Do you remember Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s “human printer”? The New York Times previously reported that Harp is the incredibly devoted (some might say unsettlingly obsessed) Trump aide whose job is to print out flattering articles about Trump and deliver them to him in a Lululemon bag. Would you believe me if I said that her whole deal is even weirder?
According to a Vanity Fair excerpt of All or Nothing, Michael Wolff’s new book about the 2024 election, Harp is so wholly committed to Trump that she recently spent a summer living in a golf-club locker room just to be close to him. Wolff writes that when the campaign decamped to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for the summer, Harp was deliberately not given a room in an effort to push her out (others in Trump’s orbit had become wary of what was reportedly called “the Natalie situation”). Nevertheless, she appeared. “She had reached out to the grounds staff at the country club and gotten herself a maid’s room,” Wolff writes. “And when that proved too far from the main house to respond quickly enough to Trump’s calls, she relocated herself to the much closer women’s locker room, where, with undiminished proximity to Trump, she would spend the summer.”
No job is worth doing all that. Based on Wolff’s reporting, it seems that Harp is somehow even more sycophantic than the usual freaks in Trump’s orbit. When she was part of a trio of women brought to an NCAA wrestling competition, Trump attempted to bait them into saying which wrestlers were hottest. Harp initially wouldn’t say anything, but when pressed by Trump, she reportedly said, “Oh, none of them, none of them, sir. I didn’t find any of them attractive or anything worth looking at.” The takeaway being, apparently, that Harp had eyes only for Trump. (In a detail that will send a chill down your spine, Wolff writes that Trump has never had an affair with Harp because winning the presidency in 2016 made him “post-sex.”)
One of the more interesting things about Harp is that the more she ingratiates herself to Trump, the more everyone else tries to get rid of her. Eric Trump was confused by her presence, as were other staffers, the Secret Service even deemed her to be “a potential danger to herself as well as to the president.” According to Wolff, anyone who wanted facetime with Trump during the campaign could just text her, which is how conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer entered the mix. And it wasn’t like she was doing great work, either. Once, on Trump’s plane, the papers flew out of her hands and everyone who helped pick them up saw what she spent her day collecting: “a random collection of out-of-date articles and printouts from obscure websites and fan artwork downloaded from strange Trump-adoring places on the internet.” So, she’s basically running a poorly updated, printed out fanblog for Trump to look at whenever he wants.
Wolff isn’t the only person who’s got new Harp intel. The Daily Mail published excerpts from Alex Isenstadt’s upcoming book, Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, in which Harp is described as someone who “didn’t do well with boundaries.” In one anecdote, Melania Trump reportedly “stumbled upon Harp late at night in Trump’s private quarters at Mar-a-Lago, an area that was typically off-limits to those outside Trump’s family.” In another, Trump advisers compared Harp to Glenn Close’s obsessive character in Fatal Attraction.
Despite … all this, it appears that Harp has held on to her job. She was photographed in the Oval Office in January, looking toward the president’s desk with an adoring glint in her eye. So little of our current political landscape is funny, I say that we should keep getting dispatches about Harp every three months or so, just to lighten the mood a tad. In May, I hope to hear more about the fan art.