Post reported that she is known to bring Trump hard copies of news stories and social media posts, while CBS has reported that Trump often dictates Truth Social posts to her to type and publish.
That makes the images from Neyland Stadium particularly striking. Trump had more than 100,000 people around him, a nationally televised football game in front of him, and Tennessee and Texas battling it out on the field. Yet for at least a few moments caught on camera, his attention turned to the laptop held by the aide who has become his personal conduit to the media.
