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The Full Harp-Trump Letters Are Worse Than You Think
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Introduction
Taken in isolation and exclusively on their face, the just-released Harp-Trump Letters would excite little comment or concern. They present as just two in a presumptively lengthy stream of communications between an eighty-year-old married serial rapist and a blonde, conventionally attractive aide who’s well less than half his age. The two exemplars we now have of how these two people communicate, specifically samples of Natalie Harp’s “adoring” (NYT) missives to President Donald Trump, for all intents and purposes appear to hail from the sort of toxic, clandestine romantic relationship most of us have been in at least once. Usually in our teens.
On that basis, the most notable aspects of these letters by far would have to be (a) the two ends of this seemingly unmistakably romantic relationship (whether physical or not) both insisting that there is no such relationship, as does everyone less powerful than them in the White House they jointly control, which is basically everybody; (b) the fact that one of the two is a religious zealot while the other has astonishing contempt for all religious people; (c) the apparent factoid that one of the two is not known to have ever been in a serious romantic relationship before, while the other is the alleged or proven perpetrator of literally hundreds of incidents of Rape, Sexual Harassment, Sexual Assault, infidelity, ambiguously voluntary groping, misogynistic taunting, and diabolically gleeful home-wrecking, as well as war crimes in multiple countries that he either authorized or aided and abetted and which indiscriminately killed women and children (along with a history of publicly fantasizing about violence against women in speeches that were by turns sadistic and onanistic in delivery and tone); and (d) that the more powerful of the two mutual admirers is the autocratic capo of far-right political party whose self-ascribed obsession with “moral accountability”
and “personal responsibility” saw its zenith in the impeachment of a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) over a deeply wrong—but nevertheless notably less troubling—workplace relationship than the one we’re speaking of right now.
Sure, we could add here that Trump is a married man, but the general sense now is that the marriage in question is a sham, Melania Trump is disgusted by her husband and is no longer even willing to live with him, and Donald Trump has cheated on her so many times and under such humiliating circumstances—every one treated as just fine by voters in a political party that defines itself by its devout Christianity—that there’s no explicit violation of the Word of God that Donald Trump could flout and lose the support of (say) a grifting heretic like his personal spiritual mentor, Paula White-Cain.
Sure, we could add that Natalie Harp describing Donald Trump (caps in original) as her lifelong spiritual “Guardian” and “Protector” and “Alpha and Omega”—all roles that God himself is supposed to fill in the life of a devout Christian—certainly adds an odd dimension to what at least seems to be an instance of emotional adultery, but then again, Donald Trump already publicly, on national television no less, declared himself “God’s Chosen One” and not one evangelical supporter batted an eyelash, so there’s that.
And as Trump has repeatedly framed himself as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ—yes, in those terms—even a religious zealot like Harp can feel that as long as she does whatever he tells her to do she’s serving God (or at least the only one she’ll know while on Earth).
And sure, the very fact that Donald Trump, an atheist who is among the least godly Americans to rise from this soil—he installed a golden statute of himself at one of his clubs and called it Don Colossus, encouraging Christians to pray over it (the same thing he’s done over and over and over again elsewhere); he was convicted of 34 counts of a theft-related offense (Fraud); he’s one of the only men alive famous for bearing false witness against his neighbors; he proudly orders illegal killings in other parts of the world, his own back yard, and amidst illegal wars he unilaterally launched—has somehow convinced an apparently bright young lady to give him “all her heart,” to the point that she expressly dishonors her late father by expressly raising up in his place a man whose diabolical nature appears to be virtually boundless is… well, something.
It’s troubling, one supposes—though only if one is a Christian, or a non-Christian who cares about decency.
No—what really makes these letters, and the relationship they imply, so upsetting is that as a matter of national security it seems relevant that one of the two people in this odd relationship is a President of the United States with demonstrably zero interest in protecting classified intelligence (he infamously steals it, flushes it down toilets, eats it, rips it up, trashes it, puts it in burn bags, discloses it cavalierly to our enemies as small talk, develops plans to sell it, hides it from even those entitled to access to it, blurts it out, lets it be intercepted by America’s enemies over non-secure phone lines, or else declassifies it via Jedi mind tricks, as his mood dictates) and the other person in the relationship at hand has infiltrated the White House for reasons that remain unclear but that we know, at least, she’s aggressively lied about for many years.
All of which means, if we refuse to take the Harp-Trump Letters in isolation—and here at Proof we never take things in isolation, as not only is there no reason to do so but doing is be unnatural amidst the interconnectedness of the political world—we can review them with an eye toward the sort of intelligence and security reviews they clearly never got.
The author of this Proof report is a former federal criminal investigator and retired criminal defense attorney who only writes about complex interactions that are at once multivariate, must be analyzed and tracked over time, and are not the product of just one discrete narrative stream. If a story can be summarized in a squib, this outlet has little interest in covering it; Proof is strictly a curatorial journalistic enterprise (see also here and here).
In the most recent Proof report on Harp and Trump, Proof showed that Ms. Harp is a possibly unprecedented national security threat to the White House, her boss Donald Trump, and possibly even the United States. She’s in a position to do enormous harm to American interests, and is only in her current taxpayer-paid position ($150,000/year) because the sitting President of the United States is a dirty old man who is not only wildly immature for his advanced age but also—subclinically speaking—a malignant narcissistic psychopath.
This is not the first time Donald Trump has endangered the United States by dint of his greed and vanity and overarching venality, and it won’t be the last.
Enter the two just-released Harp-Trump letters (see images infra).
These two letters from Harp to Trump, so inappropriate and unnerving as to surely be without precedent, take the concerns Proof has already expressed about this situation to a new level. While many of the odd professions of devotion in these two documents have already been unpacked here at Proof and elsewhere, what’s most surprising in the release of these documents by The Daily Beast is how many sentences in them have flown under the radar while in the hands of journalists who should have known better.
It doesn’t take a former federal criminal investigator to see all the warning signs in these two missives—warning signs that should have caused the United States Secret Service to immediately leap to the defense of their protectee Trump and the nation as a whole. But it certainly doesn’t hurt that this author has that particular training (see here for more detail on my training and practice).
In undertaking this analysis, Proof both sidesteps the aspects of these letters that have already been discussed in detail here and, despite the urgency of the situation and the callous disregard for propriety shown by both Harp and Trump, attempts to approach at least the former person with a small amount of grace.
While it’s true that Harp appears to have been the “but for” cause of the leader of the free world going full Ku Klux Klan and comparing his predecessor Barack Obama to an ape—as well as other upsetting incidents, like the same leader portraying himself gleefully spraying diarrhea all over American voters—it remains the case that Harp appears to be a troubled young woman in an extremely precarious psychological state, and there’s no reason for anyone not to be at least broadly empathetic to such a state of affairs. Yes, even if the person in question has chosen to exhibit religious devotion to someone they knew (or should have known) is a serial rapist, war criminal, convicted felon, long time conman, draft dodger, serial adulterer, domestic abuser, serial sexual harasser, misogynist, racist, heretic, antisemite, Islamophobe, ableist, transphobe, xenophobe, and unrepentant wannabe fascist dictator whose sexual attractions are self-admittedly pedophilic and says the only code he follows is the dictates of his own spectacularly malformed mind.
With all that in mind, let’s proceed.
The Harp-Trump Letters
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The Ten Most Harrowing New Revelations in the Just-Released “Full” Harp-Trump Letters
