Is Natalie here?
Donald Trump looked around during the meeting with South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa. Then he started the criticized video screening that was claimed to show "genocide" of white South Africans. Afterward, he held up what was said to be printed news articles about attacks on white farmers in the country.
According to several media outlets, it was Natalie Harp who had produced the material and who was requested by the president. Harp has made a remarkable political career and is described as one of Trump's closest associates and confidants.
Controlling the flow
She is significant because she provides him with what is generally a stream of uncontrolled information, notes journalist Maggie Haberman in an interview with CNN.
Many times, it has led to social media posts that have worried other people in the Trump sphere or that they wanted to see undone.
Haberman works for The New York Times and has written a biography about Donald Trump, whom she has covered for many years. In an article, she describes the California-born Harp as a kind of "gatekeeper" when it comes to the flow of information to the president. She is said to stay close to him so that he can dictate posts. And she often carries a portable printer so that she can deliver selected news and positive social media posts on paper, as he likes. In the rest of the Trump staff, there is concern that she not infrequently gives him the far-right's conspiracy theories, the newspaper writes.
Thanked Trump
Donald Trump is said to have taken notice of her when she in a 2019 interview on Fox News thanked the president for saving her life. The deeply religious Harp said she had had a rare form of skeletal cancer and the legislation that Trump signed in 2018, which gave the green light for certain experimental treatments, gave her life back.
Trump liked the story and invited her to speak at the Republican Party's convention in 2020. Two years later, she left the right-wing channel One America News Network and started working for the Trump campaign.
It is well known that the President of the United States values loyalty, and Harp has delivered, according to the media. She – and the printer – are said to have gone with Trump on the golf course and been present at last year's trial for accounting crimes in New York.
In 2023, Harp wrote a number of letters to Trump in which she, among other things, described him as her "protector". "You mean everything to me" and "I want to give you joy", it also says in the letters according to the book "All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America".
