Trump's Personal Aide: Scandal Erupts Over President's "Emotional Anchor"

Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old aide to US President Donald Trump, has found herself at the centre of a major scandal after an incident on a golf course in Scotland, where she was seen desperately running after the presidential motorcade. She later handed Trump an emotional letter of apology, the text of which was published by several American media outlets citing Trump biographer Michael Wolff.

"I was not myself, too caught up in the past and the pain of losing my father," Harp's letter reads. "If I caused you any inconvenience, please forgive me… I want things to always be okay between us… You're the only thing that matters to me," the outlets quote her as writing.

What Harp Posted on the Day of the Capitol Riot

Attention to the president's aide intensified after she was mentioned in a Sunday speech by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, a rising star of the Democratic Party. "The president sleeps through meetings. He plays golf and trades stocks. He doesn't want to do the job of president. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on an unsecured flying palace gifted to him by the Emir of Qatar," the senator said, referring to the ballroom under construction on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House and to the aircraft handed over to Trump by Qatar.

It also emerged that Harp had posted messages on the social network X on 6 January 2021 — the day Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. According to CNN, Harp's now-deactivated account was filled that day with pro-Trump posts repeating false claims that the 2020 election had been "stolen" from him. In one of more than 150 posts that day, she wrote "Fight for Trump!" twelve times. According to The Daily Beast, the account also contained comparisons of Trump to biblical figures.

Access Without a Security Clearance

Ossoff did not need to explain to his audience who Natalie Harp was: in July, she was among at least two other aides who hid with Trump in a catering van. That was how security agents moved the president to another plane on the way back from the NATO summit in Ankara, citing an alleged threat from Iran. In doing so, Harp was given priority over Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who — along with other staff, agents and journalists — remained aboard Air Force One, effectively serving, critics say, as decoys in case of an Iranian strike.

A week earlier, New York Times journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman published a book on Trump claiming that Harp is the one who supplies the president with material for his posts on his social platform Truth Social — and that she frequently posts on his behalf herself. The authors also mention secret notes that Harp leaves for the president in his "personal space." Critics describe her relationship with the president as "unhealthy," though Trump himself has said he loves her as much as his wife Melania and his own children. The aide is praised for her boundless loyalty — she has been granted access to the president without the mandatory security clearance required for staff who handle classified information.

An Estranged Brother's Perspective

Natalie's estranged brother, Preston, who now lives in Nicaragua, has spoken publicly about her. In an interview with CNN, he confirmed that his sister is indeed searching for a "substitute father figure," also pointing to their domineering mother. "Trump is everything our mother taught us to revere. She raised us to believe that American exceptionalism was the correct worldview — that the United States was the master of the planet," Preston Harp said.

According to The New Yorker, Natalie and Preston were homeschooled in an evangelical household. The turning point came in 2020 with the tragedy of their father's unexpected suicide. By then, Preston was already living in Central America, having fled, in his words, an ideologically far-right family. According to the magazine, their mother and sister denied the true cause of their father's death. Preston himself sees his sister's path into Trump's world as a kind of spiritual "homecoming" — a search for a substitute father figure that, as The New Yorker put it, has taken on dramatic proportions given her proximity to matters of national security.

Source: seznamzpravy.cz