A leaked video showing Natalie Harp lounging on Donald Trump’s personal plane—tapping her heels to one of his favorite tunes—has offered a striking new glimpse of just how unusually close the young White House aide has become to the president.
The footage, handed to Trump biographer Michael Wolff while he was reporting on the president’s 2024 campaign, shows the 35-year-old sitting happily in front of a laptop as “Macho Man” by the Village People plays through speakers.
It is not clear when the footage was taken, but it has emerged at an awkward time for the White House, which is already scrambling to contain a political storm over Harp’s extraordinary access to the 80-year-old president.
The Daily Beast this week published in full two personal letters Harp wrote to Trump in 2023, including one in which she told him: “You are all that matters to me” and thanked him for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
The letters were written in 2023, either during or after Harp accompanied Trump on a trip to Scotland and Ireland. She was 31, Trump was 76, and she appears to have been utterly devoted to the then-Republican candidate.
At one point, she even tells him she is envious of women “whose only job seems to be to talk with you and look pretty.”
“I want that job!!” she writes in the letter, saying she missed the days when he would call “and we’d talk about everything and nothing.”
“We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!!” she tells Trump.
The letters offered a remarkable window into a relationship between the president and his $150,000-a-year executive assistant, who has been dubbed his “human printer” because she follows him around with printouts of positive news stories and Truth Social posts, which she also helps to craft.
But security concerns emerged this week after MS NOW reported that Harp worked at the White House for more than a year without completing the routine security-clearance process, despite her proximity to Trump.
The White House says she now has clearance, but the delay raises questions about how she operated so close to the commander in chief without it.
The concerns are heightened by Harp’s presence during sensitive travel, including a recent security scare in Turkey, when she was among the small group of aides who joined Trump as he escaped to a safe plane in a catering truck.
“The role that she’d be playing would set her up as a target for foreign intelligence organizations, particularly her communication devices, her phone, her email, her messages,” Larry Pfieffer, the former senior director of the White House Situation Room, told CNN on Friday.
“Somebody in this role would have to have incredible discipline in maintaining secrecy and using secure communications as much as possible. So it’s quite a responsibility to put on the shoulders of somebody like this.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
It has so far stood by the presidential aide, but some insiders admit that the White House’s extraordinary reaction to Senator Jon Ossoff invoking her name during a rally earlier this week catapulted the story into the national spotlight.
Despite concerns that the issue could become an ongoing distraction ahead of the midterms, the administration has so far stood by Harp.
“Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s team,” spokesman Davis Ingle said in a previous statement.
He added: “The Fake News’s continued attacks on President Trump and his Administration prove exactly why trust in media is at historic lows. The media should get back to reporting real news and stop regurgitating Trump-Deranged liberal talking points.”
