Natalie Harp calls Trump her ‘guardian and protector.’ She is MAGA’s ideal woman

Natalie Harp needs help — not the world’s worst father figure or his knuckle-dragging sycophants. In July 2020, Harp’s father, Robert, died by suicide. According to her estranged brother, Preston Harp, Natalie Harp and their mother wanted to tell people he died in his sleep. Preston Harp refused, insisted on telling the truth, and reportedly helped trigger a rift between the siblings that continues today.

Harp was homeschooled in an extremely conservative family steeped in evangelical Christianity and American exceptionalism. Her father studied theology and ministry; Harp attended Liberty University. So when something happened that was too awful, too complicated, or perhaps simply too incompatible with the world the family had been taught to believe in, the instinct, according to Preston Harp, was to replace reality with something easier to swallow: Dad died in his sleep.

A month later, Natalie Harp was speaking at the Republican National Convention about Donald Trump.

Harp had already publicly credited Trump with saving her life after surviving bone cancer, a claim medical experts said did not withstand scrutiny. At the convention, she claimed Trump’s Right to Try law had given her access to the treatment that kept her alive: “Without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.” Except the chronology doesn’t work.

The treatment Harp described receiving was an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug prescribed off-label, a common practice in cancer treatment that predated Trump’s law and would not have been covered by it anyway. Harp had publicly discussed receiving the treatment in March 2018, two months before Trump signed the law. Trump did not need to save Natalie Harp’s life for Harp to believe — or at least publicly declare — that he had.

That is when Harp’s life started resembling a community theater jukebox musical of Mel Brooks’s greatest hits. Only Harp is the lead singing “Springtime for Hitler” while chasing a golf cart, feverishly printing documents, and lugging around what online observers have dubbed Trump’s “diaper bag.”

Photographs from a 2023 trip to Trump’s golf course in Scotland show Harp sprinting uphill behind golf carts carrying Trump and his entourage. In a letter about the trip, she apologized for walking the course and possibly embarrassing him. She said she had been forgetting to eat and sleep, sometimes getting only a couple of hours a night.

According to CNN, she once climbed into the trunk of an SUV rather than risk being left behind when Trump traveled to court. Nicknamed the “human printer,” she follows Trump with a portable printer, supplying him with flattering articles and social media posts. She reportedly works without days off, helps manage his Truth Social account, and has become such an important conduit to the president that foreign leaders and political operatives have reportedly used her to put information directly in front of him.

And she writes beautiful letters.

“You are all that matters to me,” Harp wrote to Trump. She thanked him for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.” She told him he had the “absolute right to cuss me out” because no one knew or cared about her more. After writing that she had begun to envy women whose only job seemed to be talking to Trump and looking “pretty,” she added: “I want that job!!”

She also thanked Trump for being there after her father died. You do not need a doctorate in psychology to notice the pattern. I do not have one, and I am not diagnosing a woman I have never met. I am describing what her own words and conduct evoke.

But what the fuck.

Consider the sequence: A woman loses her father to suicide under circumstances so traumatic that, according to her brother, she wanted to say he died in his sleep. Weeks later, she is praising a man more than four decades older whom she credits with saving her life. Eventually, she calls him her guardian and protector, gives him permission to berate her, forgets to eat and sleep while serving him, reportedly climbs into a trunk rather than be left behind, and literally runs after his golf cart. And this is what MAGA calls a woman’s place?

That is why MAGA’s outrage over Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioning Harp is so fucking ridiculous. After Ossoff mocked Trump for shirking his presidential duties to golf, build his ballroom, and “travel with Natalie,” Republicans discovered feminism with the urgency of people hearing the final boarding call. CNN commentator Scott Jennings accused Ossoff of smearing a “loyal public servant.” The White House attacked Ossoff as a “feminine theatre kid.” Nothing says “respect women” quite like using femininity as an insult.

Meanwhile, over in hell on Earth, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, preaches that wives should submit to husbands, women should not lead churches, and households should vote through their “heads” — almost always men. Wilson has called women serving in the military “loathsome” to God and written that male domination and female submission are an “erotic necessity.” Hegseth attends a church in Wilson’s denomination, has studied his books, and invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon. Hegseth has also dissolved a Pentagon committee supporting female service members and blocked the promotions of female military leaders.

Natalie Harp makes perfect sense inside MAGA, which has never required women to be powerless; it requires them to understand the terms on which access is granted. Women can rise from performers in the MAGA circus to governors, cabinet secretaries, television stars, and White House aides with extraordinary access, so long as they remain useful to the men above them: human shields, storefronts, and mirages meant to obscure the men who would prefer their deals be made in the shadows. Harp has mastered that bargain. She anticipates Trump, flatters him, protects him, helps control the information presented to him, and surrenders almost every ordinary boundary in his service.

For Harp and Trump, however, the facade has worn thin. We all see what’s going on. We see the diaper bag. We see the golf-cart chase. We see the old man decaying in real time. And we see a grieving woman turning “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? into actual correspondence with her chosen father figure.

For more than a year during Trump’s second term, Harp reportedly declined repeated requests to undergo a background investigation despite spending her days beside the president, potentially encountering sensitive information while influencing what reached him. Before Trump, she worked at One America News Network, or OAN, a network that aired Russian disinformation around the 2020 election and later broadcast pro-Putin propaganda from Russia.

Imagine Barack Obama installing outside the Oval Office an obsessively devoted former employee of a network that had aired Russian disinformation, allowing her to postpone a background investigation while she controlled information reaching him and sent him letters calling him her guardian and protector. Republicans would still be holding hearings in 2047.

MAGA doesn’t look at a woman surrendering herself to a powerful man and fail to recognize what’s happening. It recognizes exactly what’s happening and promotes her for it. The diaper bag. The printer. The letters. The trunk. The golf cart chase. She’s a walking résumé for the place MAGA reserves for women in its brave new world. Someone help her.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness.

If you or someone you know needs mental health resources and support, please call, text, or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit 988lifeline.org for 24/7 access to free and confidential services. Trans Lifeline, designed for transgender or gender-nonconforming people, can be reached at (877) 565-8860. The lifeline also provides resources to help with other crises, such as domestic violence situations. The Trevor Project Lifeline, for LGBTQ+ youth (ages 24 and younger), can be reached at (866) 488-7386. Users can also access chat services at TheTrevorProject.org/Help or text START to 678678.

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