Natalie Harp during 'Fox & Friends' appearance on June 14, 2019
Natalie Harp, who serves as President Donald Trump’s executive secretary, has been at the center of a media firestorm since Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) invoked her name during a speech last Sunday, saying: “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 on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
While right-wing pundits feigned outrage over the reference to Harp, reporters at mainstream outlets used the opportunity to empty their notebooks on the heretofore little-discussed White House aide. Harp, readers learned, is Trump’s gatekeeper and social media posting partner, someone so zealously committed to the president that she writes him devotional letters and once jumped into the trunk of an SUV to ensure she could accompany him to a courthouse. Trump’s other aides have nicknamed her “the human printer” because part of her job entails printing out articles for him, and she has been termed Trump’s “binkie” by New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, the paper’s longtime Trump beat reporter.
Harp’s story, as with so much of the saga surrounding Trump and his orbit, would have been impossible without Fox News, the MAGA propaganda outlet with a central role in shaping the president’s worldview.
Trump was first introduced to Harp through a June 14, 2019, segment on Fox & Friends, the sycophantic morning show that helped launch his political career. During that segment, the hosts tried to parry then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s promise to “cure cancer” if elected by lifting up Harp, who in a LinkedIn essay had credited the “Right to Try” law Trump signed in May 2018 for saving her life from terminal cancer.
Harp punctuated the interview with praise for the president. “I’m not dying from cancer anymore, thanks to President Trump, I’m living with cancer,” she said. “I’m walking, I’m healthy. I am living the quality of life that I always wanted to have that it took me four years to find because I wasn’t offered it here. It took President Trump going to Washington to be able to get that for me.”
(After Harp repeated these claims during a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, The Washington Post reported that experts “point out that Harp’s description of the treatment she received and her timeline for receiving it make it unlikely Trump had any effect on her case”).
“Thank you so much, and happy birthday, President Trump,” Harp interjected at the conclusion of the interview. “He’s hearing you, he’s on in an hour and a half,” co-host Brian Kilmeade replied.
Kilmeade was right: Trump was watching Harp’s interview, and — as he did hundreds of times during his first term via the process I’ve termed the Fox-Trump feedback loop — soon responded on social media to what he had seen on TV.
“Natalie Harp fighting Stage 2 Cancer and doing really well was a GREAT guest on @foxandfriends,” he posted shortly after the segment aired. “Right To Try is producing some truly spectacular results. Proud of Natalie!”
Trump also brought up the “young, beautiful woman” unprompted during his own Fox & Friends interview after Kilmeade mentioned an Esquire report that claimed Trump “hates the job” of president.
“No, I love the job. Well, it’s the fake media. You know, they’re just so fake, you don’t even respond to them anymore,” Trump said. “I love it because I don’t think anybody’s accomplished so much in two and a half years, what we’ve done. You know, I watched Natalie Harp, that young, beautiful woman, who was — they made some kind of a medical mistake a long time ago and she’s lived a tough time. And I watched her. I think she’s one of the best guests you’ve ever had. … Her spirit was so incredible.”
Trump later added, “There’s so many people like Natalie, but I thought she was just an incredible person.”
Less than two weeks later, Trump declared during a speech at the right-wing Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference that Harp had “lit up the television screen like very few people I’ve ever seen do it,” before inviting her to join him onstage and tell her story.
From there, Harp would rise through the MAGA ranks. She spent two years as a host for the far-right One America News Network, where she drew attention for her notably obsequious treatment of Trump and her hardcore election denial, before taking a job working for Trump in 2022 and, after his 2024 election, joining his White House.
But as with the careers of numerous Trump administration aides and several of the president’s major initiatives in office, it all started with Trump liking what he saw on Fox.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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