Opinion
I’ve spent my career watching officials manoeuvre and scheme, often in absurd ways, to get closer to presidents. But I’d never seen anything like the photo of Natalie Harp dashing after President Donald Trump’s golf cart in Scotland three years ago. I’d also never heard of a staffer jumping into the boot of an SUV, as Harp did, when she was denied a seat in the motorcade.
The hit horror movie Obsession, about a man who wishes for more adoration from a young woman, who falls under his spell and maniacally provides it, is playing out on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Like others, I winced when I first heard Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat, refer to how Trump liked to “travel with Natalie.” Was he gratuitously turning a salacious spotlight onto a White House aide?
But as it turns out, with three little words, Ossoff pulled a string and unravelled something really dark and deranged at the innermost circle of Trump’s White House.
The president’s proclivity for surrounding himself with sycophants — and attractive young blondes — is well known.
But this relationship is pathological, and a source of great irritation among other courtiers. It is Trump distilled to his essence: cult leader and his most rabid follower, narcissist and his most flattering mirror.
The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, Harp idolises Trump with a rare fervour. As one of his social media facilitators, she is with him most of the day and often evenings, and she never takes a day off. The New York Times′ Maggie Haberman calls Harp the “binky” (emotional support toy) of the man-child president.
Harp is nicknamed — and refers to herself as — “the human printer” because she follows Trump around with a portable printer to provide him with paper copies of any positive stories or tweets. (When The Mirror published the picture on Friday of Harp dashing after the golf cart at Turnberry in Scotland, the story’s author dubbed Harp “the human sprinter.“) Haberman said foreign leaders also try to use Harp as a conduit to reach Trump.
As Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in their blockbuster, Regime Change, Trump told his staff that Harp was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids did. “She’ll never leave me,” he would tell other staffers.
Harp first came to his attention in 2019 when she spoke on Fox News about how Trump had helped save her life with the Right to Try Act, which she said had allowed her to get experimental treatment for bone cancer.
Before she began to work on Trump’s restoration in 2022, Harp was an anchor at the far-right OAN and spread the gospel that the election was stolen. This winter, she was the one who posted the sickening video depicting Trump as the king of the jungle and the Obamas as apes.
The Harp saga reflects a truly weird fact about Trump. The 80-year-old president got elected, governs, provokes and seeks revenge using social media, and he was surrounded by bootlicking tech titans at his inauguration. But he still needs someone young and online to sit beside him and type his posts. Their online symbiosis raises the question of whether all those strange capitalisations are his or hers.
Ossoff impaled Trump with his Natalie Harp-oon last weekend during a speech in Atlanta. The senator was lambasting the commander-in-chief for his erratic, pathetic handling of the Iran war: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
After so many years of flailing around, trying to figure out how to get under Trump’s skin, as he has grown ever more destructive and unhinged, Democrats are not in the mood to follow Michelle Obama’s dictum, “When they go low, we go high”. They were happy to drag Natalie into the fray.
But it was the MAGA megaphone that did in Natalie. The White House was clearly rattled by the allusion to the close relationship between Trump and his 35-year-old, $US150,000-a-year social media helper. Melania even made a rare appearance to show the conjugal flag.
Harp made headlines earlier when the president chose her and a few other close aides to accompany him when he sneaked into a catering truck and switched planes to fly back from Turkey to the District, after a threat of an Iranian assassination attack. Shockingly, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent and the media were left on the other plane as decoys.
The vitriolic MAGA response to Ossoff, the usual risible caricature of macho bullying, had a suspicious “doth protest too much” aroma. The White House called Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid” and Trump mocked him as Pee-wee Herman (showing that he has lost his touch for nasty but effective nicknames).
After Kristen Holmes, the CNN White House correspondent, asked Trump about Ossoff’s critique, the White House tweeted a creepy warning: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling”.
But the troubling thing was the tone of Harp’s adoring letters to the man she addresses as “Mr. President,” released by The Daily Beast, in which she talks about her fragile emotional state — forgetting to eat or sleep and getting hurt by others’ critical remarks.
“I want things to always be right between us,” she writes, adding, “I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
She frets in another that she works so hard for him that she looks like “a hunchback who didn’t have time to freshen up.” She pleads, “We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!!” and pines to “hear every conversation” he has.
Harp quotes a line from Pride and Prejudice to say that it would have been hard to lose her father if she had not had someone so “worthy” to turn to in Trump. “And, I will add,” she signs off, “it is I who is unworthy.”
It’s a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he’s amazing. And he agrees.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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