Donald Trump’s ever-present aide Natalie Harp played a key role in helping the president turn taxpayer money into a vehicle for glorifying himself, a new report reveals.
At a strategy meeting in the Oval Office, Trump instructed Harp to pull up footage of the kinds of flattering images of himself he wanted to see in the ads, The New York Times reported. Harp quickly obliged, showcasing clips of Trump before massive crowds and beneath fighter jets, among other footage.
The 13 partisan ads (so far) praise Trump, 80, for his military prowess in Iran and Venezuela, extol his much-criticized tariffs, and declare repeatedly in one ad that “God made Trump” because he needed the president’s help.
Trump is using $20 million of taxpayer-provided Homeland Security funds to pay for the ads, even though he recently boasted that he has access to “close to $1 billion” in his political super PAC, MAGA Inc. (In reality, it’s reportedly closer to $415 million, according to official filings.)
Instead, Trump directed Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought to find government money. The video ads are all labeled “public service announcements.”
Trump unveiled his unprecedented blitz of self-glorification in a meeting with Republican strategists in the Oval Office in early August, The New York Times reported.
Trump was supposed to be discussing how best to use the fundraised super PAC money to help struggling Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Instead, “he was much more interested in looking at videos of himself,” the Times reported, noting accounts from several unnamed sources on the scene.
Trump said at the meeting that he planned to campaign for GOP candidates, but that his presidency needed to be promoted “front and center.”
Trump instructed Harp to show those assembled the “kind of images” of himself that he likes.
Harp, the so-called “human printer” who churns out positive news articles about her boss for him to read, has happily gone digital, and she quickly called up recordings on her tablet for all to see.
The videos, created by the White House digital team, showed off Trump in “vast crowds,” and the president beneath fighter jets, among other images, the newspaper reported.
One showed UFC President Dana White calling Trump “the most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” A short time later, the nonprofit Securing American Greatness—at a cost of some $60,000—aired a spot featuring the White quote, according to AdImpact.
The ad ran largely in Washington during the first days of September, where the president could see it.
Trump’s self-promotional propaganda blitz has since gone nationwide and on major TV networks, including CBS, MS NOW, Fox News, ABC, and NBC.
The first foreboding ad was a dark vision of a serious Trump amid lightning-fast images over the repeated message, “America will never be a communist country” beneath a song chillingly intoning over and over: “Love me.”
Democrats and Republicans have attacked the publicly funded partisan ads.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said on X that the ads “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
An unsigned press office statement to the Times said that the “public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders and abroad.”
