The president of the United States and his assistant are in a toxic, dangerous relationship that puts all of us at risk.
On the campaign trail Monday, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff mentioned Trump’s “Special Assistant to the President and Executive Assistant to the President” Natalie Harp—who makes $150,000/year—as a source of Trump’s distraction.
“And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie [Harp] on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Amir of Qatar.” —Jon Ossoff, 8/18/26
This relatively anodyne comment about someone who has been around Trump and rumored about for years nevertheless generated an enormous, outsized cloud of feigned outrage—and deflection.
During an appearance with children who had been rescued by lifeguards, Trump was asked a question about Ossoff mentioning Natalie Harp. Trump shot back: “You mean, Peewee Herman?” and rambled about his militarized ballroom for several minutes.
Later, a second reporter tried to follow up. Trump asked the young boy next to him: “Don’t you think she’s being disrespectful?” and told the reporter “You’re fake news. Be quiet.”
When the official “rapid response” account responded on the former Twitter, it claimed to be so incensed, it brought up the reporter’s children.
This has been accompanied by a range of right-wing propagandists rolling out their fainting couches. This is coordinated narrative warfare, not concern for Natalie Harp.
This brings up two important questions: Who is Natalie Harp? And why is the Trump machine so sensitive about her?
Unfortunately, the answer is not encouraging, nor is it obvious from the outside what’s going on. In short, Trump and Harp appear to be locked in a psychological dyad sometimes called a folie á deux.
Folie à deux is a psychological phenomenon in which two closely connected people come to share and reinforce the same delusional beliefs, creating a self-sealing reality that becomes increasingly resistant to outside correction.
In exactly this way, Natalie Harp and Donald Trump appear to need each other to keep each other’s delusional realities intact.
In order to understand why this is such an extreme situation, you need to understand some of Natalie Harp’s background—which is highly unusual, especially her relationship to her father Robert Harp.
Along with her brother Preston, who has spoken out about their father, Natalie was homeschooled on a curriculum based on material from conservative evangelical Bob Jones University that emphasized Christian nationalism and American exceptionalism. Robert Harp was a theologian who taught at Biola University and joined the Christian integralist Lausanne Movement. He professed that business is not a secular activity, but should be thought of as a Christian “mission.”
“She thinks that the whitewashing of history is actually a ‘correction,’ like Trump,” Preston told the Daily Beast. “My sister and I were raised to believe in U.S. exceptionalism from childhood through high school, and that is exactly what Trump embodies.”
After graduating from Christian liberal arts college Point Loma Nazarene University, Natalie got an MBA from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in 2015. She started working in her father’s company in 2013, GlobalHotelNetwork.com (GHN) which Robert started in 1987.
GHN was a small boutique newsletter and influence exchange that had a powerful role in the hotel industry—Donald Trump’s primary business milieu. GHN did events, profiles, and outreach for a who’s who of hotel magnates, including Trump—starting as early as 2012.
By 2015, Natalie Harp was one of just a few employees of GHN as Director of Marketing and Operations. How much direct contact, if any, she had with Trump through GHN before 2019 is unknown.
But in 2018, Natalie Harp says she got successfully treated for bone cancer—although there is little direct proof of this—and began immediately (and inaccurately) crediting Donald Trump’s policies for the cure. Later, she claimed that Trump’s “Right to Try” law saved her life, even though she was allegedly cured two months before he signed it.
But on June 12th, 2019, Natalie Harp posted “I’m Living Proof—the Party of Healthcare is Trump’s” on LinkedIn as a "millennial woman fighting cancer," blamed healthcare in her Democrat-controlled state for her problems, and once again credited Trump with saving her life. Two days later she was on Fox and Friends telling her dubious story, alongside Donald Trump.
On June 26th, 2019, just two weeks after her LinkedIn post, she was invited onstage at the “Faith and Family Coalition” where she gained physical access to Trump for first time.
By 2020, Natalie Harp was on Trump’s advisory board and was a surrogate for the campaign. Then, in what appears to have been a major turning point, her father, her boss, and her theological mentor, Robert Harp, unexpectedly committed suicide in July 2020.
Despite how close she was with her father, however, she did not miss a beat. Within three weeks, Natalie and her mother had moved to Palm Beach to within a few miles of Mar-a-lago. Almost immediately, Natalie was seen at Trump’s golf resort following him around with printouts, hence her first nickname—“the human printer.” Trump then invited her to speak at the 2020 RNC. More recently, she has been described as his “Binkie.”
The psychological ramifications of this sequence of events are highly charged and from the outset look like transference.
In psychoanalysis, transference means expectations, feelings, and relationship patterns formed around important earlier attachment figures—especially parents—are re-created in a present relationship. The American Psychoanalytic Association explicitly describes it as basing perceptions and expectations in current relationships on earlier attachments, particularly parents and significant others.
You cannot complete the grieving process for a parent in three weeks, especially one so close, but Natalie had an alternate father-figure already built, so she never had to fully experience her father’s loss. According to Preston, Natalie had begun to doubt Robert’s commitment to “American exceptionalism.” When her father took his own life, she doubled-down with his ready-made replacement—the president of the United States.
When Donald Trump finally gave up the White House in January 2021—after attempting to keep it through violence on J6—he didn’t have a full-time job for Natalie Harp, but she didn’t give up on him.
By February 2021, she had already landed a job at One America News (OAN). By March, she was on the air, creating elaborate conspiracy theories about the “stolen election.” How she got the job, despite no television experience, is unknown.
OAN is not just any right-wing propaganda channel. It is a dedicated pro-Russian network with a long, unblemished record of defending Putin, attacking Ukraine, and trying to get Russian assets elected by any means necessary. In 2019, Rudy Giuliani and OAN anchor Chanel Rion interviewed sanctioned Russian oligarch Andrii Derkach while trying to create dirt on Joe Biden.
The owner of OAN, Robert Herring, retired in 2000 at the age of 59. But in 2004, Herring took a trip to Russia and married a Russian woman half his age. When he came back he came out of retirement to start a TV network—WealthTV—which morphed into OAN. Herring is known to be extremely hands-on about what stories go on his network—and overt about his pro-Russian views. This includes hiring Kristian Rouz, who was simultaneously employed at Sputnik and OAN.
Natalie Harp stayed in her job at OAN until Trump decided to get back in the race in early 2022. She quit OAN that March to become his near-full-time companion, almost at the same time as another election-denying OAN anchor, Christina Bobb—who had been Mike Flynn’s military lawyer in Afghanistan—quit to join Trump’s re-election effort.
To get a good sense for how dedicated Natalie Harp was to Trump while he fought his legal battles and geared up for the 2024 election, CNN has this story:
Natalie Harp wouldn’t take no for an answer.
It was October 2023, and Donald Trump was due at a New York City courthouse to fight his latest set of legal troubles. But as the motorcade idled outside his Trump Tower residence, staffers confronted a more immediate problem: There wasn’t room for Harp, the hyper-loyal aide whose devotion to Trump had quickly entrenched her within his orbit.
A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN.
From the book Regime Change and other reporting we know that Natalie Harp likes to leave notes around Trump’s “personal spaces” which have included the following:
“You are all that matters to me.”
“I don’t ever want to let you down.”
She thanked Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
In another letter she said she wanted to return to “that synergy” they had previously shared, when “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”
She wrote: “I want to bring you joy” and said she wanted them to be able to get through a day without ever having to talk about “work.”
None of this language is political, nor has it anything to do with Harp’s job—or Trump’s. This is textbook attachment language. It is about emotional binding. Trump does not discourage this behavior. He knows she has transferred her father-figure to him.
“All of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me.”
—Donald Trump on Natalie Harp, Regime Change
But Donald Trump also appears to be engaged in his own psychological transference. Trump infamously said on TV about his daughter Ivanka: “If she wasn’t my daughter I’d probably be dating her.” It doesn’t take much imagination to see that Natalie Harp is nearly Ivanka’s doppelgänger.
This creates a double bind: Natalie has transferred her father into Trump. And Trump has transferred his daughter into Natalie. But what are the real world ramifications of this unhealthy relationship between the president and Natalie Harp? Is it really so bad that they’ve found each other?
Yes. It’s really, really bad.
First, Natalie Harp’s position as Trump’s filter and gatekeeper gives her an enormous amount of unearned power. This also makes her an attack surface for malicious actors to use for their own agendas. For example, when professional bigot Laura Loomer wanted to get “woke” general officers fired from the military, Natalie Harp was her conduit to Trump—bypassing the White House. That’s why Loomer, despite her record of horrific personal attacks on people, called Jon Ossoff’s comment “a low blow.”
Second, and most importantly, Natalie Harp appears to control both much of what Trump sees—his input—and what Trump expresses through his social media—his output. Here is what it looked like during the thick of the 2024 campaign.
As I’ve written, Donald Trump is evidently psychotic, meaning: he lives in a delusional world created by his own messianic narcissism and cognitive decline. Natalie Harp functions to keep this alternate reality unperturbed by uncomfortable facts. She is his filter and his emotional protector.
The impact of this is clear. As a small example, Donald Trump is still absolutely convinced that the Reflecting Pool fiasco, which was botched by his no-bid pool contractor, was caused by “vandalism.” This includes indicting Olympian David Hearn, who is still being harassed by Trump’s DOJ. As “evidence,” Trump has repeatedly cited posts from his website Truth Social—which were almost certainly printed out for him by Natalie Harp.
If the only information Trump receives from the outside world is deliberately tuned by Natalie Harp to serve his preconceptions and delusions, he will continue to believe them. She sees it as her job to keep him safe from narcissistic injury.
As a far more serious example, Trump constantly insists that “the Strait of Hormuz is open” and “we have total control of the Strait” despite the obvious fact that he already surrendered to Iran—which now says it is closing the Strait “indefinitely.” Trump appears to receive little negative information about the conflict, nor does he receive pushback from Natalie Harp—who just acts as a stenographer for his delusions.
The psychological folie á deux between Trump and Natalie Harp is not harmless, and it has nothing to do with whether there is a physical relationship between them. This is a sealed epistemology where she curates the information he receives in order to present the world back to him as he wants it—not as it actually exists.
Trump’s security blanket, his “Binkie,” may keep him safe from hurt feelings, but in the real world, Natalie Harp is a national security emergency.
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Sweet Baby Jesus, a Biola girl. I lived in La Mirada for about a year in the early '80's. What a strange place it was then. This explains a lot. The whole Biola "University" ethos. It was founded in 1908 as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles as a center for biblical and missionary training. Calvinist capitalism writ small.
Ossoff simply said 'traveling,' but the MAGA world went berserk, accusing him of implying a sexual relationship.
As always, the projection is an admission - they suspect said relationship. Yet they demand an apology from Ossoff.
That would be funny if it weren't so scary...