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Natalie Harp: the far-right conspiracy conduit who will be Trump's information gatekeeper
A former anchor for the far-right One America News Network (OAN), Natalie Harp, will serve in a key, though yet-to-be-specified communications role for the Trump White House. She is thought to already be a critical information gatekeeper to President-elect Trump and someone who may have played a role in some of the campaign's more controversial decisions and statements over the past year.
Rise to prominence
The 33-year-old Harp hails from a conservative Christian family in California. Her father, Robert Harp, was a professor in the Crowell School of Business at Biola University, a Christian institution, and passed away in 2020. Natalie Harp graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012 before obtaining an MBA from conservative Liberty University in 2015. A bone cancer survivor, Harp first landed on the public radar in 2019, when President Trump received a letter she had written crediting his "Right to Try" law, which gives terminally ill patients access to experimental drugs, with saving her life.
Experts have cast doubt on the veracity of Harp's claim. The timeline shows that "two months before Trump even signed the law, Harp had already spoken online about receiving her new treatment," said William Wan at The Washington Post. Using certain drugs "off-label," as Harp's doctors apparently did with an immunotherapy drug, was "common in cancer treatment and long predated the law," said Wan.
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Harp "first caught national attention and the eye of the president" when she told her story on Fox & Friends in June 2019, said Lillian Abbatacola at Liberty University. Two weeks later, the president invited her onstage at the annual conference of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. She worked on Trump's re-election campaign in 2020, and her speech at the Republican National Convention that year earned her a job as an anchor for the far-right OAN in 2021, where she stayed until she joined Trump's campaign. At OAN, Harp conveyed many of the same falsehoods about the 2020 election that landed Fox News in legal jeopardy.
Role in Trumpworld
Harp joined Trump's campaign in 2023, and she is known as “the human printer, said multiple news reports. Harp "travels with a portable printer (plus paper and rechargeable batteries in a large bag) whose job is to feed Trump a steady stream of information on 8.5-by-11-inch pieces of paper," said Marc A. Caputo at The Bulwark. Because of Trump's well-known preference for reading printed material, "her role has become hugely important," said Sarah Ewall-Wice at The Daily Mail. "What Trump has is, functionally, an algirlrithm sifting through the algorithms that comprise our every day," said Luther Ray Abel at The National Review.
Harp also reportedly manages Trump's Truth Social account, which was the cause of numerous controversies driven by Trump's consumption of far-right media during the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump's account activity at Truth Social was "part of a stream of conspiracy theories, often originating from right-wing online instigators and extremists," said an October 2024 New York Times report. According to Caputo, Harp was responsible for reposting a video on May 20, 2024, that imagined a Trump victory ushering in a "Unified Reich." The video was deleted from his account, and the campaign blamed a "junior staffer."
Her precise role in the transition or what she will be doing in the Trump White House is not clear. She will be the "conduit for a largely unsupervised flow of information to and from the president," said Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan at The New York Times. Haberman and Swan's reporting gives "new insight into how the president-elect's deranged social-media activity has evolved," said Danielle Cohen at The Cut. Sources, said Haberman and Swan, noted that Harp wrote Trump a series of fawning letters in 2023, including one that said, "You're all that matters to me."
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Trump reacted angrily to Haberman and Swan's report on Truth Social. "Magot Haberman" is "a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect," he said. Haberman won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 2018.
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics." He's a frequent contributor to Newsweek and Slate, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Nation, among others.
