President Donald Trump’s devoted aide Natalie Harp isn’t shying away from the cameras after triggering an all-out war with the press.
Harp, 35, reportedly acted as the devil on her 80-year-old boss’s shoulder, feeding him negative coverage until he exploded onto Truth Social on Friday and declared that MS NOW, CNN, and Politico had been banned from the White House.
The fallout has been spectacular, with Trump returning to his social media profile to excoriate a reporter by name just before midnight on Tuesday. “All of the SLEAZEBAGS, like Third Rate ‘Reporter,’ Kaitlan Collins, of Fake News CNN, a truly unhappy person, said they weren’t going to be covering me. Then why were they ranting and raving like Lunatics, in the Press Area, at the United Nations? Why was she there? She’s got a ‘TRUMP’ addiction, and so does CNN and MSDNC. They’re all sick, treasonous, and demented!” he raved in the unhinged post.
Despite the madness she reportedly helped cause, Harp has not shirked the limelight and has stuck to her boss’s side. Harp, officially Special Assistant to the President and Executive Assistant to the President, was seen marching into United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday, where Trump address fellow world leaders.
Harp, who has been in Trump’s orbit in varying roles since 2018, smiled broadly as her boss spoke. She sat with White House Communications Director Steven Cheung and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
She traveled to U.N. HQ earlier on Tuesday in Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on its maiden voyage from its new White House helipad. After the event, she traveled to John F. Kennedy International Airport, where she was pictured alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent preparing to board Air Force One.
Ironically, Bessent was one of the Trump goons left behind on Air Force One left behind during an elaborate ruse to protect Trump from an Iranian threat he left a NATO summit in Turkey in July. Harp was one of a select group of aides who stayed with the president as he was sneaked onto a different plane.
Harp’s obsession with her boss has been known for years, but it has come under renewed focus lately.
Fawning letters and a testimony from her estranged brother, who asserted that the relationship is “unhealthy,” added to the attention, and when Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff name-checked the former right-wing cable host at a re-election rally, the MAGA reaction sent the story stratospheric.
Melania Trump made an increasingly rare appearance at the U.N. According to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, she is steering clear of her husband because she has little interest in sharing his side with Harp.
In an August post on his Substack newsletter Howl, Wolff wrote that Harp’s “central presence” in Trump’s life helped explain why Melania rarely appeared alongside him on the 2024 campaign trail.
“Melania, whose appearances with her husband were carefully negotiated and choreographed, would not show up if Harp was around,” Wolff wrote. “Since Harp was always around, Melania never was—appearing with her husband only in the last week of the campaign.”
