The White House’s tight-lipped responses to inquiries about the relationship between the president and his much younger aide, Natalie Harp, only raise more questions.
On The Daily Beast Podcast, host/chief creative and content officer Joanna Coles and executive editor Hugh Dougherty delved into the odd revelations about the pair, as described by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
In one excerpt, Trump calls on Harp to overrule Cabinet members when he wants numbers that fit into his preconceived notions of trade.
“So, she is fueling his delusions: she is providing him with endless praise that she prints out off random social media, and then it’s all being put out in public, and she is with him ‘round the clock,” Dougherty said of Harp, the 34-year-old who has been referred to as a “human printer” for following Trump around with printouts.
Harp, according to the book, is so infatuated with the 80-year-old president that she wrote adoring letters to him to find in his personal spaces. “You are all that matters to me,” she said in one of them.
Trump, in turn, reportedly said that Harp, unlike his other staffers, “will never leave me.”
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, according to the book, seemed taken aback by Harp’s love letters, asking herself, “Where am I?”
Harp is also behind many of Trump’s social media posts, some of which come late at night or early in the morning.
“When we’re saying that she’s with him 24/7, are we suggesting that she’s in the White House bedroom with him late at night and in the early hours of the morning Truth Socialing for him?” Coles wondered.
“Well, we don’t have any evidence that that is the case, but we also have a mystery that he is with her more than any of the other aides,” Dougherty replied.
“It’s very clear that there are no witnesses who are in a position to say exactly when their interactions stop. She is absolutely with him later at night than other people. That we know,” he continued. “What then happens? How are they interacting? We are unclear.”
“The White House is refusing to give us any details, any comment on this in this situation,” he continued. “They didn’t really elaborate on it to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who asked about it.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt previously said in a brief statement that Harp “is one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team.”
Harp was among the few people sitting with Trump when he sat in the Oval Office with the authors for a fact-check interview for their book.
“It shows just how intensely close in the inner circle she is,” Dougherty said. “If a woman of 34 has access to Truth Social and Truth Social is the most important way to communicate for the president, then who’s in charge? We don’t know.”
Author Michael Wolff, in his 2025 book All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, also described Harp’s “fixation” with the president. It was so extreme that the Secret Service viewed her as a “potential danger” during the 2024 campaign.
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