Natalie Harp has found herself in the middle of Donald Trump’s bitter war with Canada as Democrats double down on the bizarre relationship between the president and his 35-year-old aide.
On Tuesday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. was “giving serious consideration” to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, in the latest escalation of tensions after trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed.
Lake Ontario, one of the five so-called Great Lakes, spans the U.S.-Canada border, with its northern side in Ontario and the southern portion in New York.
But in response to the president’s latest attack, Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Dingle suggested a novel way to ensure Trump would take care of the crucial waterway: name it after Harp.
“Let’s just call it Lake Natalie so we know you’ll start protecting our Great Lakes,” she wrote on X in response to Trump’s Truth Social threat.
The post immediately prompted a MAGA backlash, with some loyalists attacking Dingle, whose state of Michigan also has some of the five Great Lakes.
“You should fire the staffer who wrote and posted this,” said one of the less profane responses.
Others, however, backed the comments, which come more than a week after Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff first invoked Harp’s name to attack Trump at a rally in Georgia.
“He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie to their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” Ossoff said.
The comments sparked a White House reaction so aggressive that even insiders admit it likely inflamed what could have been a fairly fleeting comment into a much bigger story.
The relationship between the 80-year-old president and his so-called “human printer” has been under intense scrutiny ever since, fueled in part by personal letters Harp wrote to Trump, published in full by the Daily Beast, showing the depth of her obsession with her boss.
“You are all that matters to me,” she told him in one of the letters, signing off, “With all my heart, Natalie.”
“I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this life.”
But the protection of the Great Lakes is now under the spotlight, thanks to the president’s escalating feud with Canada.
The trade war escalated after trade negotiations between the U.S. and Canada collapsed late last Friday when the U.S. side introduced last-minute demands that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected as unfair and uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.
Trump responded by slapping 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, prompting Carney to impose retaliatory tariffs.
But the trade war threatens GOP efforts to address voters’ economic concerns at the midterm elections, when control of the U.S. Senate hinges on states along the border between the United States and its northern neighbor.
Among those states is Maine, which has lobsters, blueberries, lumber and other products that end up in Canadian markets.
“Imposing new tariffs on Canada is a mistake,” said Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins.
On the other side of the border, Canadian premiers have come to Carney’s defense, including Ontario’s outspoken leader Doug Ford, who said of Trump: “He can kiss my ass.”
“This guy’s a loser. He’s going to be a loser,” Ford said on Monday. ”And simple as that—we’re gonna fight with everything we have. And you know something? I have more courage, more brains in my baby toe than he has in his whole body.”
Hours later, Trump threatened to rename Lake Ontario, just as he renamed the Gulf of Mexico last year. He even posted a picture of a map showing the renamed waterway as “Lake America.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House.
