Wearing shoulder-length blond hair, gold earrings and a red dress, cancer survivor Natalie Harp introduced herself to the 2020 Republican national convention as “a formerly forgotten American from California” and compared Donald Trump to George Bailey, the everyman hero played by James Stewart in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life.
“George Bailey’s father was right,” smiled Harp, her voice echoing in the Andrew W Mellon auditorium in pandemic-hit Washington. “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away. Mr President, that makes you the richest man in the world.”
Six years later, Harp is now one of Trump’s closest and most devoted aides. Her official job title is special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president on an annual salary of $150,000.
Her unofficial job title is the “human printer” for supplying him with print-outs of information. And for years she has only been a minor character in the Trump Cinematic Universe.
But all that changed this week when Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator and possible 2028 presidential contender, accused Trump in a campaign speech of wanting to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” instead of doing his job.
The remark triggered a tsunami of online speculation about the precise nature of the relationship and a furious backlash. On Monday Trump lashed out at the CNN reporter Kristen Holmes after she asked a question about Ossoff’s comments, while the White House’s anonymous “Rapid Response” team posted at Holmes: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question.”
Far from dousing the flames, the White House had in fact poured kerosene on them, inadvertently enhancing Ossoff’s national standing among Democrats and inviting millions of people to ask the same question.
Who is Natalie Harp?
The 35-year-old Californian graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University, a Christian liberal arts college in San Diego, in 2012. Three years later, she earned an MBA from Liberty University, an evangelical college founded by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Four years later, as Trump was mounting a bid for re-election, Harp wrote a post on LinkedIn entitled: “I’m Living Proof – the Party of Healthcare is Trump’s.” Recalling her experience with bone cancer, it explained: “On November 9, 2015 – a year to the day Donald Trump would win the presidency – a nurse mixed up my IV with the deadly substance of sterile water leaving me housebound and searching for care.
“Instead of studying my symptoms to diagnose my condition, my Democrat-controlled state and country offered me opioids, barbiturates, medical marijuana, disability, Do-Not-Resuscitate orders, and yes, Death With Dignity. Before one appointment, I was even instructed in the voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED).”
Harp praised Trump’s signing of the 2018 Right to Try Act for giving her the opportunity to access experimental treatments that proved successful. “My oncologist didn’t tell me I had other options,” she said. “Donald Trump did … Now my numbers are stabilizing and so is my pain.”
The LinkedIn post caught the eye of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network, which invited Harp on air to talk about it. Trump responded on social media: “Natalie Harp, fighting Stage 2 Cancer and doing really well, was a GREAT guest on @foxandfriends. Right To Try is producing some truly spectacular results. Proud of Natalie!”
That led to Harp’s speech in praise of Trump at the Republican national convention, a month after the death of her father. She managed to take a swipe at Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) after offering a message to Trump: “I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for you.”
But a Washington Post article cast doubt on the claim, noting that experts point out that “Harp’s description of the treatment she received and her timeline for receiving it make it unlikely Trump had any effect on her case.”
‘Human printer’
Still, Harp and her mother quit California and moved into an 18th-floor apartment in West Palm Beach, Florida, three miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. In 2020 Harp joined the far-right One America News Network (OANN), where as a presenter she amplified Trump’s “big lie” that the presidential election had been stolen by Joe Biden.
Harp left OANN in 2022 and began working for Trump, then a former president facing criminal cases and mounting a seemingly unlikely bid to return to the White House. She fed him a diet of good news on the election campaign trail.
The New York Times reported in 2024: “She has no official title, but during the campaign, colleagues referred to her as the ‘human printer’ because she followed Mr Trump around with a portable printer and a battery pack to charge it, so she could hand him information in hard copy, as he prefers.”
Now that Trump has returned to the Oval Office, Harp is frequently seen at his side and has become an indispensable aide. Last month, when the president was forced to secretly swap planes in Turkey because of an alleged Iranian assassination threat, she was one of the few people to join him on a military plane while other staff and journalists remained on a decoy Air Force One.
One acquaintance of Harp, who did not wish to be named, said on Tuesday: “Nobody questioned [deputy chief of staff] Dan Scavino being on the military plane but frankly Natalie is a lot more capable than Dan Scavino in a lot of areas. She is beautiful by any definition and because of that people don’t understand how intelligent, articulate, loyal, trustworthy and engaged she is with politics.”
‘Guardian and Protector’
Harp also plays an outsized role in shaping both Trump’s worldview and his output. She reportedly shows him proposed Truth Social posts – often containing recycled content – then logs into his account to publish them. These have included a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes and an AI-generated image portraying Trump as Jesus Christ, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In the book Regime Change published this year, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote that Harp’s loyalty extended to writing Trump “adoring letters” including one that read: “You are all that matters to me.”
In one she wrote: “I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’” In another she said, “I don’t ever want to let you down” and described Trump as her “Guardian and Protector in this Life”.
Haberman and Swan also described a typical scene: “Harp was generally on a chair off to the side, her laptop open, head cocked, listening but never contributing unless ordered to by Trump. She fulfilled, in a flash, any request, whether a ‘Trump 2028’ that needed to be fetched from the merchandise room, a quick Google search, or producing the latest story from rightwing websites like Breitbart or Gateway Pundit.”
Harp’s devotion to Trump does not sit well with her estranged brother, Preston Harp, who lives in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua. He told the Daily Beast website last month: “I think that she does see Trump as a kind of father figure because he embodies the doctrine of American exceptionalism.”
Meanwhile the administration’s furious response to Ossoff’s speech implies that he touched a raw nerve and looks set to invite further scrutiny of Harp and her role in Trump’s life. Kurt Bardella, a political commentator and former congressional aide, said: “It does invoke the famous line, ‘Methinks he doth protest too much’. You made this a bigger thing.
“There’s something in life called a proportional response and what we saw from the White House was a massive response, which only further encourages questions and intrigue. It’s like, ‘Oh, there must be a there there for you to react so violently.’ If their thought process was this will tamp down speculation and gossip, whoever thought that is a moron.”
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