Natalie Harp’s Devotion to Trump

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Rachel Abrams** (0:16)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Natalie Harp is a constant presence in President Trump's orbit. She's a 35-year-old gatekeeper deciding much of what he sees. She stays up late with him to draft his social media posts, and even texts with world leaders on his behalf. Today, I speak with my colleague Maggie Haberman about what we know about Trump's closest aid, and why people inside and outside the White House are questioning her devotion to the president.
It's Monday, August 24th. Maggie Haberman, welcome back to The Daily.

**Maggie Haberman** (1:11)
Rachel, thanks for having me.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:13)
Maggie, in the last week, I feel like I cannot open up X or frankly be on the internet without seeing the name Natalie Harp.
And this is a name I wasn't super familiar with before the last week or so. So can you just do a little recap for us and explain why we're suddenly hearing her everywhere?

**Maggie Haberman** (1:30)
Sure. So in our book, Jonathan, Swan, and I wrote a book called Regime Change. We got more in depth on who Natalie Harp is, and she has been serving in the president's world now for several years. She became known by her colleagues as the human printer because she would carry around this portable printer and became a constant purveyor of positive news for him that she was seeing in various places or things she wanted him to be aware of. She is now in the news constantly because she was one of the very small number of people who were on the military jet with the president when he flew out of Turkey, when he was departing the NATO summit. While the press corps and most of his aides were on what turned out to be a decoy jet.
Senator John Ossoff.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:18)
Thank you all so much for being here.

**Maggie Haberman** (2:22)
Made a reference to her that was not overt.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:26)
He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

**Maggie Haberman** (2:34)
But he appeared to be implying that there was kind of a relationship that went beyond just professional.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:40)
I am your guest host, Rosie O'Donnell.

**Maggie Haberman** (2:43)
And then you had late night comedians picking up on it.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:46)
You gotta realize it's time to hang up your wig and let Natalie tuck you in.

**Maggie Haberman** (2:52)
You had other references to it that have just now become part of the pop culture mainstream. Her name is Natalie Harp. Natalie Harp. Natalie Harp.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:59)
New details about Trump's powerful aide, Natalie Harp.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:02)
Natalie Harp continues to be in the news. Who the heck is Natalie?
Thanks to reporting from Haberman and Swann. We know that Natalie Harp has been...

**Rachel Abrams** (3:09)
And suddenly you, Maggie Haberman, find yourself on basically every news channel talking about this woman.

**Maggie Haberman** (3:14)
Yes. I mean, she has now become a massive focus.
And it's important to understand, Rachel, that Trump has always had people like Natalie Harp around. He has always had people around who are incredibly obsequious. He has always had people around who provide him positive information, who don't want to give him things that are negative or will upset him, as he would put it. But Natalie Harp is at a fundamentally different level in doing so. And she works all the time and is around him a lot of the day. And the reason that it matters is because, A, who advises a president or who is around a president, and she sits about 10 feet away from him in the Oval Office most of the time, matters significantly in terms of how a government functions. But also, she helps supply him with some of the information that he gets at a time when he is pretty isolated from large parts of his government.
I've talked to some of my colleagues who have covered a number of presidential administrations, far more than I have. And there has never been in there telling someone exactly like Natalie Harp.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:19)
Okay, so Maggie, who is Natalie Harp and where did she come from?

**Maggie Haberman** (4:22)
So Harp is from California. She was working for One America News, which is a right-wing network that positioned itself as a pure version of the MAGA base to the right of Fox News. And part of how it made its mark was around the 2020 election at a time when President Trump was promoting conspiracy theories about the election, and they amplified those.