In a speech last week, Georgia Senate candidate Jon Ossoff opened up a lightly-sealed can of worms. “Donald Trump doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
The line worked as intended. Who, listeners wondered, was Natalie? And journalists went fishing.
Natalie is Natalie Harp, a 35-year-old White House aide who has made herself indispensable to the president, and is typically seen (silently) at his side. She travels with him. She types out his tweets. She sends him racist social media posts. She sleeps in his clubs’ locker rooms to maintain proximity to him. She races after his golf cart on Scottish courses and then pens impassioned apologies when it turns out that embarrasses him. She is, in her own telling, his most loyal servant, and he her beloved guardian and supreme protector.
This really is how she talks about him — just read the letters Harp has written to Trump, which were obtained by the Daily Beast and are frankly bananas:
“You are all that matters to me” and you are “my Guardian and Protector in this Life” — these are not normal things for a person to write to their boss. “With all my heart” is not a normal way for an employee to sign off on a letter to their boss.
In a second letter, she writes that she envied those “whose only ‘job’ seems to be to talk with you, and look pretty (I want that job!)” and laments that she and Trump no longer talked like they used to (“about everything and nothing”). “And please, when I fail, will you tell me?” she adds. “You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more.” She ends by declaring herself “unworthy.”
Trump has reportedly told people that Harp is the only person in the world who loves him as much as his wife and children do. She shows him social media posts he then shares or fixates on, including one that showed the Obamas as apes and another that showed Trump as Jesus Christ (Trump then shared both from his account, to significant controversy). She often types his Truth Social posts herself.
The whole thing is weird. It is obviously, inarguably weird. Who wouldn’t find this weird?
But when liberals began pointing out that this is all really weird, Republicans took umbrage. How dare we impugn the reputation of a professional adult woman who is simply extremely dedicated to her boss and her job?
