On September 1, 1987, a military train loaded with munitions coursed out of Diablo Valley, in the East Bay of Northern California. President Ronald Reagan would, through his extralegal maneuvering, put the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua down by force. In the city of Concord, a network of pacifists—many of whom were converts to the path, being veterans of the Vietnam War—organized nonviolent protests of this circuit, the flow of weapons to the Contras, American-backed insurgents in Central America. That day in September, the train came upon an obstruction on the track: veterans who had lain down on the rail. The train did not stop. It struck S. Brian Willson, an Air Force veteran, severing both of his legs.
Willson, who is now eighty-five, has lived in Nicaragua for years. The word from one of his documentarians is that he is more famous there than the other Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys. A figure like that attracts a village, notwithstanding his secular vow of “living simply so others may simply live,” and one of his votaries is Preston Harp, a thirty-eight-year-old Californian who left the States a few years ago for Managua, where he works with Willson on his manuscripts. Harp was called out of his voluntary defection, recently, to comment on the news spewing out of Washington, D.C., given that it concerned him personally, as the older brother of the subject in question, Natalie Harp, the thirty-five-year-old executive assistant to Donald Trump.
“Trump is everything that my mom taught us to respect,” Preston Harp said, on CNN. “My mom raised us with the idea that American exceptionalism was the correct way of looking at things, that the United States is the boss of the world. That slavery was—back then—that was normal. People weren’t bad because they had slaves.” Preston and Natalie were homeschooled and raised in a strain of evangelicalism. In 2020, their father, who worked as a real-estate broker, killed himself. Natalie and her mother, perhaps fearing the wrath incurred by the cardinal sin, denied the cause of his death. Preston soon stopped talking to his nuclear family, with whom he diverged politically. His pitying psychological reading of his sister was that her elaborate journey to Trumpworld was like a spiriting toward home, a towhead girl stumbling through dense thicket, awestruck by her first glimpse of thatched roof where surrogate father lives.
The reason that everyone is suddenly talking about Natalie Harp is because of speechwriting, an origin that seems almost arcane in the rhetoric-hungry electorate. In Atlanta, the Democratic senator Jon Ossoff, campaigning to keep his seat in Georgia against his Republican challenger, Mike Collins, was carving an argument against Collins via his ally Trump, when he made a practiced turn into what I hear as the podcast register: a little offhand and smooth. The President, he said, doesn’t want to work; what he wants is to “build his ballroom”—a reference to Trump’s raising of a gilded monument to his ego in place of the East Wing—“and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.” I’m not going to be craven and overanalyze the speechifying; what is clear is that the Ossoff campaign team, that is courting hearsay about a 2028 Presidential run, got what it was aiming for.
Civic powerlessness can be overridden by good gossip. “Natalie” became a subject of fascination, materializing in discoveries and rediscoveries. The reporters at the Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets had, in fact, been giving Harp the curio treatment long before she officially joined the Administration last year. She had received the who’s-this-new-blonde gloss in the political press, because in the ecosystem of arrivistes she seemed lone. The Trump campaign team had, in the twenty-tens, been in the habit of plucking ordinary people to publicly extoll him. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Harp, known then as a “California entrepreneur,” testified that Trump had saved her life. Diagnosed with Stage II bone cancer, she said, her chemotherapy program had been failing. The Administration’s passage of the Right to Try Act, in 2018, which allows terminally ill patients to access certain therapies that have not yet been fully approved by the F.D.A., gave her a new lease on life. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President,” Harp said. “You did, and, without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.” Is that true? The Post cast doubt on this narrative, back in 2020, finding that the “timeline” of the bill’s passage and her illness made it “unlikely Trump had any effect on her case.” But the appearance at the R.N.C. had brought the regular citizen into Trump’s view. The next two years, the Biden incubation period, Harp spent as an anchor on the One America News Network. Trump would call her on the phone, and the two would “talk about everything and nothing,” as she’d later reminisce. In 2022, a layman for Trump, she joined his enterprise as executive assistant. When he became President-elect, again, in November of 2024, the Times’ court-intrigue team zeroed in on Harp as a harbinger for the next term: “President-elect Donald J. Trump has always demanded loyalty from his aides, but few have answered the call like Natalie Harp.”
Harp is seen at his arm (is she basically his arm?) but is functionally silent in the public, so in her silhouette rumor, leaks, facts, untruths, etc., abound. She lived in a locker room on the Bedminster golf course for a summer in order to facilitate closeness to Trump, according to Michael Wolff’s autopsy of the election, “All or Nothing.” Nicknamed the Human Printer by her colleagues, she carried hardware with her, ready at any moment to print out an article for Trump, or a draft of a missive to be posted on X or Truth Social. The news after Ossoff’s speech points to the acceleration of Harp’s presence and power: reports of devotional letters sent; a Presidential media diet composed almost entirely of news chosen by Harp; an untruth, catching on, that she had been secretly registered as a hospice nurse and was ministering clandestine care. History is made as much through rumor as through fact. The respondent MAGA tantrum, citing misogyny, lying, and shit-stirring on behalf of the Democrats, is instigated by the stubborn fact of Trump’s decline. He is declining. He is declining in approval ratings. He is declining physically. Is he in diapers? Is Harp behind the scenes, pulling the strings, à la Joan Quigley, the astrologer in the Reagan White House? (Footage of Trump dictating social-media posts to Harp—who is apparently the person behind some of those strange capitalization decisions—recalls stories of Zhang Yufeng, Mao Zedong’s private secretary, speaking on behalf of the C.C.P. chairman after his strokes.) Trump as one pole of a bipartisan gerontocracy (worse than that, is this necrocracy?) is surrounded by frailty, with his hawk Lindsey Graham dying suddenly and unexpectedly, and with his longtime enabler Mitch McConnell out of sight after spending weeks in the hospital. A sex scandal would at least signal vigor.
Natalie Harp has not, or cannot, come out and speak for herself. The most persuasive among the theories for how she got to where she is belongs to her brother, Preston, who voiced the surrogate-father narrative on CNN, after being made to account for the actions of a family member with whom he presumably hasn’t spoken in years. Pop psychology these days is seeking to understand family estrangement, which is framed as a problem on the rise. The note of crises belies a subconscious fear: units are splitting, and if the blood family breaks then society will break. Purple families, the father of one allegiance, the mother of another, a daisy chain of Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Maria Shrivers, had once been exalted as a civilizing mark of a democracy, the two parties achieving more than just living side by side. (Or, as Julius Nyerere, the former president of Tanzania, once said, America is a one-party state, “except, with typical extravagance, they have two of them.”) Time is marching. Political divisions among the related increase as the standards for living across generations diverge. The Harp family is one such broken family, the “long-haired hippie,” from the Daily Mail, and the “blonde geyser of positivity,” from the Times.
A couple days ago, as the media frenzy continued, Wolff decided to release full letters that Harp had sent to Trump during his last Presidential campaign, missives that had reportedly alarmed the Secret Service. There had been an embarrassing episode in Scotland, again on a golf course, in which Harp had made the gaffe of being overly clingy. “I haven’t been myself, dwelling on the Past, and the pain of losing my Dad,” she wrote, in an apology letter to Trump. “You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.” In his CNN interview, Preston had recalled an adolescent Natalie writing letters to George Bush. The conventional desires for wealth and power do not seem to drive her; she willed into reality the replacement-father fantasy, an otherwise clichéd Freudian scene rendered more dramatic, given such “matters of national security,” as it is said. What we’re left with is the image of the fanatic, leaving prints on the grass, chasing the President’s golf cart to no avail, working out her psychic need in the epistolary form, writing as much to herself as to her addressee. ♦