ANALYSIS: Natalie Harp, 35, writes to executives on Trump’s behalf — a stream of messages that no one ever proofreads

To understand how a stranger from California came to be the last person to review a president’s messages, we have to go back ten years.

2015–2019: Cancer and the Story

Natalie Harp recounts being the victim of a medical error on November 9, 2015, and then battling stage 2 bone cancer. A 2012 graduate of Point Loma Nazarene University and an MBA graduate from Liberty University in 2015, she published a post on LinkedIn in 2019 crediting Trump with her survival: the Right to Try Act, enacted on May 30, 2018, as Public Law 115-176, allegedly gave her access to experimental treatments.

Fox News invited her on. Trump publicly congratulated her. The machine was set in motion.

On August 24, 2020, she opened the Republican National Convention: “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”

The Disputed Account

Here, one fact is troubling—and it troubles our own side.

As early as August 25, 2020, the Washington Post debunked the timeline: the treatment described by Harp was an already-approved immunotherapy, prescribed off-label—a common practice in oncology that predates the law. However, as the FDA specifies on its own website, the federal law covers only drugs that have never been approved for any use. She first mentioned her new treatment in March 2018, two months before the law was signed.

Her gratitude may be sincere. Her founding narrative, however, does not stand up to expert scrutiny.

The origin story of the president’s closest advisor has been disputed for six years.

Next steps: anchor at One America News, where she perpetuates the myth of the “stolen 2020 election”; joined the Trump team in 2022; campaigned for 2024; then appointed to the White House in January 2025. In the meantime, according to The Guardian, she left California with her mother to move into an apartment in West Palm Beach, three miles from Mar-a-Lago.

From the chemotherapy room to the Oval Office—in ten years.

Two documented incidents illustrate the intensity of this devotion.

October 2023, Trump Tower

One morning in October 2023, the motorcade waits outside Trump Tower for a court hearing in New York. No seat has been reserved for Harp. An argument breaks out in the lobby. She claims that Trump personally asked her to come.

Denied entry to the witness booth, she climbs into the trunk of a van in the motorcade.

CNN reported the incident on August 18, 2026, citing two sources and a photograph obtained by the network.

The Summer in Bedminster

Sarah Matthews, former deputy press secretary for the first Trump administration, testified openly: during the summer campaign, the team refused to house Harp at the Bedminster club to create some distance. Her response: she slept in the club’s women’s locker room all summer.

Matthews adds that this proximity “alarmed” the Secret Service—a concern that the book Regime Change, written by Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, also documents, as does the unease felt by colleagues, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

The same book cites letters from 2023, seen by the Times: “You are all that matters to me.” “I want to bring you joy.” Trump is referred to in them as “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

And Trump, according to these authors, summed up the relationship in his own way in front of his team: “All of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me.” You’ll all go off to make your fortunes. She never will.

None of these details establish anything intimate. They all establish something else: unchecked loyalty, entrenched in the most sensitive position in the U.S. government.

Let’s go over the mechanics again, piece by piece, since that’s the topic.

What goes in

Harp feeds Trump articles, screenshots, and messages—including, according to The Times, content drawn from “the gutter of social media.” Some advisors consider part of this feed toxic and counterproductive, and as early as November 2024, the newspaper reported that the selection leaned toward conspiracy-theory sources, to the point of worrying the president’s inner circle about his perception of current events.

Her access also serves as a backdoor. Rivals send her clips that cast their enemies in a negative light so she can print them; according to the Times, activist Laura Loomer has found a direct channel to the president through this.

What Goes Out

Conversely, she types and posts the Truth Social messages the president dictates—often late at night, on weekends, and on holidays. According to The Guardian, only two staff members have access to his accounts: Dan Scavino and her.

February 2026: A video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys appears on the presidential account, then disappears. The inner circle spent days speculating. Was it him or her? No one publicly took a stand.

Such is the level of traceability of official U.S. statements.

You don’t monitor a stream that only one person controls.

Add the diplomatic layer—those text messages sent to heads of state on behalf of the president—and consider the whole picture: an unelected advisor, never confirmed by the Senate, selects part of what the most powerful man in the world reads, drafts part of what he publishes, and speaks on his behalf to foreign governments.

Without oversight. That’s the New York Times’s word, not mine.

In July 2026, following the NATO summit in Turkey, U.S. intelligence detected an Iranian missile threat targeting the presidential plane as it took off from Ankara—an incident that has since been reconstructed in consistent accounts by CBS News, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

The Secret Service orchestrated a ruse: Trump left Air Force One hidden inside a catering truck and boarded a smaller aircraft.

Who boards with him? Pete Hegseth, Walt Nauta, Dan Scavino—and Natalie Harp.

Who stays on the decoy plane? Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with most of the staff and the entire press corps.

Read that list again.

Aboard the last secure plane, the true hierarchy is laid bare.

A secretary of state travels as bait; the human printer travels with the president. In a normal administration, physical proximity follows the organizational chart—here, the organizational chart follows physical proximity.

The issue would have remained a matter for insiders only if it weren’t for a Democratic senator on the campaign trail.

Sunday, August 16

In Atlanta, Jon Ossoff goes on the offensive: while sailors aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln are fighting in his war against Iran, the president “falls asleep during meetings,” “plays golf, and speculates on the stock market.” Then comes the line that sets everything ablaze: he wants to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” in their flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.

Millions of views. A disproportionate response.

When questioned the next day by Jen Psaki about the decision to appoint Harp, the senator replied that this aide had been described to him as the president’s “security cover,” while advisors tell him what he wants to hear—“and the nation is at war.”

The White House’s Response

When questioned on Monday in the Oval Office by CNN reporter Kristen Holmes, Trump dodged the question and sneered: Ossoff was a “Pee-wee Herman lookalike.” The White House’s “Rapid Response” account then attacked the reporter herself, even bringing up her children: “One day, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question.”

Communications Director Steven Cheung insulted the senator. Spokesperson Davis Ingle called him an “effeminate theater kid” with a “dangerous” track record. A Florida lawmaker and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency came to Harp’s defense by denouncing the sexism of the attack.

On the substance of the matter—who controls the flow of information, who verifies the messages, who authorized this access—not a word.

Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt offers the only official response regarding Harp: “Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardworking members of President Trump’s team.”

Harp, for her part, did not respond to the Times’ request for comment. In November 2024, after the first article about her letters, Trump demanded an apology from the newspaper on Truth Social—without disputing a single specific fact in the report, either then or since.

On August 19, 2026, the Really American newsletter summarized the affair in no uncertain terms: a “love letter” that shook the White House—“the kind of thing you write to a lover, not a boss.”

That framing is Really American’s. I would never utter such words.

The line this text does not cross

No public document establishes an intimate relationship between Trump and Harp. Unusual devotion is not an affair. A passionate letter is not proof. Rumors remain rumors, and the psychiatric speculations of anonymous commentators end up where they deserve to end up: in the trash.

A distant brother speaks of a long-standing fascination with presidents; this is a family account, not a case file.

Voyeurism is the best distraction this administration has to offer.

Every minute spent speculating about an assistant’s heart is a minute stolen from the real question: through what channels does the President of the United States’ message pass, and who approved it?

His loyalty is genuine. The problem has never been his loyalty.

I write this as a voter who prefers Trump to his opponents, not as a prosecutor of his enemies. That is precisely why I refuse to dismiss the case with a shrug: defending a president also means demanding that he be accountable and subject to scrutiny.

Trump has the right to choose his staff. He has the right to prefer paper, loyalty, and familiar faces. No law requires a president to like his organizational chart.

But a system in which a 35-year-old—without a mandate, without confirmation, without oversight—filters incoming information, drafts outgoing statements, and contacts foreign leaders—that system no longer has a chain of command. It has a habit.

Habits cannot be controlled. They must be endured.

The day this flow carries an error—a fake, a foreign provocation, a fabricated figure—there will be neither a procedure to stop it nor a record to trace the mistake. The video of the Obamas as monkeys showed this in February: even those closest to him don’t know who’s pushing the button.

A signature on a letter is not a national scandal. A dissolved chain of command is.

The responsibility for this system does not rest with the woman running behind the golf cart. It rests with the man sitting inside it.

He built this system; he protects it; he is accountable for it.

What will remain of this organization when loyalty is no longer enough to replace verification?

Who will be able to say, a year from now, which of the presidential messages actually came from the president?

And if the person operating the printer also guards the door to the most closely monitored office in the world, who guards the door?

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist