‘With All
My Heart, Natalie.’ Trump’s Most Devoted Aide Emerges.
President
Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly,
does she do?
Shawn
McCreeshMaggie Haberman
By Shawn
McCreesh and Maggie Haberman
Shawn
McCreesh and Maggie Haberman cover the White House.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/politics/natalie-harp-trump-devotion-white-house.html
Aug. 18,
2026
She never
takes a day off, not even on Sunday. She works out of the Oval Office and she’s
got a regular seat on Marine One. She texts with world leaders on the
president’s behalf. She stays up late with him drafting social media posts.
She
rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a
wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.
She is
Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old West Wing aide who is the utmost gatekeeper to
President Trump, a one-woman conduit of information operating entirely outside
the usual chain of command. The public’s interest in Ms. Harp exploded after
she was revealed last week to be one of the lucky few who joined the president
inside an airplane catering container to be whisked out of Turkey under threat
of attack by Iran.
This week
she became the subject of a political attack line delivered by Jon Ossoff, the
Democratic senator from Georgia, who said of the president: “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.”
The
senator’s singling out of Ms. Harp triggered a particularly ferocious response
from many corners of Trump world. White House aides, lawmakers on Capitol Hill,
conservative influencers and at least one cabinet member took to the ramparts
on X to defend Ms. Harp’s honor. There were accusations of sexism from the
right and cries of snowflakery from the left. Mr. Trump deflected when a
reporter from CNN asked him about Mr. Ossoff’s comments. But a social media
account run by the administration then attacked the reporter in unusually
personal terms, invoking her children.
The furor
intensified the spotlight on this seldom-heard-from and sylphlike woman who has
long fascinated and frustrated people around the president. This article is
based on interviews with a half-dozen people with knowledge of her role. Ms.
Harp did not respond to a request for comment.
The
unique power Mr. Trump affords her says much about how he functions as
president.
As long
as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it
poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other
advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the
social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and
provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which
he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she
tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in
hard copy.
She is a
platinum blonde geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets
rough. She believes, or at least vehemently claims to believe, that he totally
won the 2020 election. In the book “Regime Change,” by the New York Times
reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump is described as
explaining to people that Ms. Harp is the only one who loves him as much as his
wife and children. All his other staff will go off and make money, Mr. Trump
would say, but Ms. Harp will never leave him.
“Natalie
Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s
team,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary who will soon be
leaving her post, said in response to questions from The Times about the nature
of Ms. Harp’s position and why she was chosen to join the president on the
secret food-delivery-truck rescue gambit.
In some
ways, Ms. Harp is filling a role that Mr. Trump has always required, going back
to his days as a real estate developer in Manhattan. Back then, there were
always secretaries sitting outside his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower,
ready at a moment’s notice to hop to it. He referred to these women as “the
girls.”
Ms. Harp
collects a taxpayer-funded salary of $150,000. Her double-barreled title is
special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president. At
work she can be a bit of a loner. Even in this West Wing, in which loyalty to
the president seems to know no bounds, Ms. Harp’s displays of devotion have
unnerved some of her colleagues.
Several
videos shared with The Times show Ms. Harp sprinting across great distances to
keep up with Mr. Trump’s golf cart as it putters across his course in Scotland.
“I also am sorry if I was an embarrassment walking the course in Scotland,” she
wrote in a letter to the president that was viewed by The Times.
The
letter goes on to say: “I want things to always be right between us. I also
know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and
even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).”
The
letter concludes: “With all my heart, Natalie.”
She grew
up in California. On Wednesday, her brother, with whom she is apparently
estranged, gave an interview to CNN. He said this about his sister: “I’d say
since she was, like, 16, she’s had an obsession with, um, gosh, how do I
explain this? Um, she’s written letters to other presidents, let me put it that
way.” (He said he was referring to George W. Bush.)
Ms.
Harp’s connection to this president runs deep. She credits him with saving her
life.
She has
said that she suffered from bone cancer and that it was legislation Mr. Trump
signed in 2018 that provided her access to experimental treatments. (She has
not publicly detailed which treatments.)
She was
recounting that experience on Fox News in 2019 when she caught the president’s
eye. He invited her to speak at the Republican National Convention in 2020. She
spent the next two years repeating his election lies as an anchor on the
far-right One America News Network. In 2022, she finally joined his team.
A “War
Room”-style documentary filmed during Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign, called “Art of
the Surge,” provides glimpses of Ms. Harp hard at work.
“Politics
was never something I liked,” she explains in one scene that was filmed at
Mar-a-Lago. “But when I was sick, I started watching the Republican debates. He
was my first exposure to politics, and I loved it. Like, this guy, he gets it.”
The film
cuts to Mr. Trump introducing Ms. Harp in 2019 at something called the Faith
& Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference.
“They
were preparing her for death,” he says. “Her name is Natalie Harp, and because
of ‘right to try,’ she’s now living, and I think doing phenomenally well. And
somebody said she’s here. Are you here, Natalie? Where’s Natalie? Will you come
up here, please?”
The woman
who walks across the stage to hug him is not yet the full-fledged Trump aide
she would soon become.
“I had
cancer and he saved my life, signed that bill,” she says in the film, “and ever
since he found out, he stayed in touch with me. Made sure I was OK.”
Shawn
McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump
administration.
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President
Trump.
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