CNN also found that Harp posted messages in support of Trump during the 2021 attack on the Capitol. She is described as the US president’s closest and most devoted adviser.
She never takes a day off, not even on Sundays. She works in the Oval Office and has a permanent seat aboard the Marine One helicopter. On the president’s behalf, she exchanges messages with world leaders and prepares posts for his social media accounts. This is how The New York Times (NYT) describes Natalie Harp, the US president’s 35-year-old adviser.
Media and public interest in Harp increased after it emerged that she was among a select few who accompanied Trump during his covert escape from Air Force One as he departed the NATO summit in July. She and President Trump reportedly hid inside a container used to deliver food at airports in order to evade an alleged Iranian plot.
Media reports suggest that Trump secretly changed planes whilst leaving Ankara. He hid in a food container (in Czech)
Last week, Harp came under political attack from Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia. “Trump doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie in their flying palace, gifted to them by the Emir of Qatar,” Ossoff said. The US government officially accepted the luxury Boeing 747-8 from Doha last year, despite concerns about the ethics and legality of accepting such an expensive gift from a foreign state.
Ossoff’s remarks prompted a furious response from the White House, with Trump’s aides immediately coming to Harp’s defence. White House communications director Steven Cheung complained that Ossoff was “smearing hard-working people who serve their country”. The president himself then sharply attacked a CNN reporter who asked him about the remarks.
Trump unveiled the new presidential aircraft, Air Force One, donated by Qatar (in Czech)
The White House has also faced questions over whether Harp had access to classified information without a security clearance. The news channel MS NOW reported last week that she had worked at the White House for a year without one. According to two unnamed sources cited by the channel, she declined to submit the required applications for reasons that remain unclear.
Only after the White House Counsel’s Office raised the issue and Trump himself intervened did Harp complete the documents required for a federal security clearance, which she was subsequently granted, The Guardian reported.
Natalie Harp. KENT NISHIMURA / AFP
“It is shocking that an adviser with potential access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets reportedly went without a security clearance for so long. Treating access to classified information as merely a perk of the job is a scandalous way to handle our national security,” Norman Eisen, a former special counsel for ethics under President Barack Obama and former US ambassador to Czechia, said, according to The Guardian.
“This is yet another sign of the incompetence of an administration willing to set aside our country’s interests, disregard established procedures and expose the White House to intelligence security risks simply to please Trump,” Eisen continued.
Former Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote on X that if the report that Harp had gone without security clearance for a year was true, and if “the person closest to the president, who is involved in his decision-making every day, refuses to undergo the clearance process”, then this was “an extremely serious matter”.
In response to criticism from former White House officials, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “Harp has a security clearance like everyone else and is a loyal and hard-working member of President Trump’s team”.
According to the Financial Times (FT), however, it will not be easy to deflect the attention focused on Harp and her role at the president’s side. The FT says she has quickly become a symbol of the excessive sycophancy surrounding Trump.
Her overt displays of loyalty to Trump have become the talk of Washington. According to the Financial Times, she sent him letters saying, “You are all that matters to me” and “I want to bring you joy”. She also signed them “With all my heart, Natalie”, The New York Times reported.
She regularly hands out copies of newspaper articles praising Trump – she even carries a portable printer with her so that she can give Trump the information in printed form, which has earned her the nickname ‘the human printer’.
The US Attorney General declined to say whether he would act independently of Trump
CNN found that Harp had displayed extraordinary devotion to Trump long before becoming his adviser. On the day of the attack on the Capitol, 6 January 2021, she reportedly “flooded” her Twitter account with posts urging Republicans to “fight for Trump” as he began his speech near the White House.
At the time, Harp repeated the president’s baseless claims that the election had been rigged and endorsed the rhetoric of his allies, who were also seeking to challenge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election victory. Harp, then 29, wrote on social media: “Today, we stop the steal!”
A US court has stayed proceedings against the Capitol attackers. It granted the Ministry’s request (in Czech)
After a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, she shared posts claiming that the rioters “were not Trump supporters” and spread false reports that Antifa members had infiltrated the crowd. Harp later shared Trump’s calls for the rioters to go home.
Harp was born in 1991 into a family of Christian conservatives. Her father was a real estate agent, while her mother homeschooled her. “Our mother raised us to believe that American exceptionalism was the right way to see things – that the United States ruled the world,” Harp’s brother Preston told CNN. “Unfortunately, my sister never broke free from that delusion,” he said.
Harp studied at Point Loma Nazarene University in Southern California, where she earned a bachelor’s degree, before completing an MBA at Liberty University, a Christian university in Virginia.
When Trump first entered the White House, Harp was battling bone cancer. She attracted the president’s attention after crediting him with saving her life through legislation he signed to make it easier for government agencies to approve experimental drugs, the Financial Times noted.
However, an article in The Washington Post questioned Harp’s claim that the president deserved credit for her recovery. It cited experts who said that, based on the treatment she described and its timeline, “it is unlikely that Trump had any influence on her case”.
Trump wants to slash the prices of prescription medicines, but Europe is expected to foot the bill (in Czech)
Trump subsequently invited Harp to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where she introduced herself as “a once-forgotten American from California”. After the current White House leader lost the election to Joe Biden, Harp remained close to Trump and his inner circle.
As soon as Trump officially announced his candidacy for a second term, Harp was by his side. In Regime Change: Inside Donald Trump’s Imperial Presidency, which describes how Trump has upended the US government since returning to office, authors Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote that the president told his aides that Harp was “the only person who loved him as much as his wife and children did”. “You will all leave and go off to make money – she will never leave me,” he added.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said that Harp was “one of the most loyal and hard-working members of President Trump’s team”.
“She has proved to be an utterly loyal and sycophantic adviser and aide,” David B. Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Akron, said of Harp. “Trump likes that. He does not like being challenged. He likes to be worshipped, and she clearly does that,” he added.
The US has sent a questionnaire to its NATO allies. It asks about their loyalty to Trump (in Czech)
An article written by Klára Machková (CT), initially published on 25 August 2026, 11:27 (CEST)