Secret Service Once Deemed Trump’s Young, Doting Aide a ‘Danger to Herself & the President’

Erm, this is odd.

Politics
Secret Service Once Deemed Trump’s Young, Doting Aide a ‘Danger to Herself & the President’

While on the campaign trail in 2024, 78-year-old Donald Trump proved he’s still got a sex scandal or two left in him. Beginning in September, rumors swirled daily about him and his white nationalist maybe-situationship, 31-year-old Laura Loomer. Whatever did or didn’t go down between those two, it would seem they weren’t exclusive. According to new excerpts from Michael Wolff’s forthcoming book on Trump’s return to power, All or Nothing, something very odd was and/or is going on with Trump and his 34-year-old aide, Natalie Harp—who remains his devoted aide today.

Harp, a former talking head on the far-right One America News channel who joined Trump’s campaign in 2022, developed such a strong obsession with the president that Secret Service agents deemed her “a potential danger to herself as well as to the president.” At one point in the summer of 2023, Harp slept in the women’s locker room of a country club to be closer to Trump. 

Harp initially joined the campaign as essentially Trump’s glorified bagman, or, as Wolff put it, his “fetch-it girl.” Whatever he needed, she provided. She came to be known as the “human printer,” because she carried with her a small, portable printer to print anything and everything for Trump so that his old man eyes wouldn’t have to look at a screen. Menial as that labor might sound, this—almost unilateral power over what information Trump would and wouldn’t see—rendered Harp “a significant gatekeeper,” Wolff wrote. In the papers Harp provided for Trump, she often included intimate, adoring letters that increasingly concerned not just secret services, but top Trump staffers. At different points, she wrote to him, “You are all that matters to me,” “I don’t ever want to let you down,” and “I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’.” She once wrote him:

I need to reunite my past self with my current into a better version who will make you proud. And please, when I fail, will you tell me? 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.

In November, the New York Times reported that Harp previously told Trump he is her “guardian and protector in this life,” and how she loves that they’re able to “talk about everything and nothing.”

As those in Trump’s orbit became increasingly wary of Harp, determined to address what became internally known as “the Natalie situation,” staff tried to lessen her access to the president. But nothing would stop her, and Wolff writes that “her doggedness [amused] and [impressed] Trump.” At one point, when the campaign spent prolonged time in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump’s staff deliberately ensured Harp didn’t have housing at his country club. That didn’t stop her. She sought and received a maid’s room at the club. And when that wasn’t close enough to the president, she “relocated herself to the much closer women’s locker room, where, with undiminished proximity to Trump, she would spend the summer,” Wolff reports. Can I just say: Wow!

Wolff further writes that Harp is one of numerous much younger, attractive women Trump kept close to him on the campaign trail and flirtatiously referred to as his “Charlie’s Angels.” Wolff describes one particular incident when Trump took his “angels”—attorneys Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan, and Harp—to watch the NCAA wrestling championship and pressed the women on who they found most attractive. Harp repeatedly declined, making it clear she didn’t find any of the young, muscular, college-aged men as attractive as the man old enough to be her grandfather. 

Harp’s Trumpland origin story clarifies some of this, as she quite literally credits Trump with saving her life. She claims she only recovered from bone cancer thanks to Trump’s “Right to Try” law, which allowed her to get the experimental medication she needed. Wolff stressed that there are quite a few holes in her little miracle story, but nonetheless, she spoke about it at length in her 2020 Republican National Convention speech. 

Trump has reportedly entirely ignored Secret Service and staff warnings to him about Harp’s behavior. It should speak volumes that Secret Service agents ultimately deemed Harp’s letters to Trump so concerning that they, themselves, keep the letters in their possession. Nonetheless, Trump has simply told them, “She just loves her president.” 

In addition to giving Trump his papers, Harp is also reportedly responsible for “as many as a hundred” of Trump’s social media posts… per day. That was one of the biggest shocks to me, because Trump is 78 and he certainly tweets and posts like it. So, you can imagine my surprise to learn that a good chunk of his posts come from a 34-year-old woman. 

Trump is a very strange person, so my threshold for being shocked or puzzled by any of his antics at this point is quite high—I mean, this is a man who spent the summer touring the country telling the story of Hannibal Lecter and warning about windmills, who nicknamed his chief of staff “the Ice Maiden” and, without any explanation, assumed we’d all just… get it. Still, keeping a young woman so dangerously obsessed with him that Secret Service is keeping tabs on her is incredibly fucking strange—on its face, that is. One quote from an unnamed staffer to Wolff ultimately made it all make sense: “I mean, this is how it is. He just likes people who are, you know, entirely in the sycophant territory.” 

Harp is very clearly in love with Trump, and if these two crazy kids want to reenact the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet, I’ll support them!

 
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