The first story I unpacked about Natalie Harp was this one, from Marc Caputo, who was and remains exceedingly well-connected with right wing Floridians (Though the first time I mentioned her discussed how unvetted her 2020 Convention speech to Trump was.)
In a story that broke the news that Harp had posted a video promising Trump would bring about a “unified Reich,” Caputo instead focused on her gatekeeping role.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Harp gatekeeps much of what Trump sees on social media and reads in the news.
“IF YOU WANT THE PRESIDENT TO SEE SOMETHING, the best route is Natalie,” says a knowledgeable source who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the internal workings of Trump’s inner team and who has passed information to the candidate via Harp. “Don’t underestimate her importance.”
Much later in the story, Caputo described that Trump’s campaign staffers didn’t supervise Harp.
“No one spends as much time on this campaign around him as Natalie,” said one insider. “If people think she’s an airhead because of her looks, they don’t understand how smart she is and how much the president relies on her.”
The campaign’s co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, don’t directly oversee Harp and, the source said, and essentially leave her alone.
“Natalie fills a role and Chris and Susie know that’s what he wants,” the source said, “so they focus on other things.”
In the WSJ’s story from yesterday introducing Harp to those just checking in, they describe her the same way: She’s the gatekeeper.
To Democrats, Harp is one of the president’s chief enablers. For Republicans, she is Trump’s gatekeeper. A well-timed text to Harp can unlock access to Trump, giving well-known lobbyists and fringe figures alike an audience with the most powerful man in the world.
They, too, emphasize that no one supervises Harp — still not Susie Wiles, not Trump’s comms team, not what they euphemistically call his national security team.
The shortest path to getting something on the Resolute Desk, the people said, is often through Harp. One person close to the White House said that Harp’s cellphone number is even more precious than Trump’s.
White House officials say Harp hasn’t taken a single vacation day since joining the Trump administration and remains in constant contact with the president, sitting in on Situation Room meetings, Oval Office meetings and meetings aboard Air Force One in his private office.
While all executive staff work for the president, Harp reports exclusively to Trump and no one else, according to people familiar with the dynamic. She has at times ruffled feathers among White House aides by immediately following through on Trump’s directives without first checking in with the chief of staff, the communications office or the national-security team.
In the wake of Jon Ossoff’s mere suggestion that Trump was traveling with Natalie rather than focusing on winning a war, several new anecdotes have come out.
Just a week after we learned that Harp was among the aides who snuck out of Old Air Force One in a catering cart — a story that Trump went to unprecedented lengths to squelch, in part because only Harp and a few other people knew about the story — we learn that Trump went on a similarly paranoid hunt in 2024 when her devotional letters were leaked by one of the “tiny number of people” who had access to them.
It was late November 2024. Donald Trump hadn’t even been sworn back into office yet, and yet he was already busy ordering up the kind of sweeping leak hunts that would come to define much of his second presidency.
The president-elect was absolutely livid, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told me. On Nov. 25 that year, the New York Times ran a story that quoted from a series of leaked “devotional letters” that close Trump aide and confidant, Natalie Harp, had written to her boss. Eyebrow-raising lines included, “You are all that matters to me.”
“I want to bring you joy,” Harp warmly penned, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”
Trump, the sources said, was furious about this for days, and ordered advisers to conduct what one of the sources called an expansive “mole hunt” to figure out who leaked the private correspondence – or, “love letters,” as some Trump advisers mockingly called them. The president-elect privately bellowed about how there were a tiny number of people, including himself, who had access to Harp’s letters, and that he considered it a towering “invasion of privacy” for anyone to leak them.
One of the three sources says they were “interviewed” by Trump officials for the informal leak probe, and that they were asked to hand over their phone for inspection. It is unclear if Trump ever found the “moles” responsible.
I gotta believe that Harp is one of the few people Trump would never suspect of leaking his most sensitive details.
Then there are the multiple stories — one describing her living in the Bedminster locker room to evade Secret Service distancing, another describing her squishing into an SUV to ensure she would be at his court appearance — which have been presented as testament to just how nutso Harp is about her boss.
White House aide Natalie Harp’s closeness to Trump had “alarmed” the Secret Service and unnerved his 2024 campaign staff.
Matthews’ comments, made during an appearance on CNN’s Laura Coates Live on Monday, came a day after Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, singled out Harp by name at a campaign rally, accusing Trump of preferring to “travel with Natalie” instead of doing his job.
“They tried to get her to not stay at Bedminster that summer while they were on the campaign trail, because even campaign staff recognized that it was a weird relationship between the two,” Matthews said, referring to efforts by Trump’s 2024 campaign staff to keep Harp from staying with him at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club.
“So what did Natalie Harp do? She found a workaround. She stayed in the women’s locker room all summer long. So I think that it’s fair to point out the sycophancy of her in particular, and their close relationship.”
Or, they could be viewed as a measure of the extent to which she will go to ensure she retains her gatekeeper role.
The far right wants to pretend Ossoff’s comment was a slur about an innocent young lady who is in fact a gutter racist who is, at 35, pushing middle age, especially by Trump’s standards. They want to pretend this is a debate about whether the old man with cankles that look like pumpkins is fucking the aide that looks like Ivanka.
And all the while we’re not talking about what it means that anyone with a trusted relationship with Harp could learn anything about Donald Trump, could learn the content of all his meetings, all his messages, all his phone calls, could pass him — and pass on, in his name — any kind of untoward message.
Natalie Harp may be just what the far right wants to pretend she is: A staffer who has gone nutso for her boss, and therefore lavishes the kind of treatment on him that his increasingly fragile ego needs to function in the face of Narcissistic injuries.
But if she were something else, no one would be in a position to know about it.
Correction: I originally said that Trump and Harp snuck out of the Flying Bribery Palace. But it was Old Air Force One.
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