A new detail about President Donald Trump’s close aide Natalie Harp has renewed questions about their relationship.
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The White House social media account posted video from Sunday’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix that appeared to crop the 35-year-old aide out of the frame as the president waved a green flag and first lady Melania Trump stood at his side, and New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman discussed the continuing scandal on “CNN This Morning.
“Jonathan [Swan] and I get into this pretty, not extensively, in the book [‘Regime Change’], but we do write about Natalie Harp and how purely devotional she is to Donald Trump,” Haberman said. “Those letters were left, and we write about them again in the book, in his personal spaces, during the interregnum period when he was out of office. One of them said, ‘You are all that matters to me.’ These letters and some of her behavior alarmed people around the president, then candidate, including the Secret Service, and they spoke to people about what was happening at the time.”
“There’s two factors here,” Haberman continued. “One is she is 10 feet away from him in the Oval Office all the time. She supplies him not with all of his information, he obviously gets intelligence briefings and so forth that she doesn’t prepare, but she provides him sort of this alternate version of information, including that plays into his view of the ‘deep state,’ in his words, of his own government, of being suspicious of what he is being told, and she was one of the people who he took with him on that plane.”
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“When the older Air Force One was a decoy plane, very small group of people,” she added. “So that’s part of why there is a focus. It matters not because, you know, the salacious implications aside that [Sen. Jon Ossoff] did and others have done, it matters because she’s in government and she’s close to the president.”
Harp’s Jan. 6-era tweets are drawing scrutiny now, and while election denial is essentially a requirement for Trump loyalists, Haberman said the attention stems from Harp’s unusual position inside government rather than from the content of the posts themselves.
“She is a neon sign of why this term is so radically different than term one,” Haberman said. “For all of the belief that there were plenty of sycophants in term one, there was no one like this.”
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