Natalie Harp’s pre-White House Trump-obsessed Twitter account has resurfaced, as the president’s favorite blonde aide faces a media firestorm over their unusually close relationship.
Harp’s obsession with her boss has been known for years, but it has come under renewed focus lately because the 35-year-old is a constant by the 80-year-old’s side.
Fawning letters and a testimony from her estranged brother, who asserted that the relationship is “unhealthy,” added to the attention, and when Jon Ossoff, the Democratic Senate hopeful for Georgia, namechecked the former right-wing cable host in a re-election rally, the MAGA reaction sent the story stratospheric.
On Thursday, the Daily Beast published the bizarre letters from Harp to Trump in full. Only excerpts had been public until then. They show a devotion to Trump that was evident in Harp’s ramblings on a Twitter account that is now deactivated.
On the old Twitter account, which was started in 2016, Harp compares Trump to a biblical figure. “We all know the story of the Good Samaritan,” she begins, before launching into a story about how, she claims, Trump saved her life.
“But what you don’t know is I was that forgotten person on the side of the road—left to die of medical error and cancer. The Political Establishment passed me by. But @realDonaldTrump didn’t. Meet my Good Samaritan!” she wrote in the 2019 message.
Harp, who has been in Trump’s orbit in varying roles since 2018, credits the president with saving her life with legislation that allows people to try non-FDA-approved drugs, although that is contested. Harp has said she was treated with “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use,” but experts said the federal legislation Trump signed in 2018 would not have made the medication available to her because it had already received FDA approval.
She also gleefully shared Trump’s election denial after he amplified a claim that Google effectively gave Hillary Clinton millions of votes in 2016. “Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch,” he said in August 2019.
Harp also urged Trump to “build that wall!” and, in August 2020, said America is only great because of Trump. “We are living a GREAT AMERICAN STORY—only because you are in it, President @realDonaldTrump!
In this post, she quoted Philippians 1:3: “Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God.”
Days before this tweet, Trump invited Harp to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention in North Carolina.
On stage in a red gown, Harp, who was also on Trump’s campaign advisory board, compared him to George Bailey, the altruistic character played by Jimmy Stewart in the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life.
“In the classic Jimmy Stewart film It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey is given a great gift–the chance to see what the world would be like without him. Tonight Mr. President, we’d like to give you that same gift, because without you we’d all be living in Pottersville, sold out to a crooked Mr.–or I should say Mrs.–Potter with no hope of escape except death itself,” she said, earning a rebuke from Stewart’s family.
Kelly Stewart Harcourt, one of the actor’s four children, responded with a letter published in The New York Times. “Given that this beloved American classic is about decency, compassion, sacrifice and a fight against corruption, our family considers Ms. Harp’s analogy to be the height of hypocrisy and dishonesty,” she raged.
But Harp really does think Trump is some kind of savior.
“She thinks that the whitewashing of history is actually a ‘correction,’ like Trump,” her estranged brother, Preston, told the Daily Beast. “My sister and I were raised to believe in U.S. exceptionalism from childhood through high school, and that is exactly what Trump embodies.”
Her letters to Trump, as revealed in full by the Daily Beast, lay out exactly how she feels about the president. In the notes, Harp, now the $150,000-a-year special assistant and executive assistant to the president, expresses a deep desire to step away from her routine work duties, such as serving as Trump’s “Human Printer,” and regain a more personal relationship with him. Expressing burnout and envy toward women whose main role seems to be to “talk with you and look pretty,” she explicitly tells Trump, “I want that job!!”
She also recounts fondly the days when he would call her to chat about “everything and nothing,” lamenting that they now have to discuss work constantly.
The letters also show Harp apologizing for minor missteps during the overseas trip, including causing confusion after being left in a van outside Customs without her passport and walking on a golf course instead of riding in a cart. Admitting to forgetting to eat and sleep out of anxiety, she writes that her main fear is being lowered in Trump’s opinion, stating her goal is never to bring him “anything but joy.”
Harp refers to Trump as her “Guardian and Protector in this life” and references a promise he made to her following her father’s suicide in 2020. Throughout the notes, she asks Trump to correct her when she fails, writing that he has the “absolute right to cuss me out” because no one cares for her more. Expressing feeling unworthy of him, she signs off the folded printouts—scrawled with a Sharpie signature—with “With all my heart, Natalie” and “Always, Natalie.”
