A Natalie Harp Conspiracy Theory (Not Really)

President Donald Trump and Natalie Harp in the Oval Office on May 30, 2025. Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP

It’s very easy to be a conspiracy-monger. Let’s give it a shot.

This week, there was a hullabaloo about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s 35-year-old aide who’s been derisively referred to within the White House as the “Human Printer.” She’s always by Trump’s side, typing his social media posts and printing out and feeding him positive and misleading information about his presidency. (“Look, this poll shows that 110 percent of all Republican voters think you’re better looking than Jesus Christ!”) She’s also a conduit for aides and foreign leaders who want to slip Trump a message.

There’s been much speculation and tittering about her devotion and physical closeness to Trump. She was part of the small elite band that was hustled into that now-infamous catering compartment in Turkey when Trump covertly fled Air Force One to use another aircraft due to a security threat. Her notes to Trump read like love letters. (“You are all that matters to me.”)

This new shot of attention for Harp was triggered when Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, said at a campaign rally, “[Trump] golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Outraged MAGA-ites and Trump defenders pounced (see Dumbass Comment of the Week below) and slammed Ossoff for supposedly implying Harp and Trump were trysting and denounced him for denigrating a hard-working woman.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Ossoff unfairly insinuated anything and demeaned Harp. His remark was at least partially prompted by the reports that Harp was one of the few aides who accompanied Trump when he skedaddled from Air Force One and left behind the seemingly expendable Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Whether he intended to or not, Ossoff spurred a national conversation about Harp—and about the appropriateness of discussing her bizarre relationship with Trump. Her 24/7 presence in his life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

On Wednesday, MSNOW reported that for more than a year, while working for Trump in the White House during his second term, Harp declined several times to seek a security clearance. Obtaining clearance is a routine move for an aide, especially a staffer in such proximity to the president. After all, she can hear and see the top-secret information flowing to and from Trump. It’s a tremendous security lapse to allow a person without clearance around-the-clock access to the president. Yet Trump permitted this. Eventually, Harp did receive a clearance. But how stringent was the review? And why did she not do so at the start?

That’s a bit suspicious, right? What would Alex Jones have said if an aide to President Barack Obama or President Joe Biden had done the same? Now let’s add to the picture where Harp worked prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022: the One America News Network.

OAN is a far-right cable news outfit that’s for Trump fans and MAGA-heads who think Fox News has gone soft. And it’s been overtly pro-Russia. When it was launched in 2013 by Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who got rich in the circuit board business, he instructed OAN staff to promote Trump, push conservative issues, and downplay Russian aggression. Fun fact: Herring married a Russian woman years earlier. And OAN aired reports from RT, a Kremlin-funded media outlet and propaganda shop. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that OAN producers “said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia.” This was after Russia had launched its first invasion of Ukrainian territory and illegally annexed Crimea—and after Vladimir Putin had attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win.

Later, during the 2020 presidential campaign, OAN played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation. One of its anchors, Chanel Rion, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to smear Joe Biden, claiming without evidence that Biden had engaged in brazen corruption in Ukraine. The pair both promoted baseless allegations about Biden made by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who was later sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department for being a Russian agent. Derkach served as a major source for a series of Rion reports bashing Biden.

After the 2020 election, the US intelligence community stated in a public report that Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—­to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump.” The media organizations referenced here included OAN. The report also noted that Derkach and the Russian operation assisted the production of an anti-Biden documentary, apparently a film that aired on OAN in early 2020. (Following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Derkach fled to Russia. In 2024, he was appointed to a seat in the Russian parliament’s upper chamber.)

After the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, OAN aired a report from the front lines filed by Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop and fugitive who found asylum in Russia and became involved in disinformation operations Moscow mounted against the United States. He was identified on OAN as a foreign correspondent for the network, and the long piece he produced claimed that Ukrainian forces—whom he called “Nazi terrorists”—had massacred civilians and that the war had been caused by “kleptocrats in Washington” who were desperate to keep “Ukraine out of the hands of Russia” because they used Ukraine to “launder their money” and needed to hide their corruption. Dougan accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of skimming billions of US aid money and causing “thousands of innocent people to die.” OAN was broadcasting straight-­out, pro-­Putin, made-in-Russia propaganda.

As regular readers might guess, I cover OAN, Derkach, and Dougan in more detail in my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.

Now what might a creative, conspiracy-minded person do with all these dots? An attractive aide has an oddly close connection to the president and is situated to know everything and can influence his thinking. She helps write his tweets. She can control what information he receives. She once worked for an organization that has aired Russian disinformation, that has been identified by US intelligence as an outlet for Kremlin propaganda, and that has been ordered by its owner to go easy on Russia. And she was reluctant to submit to a security clearance investigation.

Hmm.

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say. But I have no doubt if there had been a similar set of facts for Obama or Biden, OAN, Fox News, Kash Patel, Glenn Beck, Roger Stone, and just about the entire MAGAsphere (and maybe Joe Rogan) would have been off to the races with such a narrative.

But the Harp tale is indeed a serious episode that reminds us of how Trump and his gang don’t give a damn about security. The fact that a staffer with such access to Trump could blow off a security clearance for so long is troubling. As is the fact that Jared Kushner, who is not a government employee and who has business interests around the world, is handling highly sensitive matters in three sets of negotiations: the Ukraine war, the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and the Iran war. (He’s also doing a piss-poor job in each of them.) No one was punished for Signalgate. Trump readily accepted a 747-8 from Qatar that posed significant security problems. Mar-a-Lago is a counterintelligence nightmare. Trump’s crypto business and other deals allow foreigners—perhaps even overseas officials—to buy influence with him. Let’s not forget he swiped top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021 and stored some in a bathroom.

Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly because he and MAGA world went apeshit over Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails when she was secretary of state. There was never evidence that her use of a private server for her official emails—a violation of the rules—led to any security breaches. But during both Trump administrations, there have been multiple instances of Trump and his lieutenants violating basic security protocols. Harp dodging a security clearance investigation is the latest example. The Donald-Natalie story might seem like gratuitous gossip. Yet it shows once more that Trump and his gang have no respect for rules and believe they can get away with anything. That attitude is a national security threat.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

For OurLanders on Cape Cod, I will be speaking at the Truro Meeting House tonight, Saturday, August 22, at 7 p.m. Come join a discussion about the midterms, as well as (of course) my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. Admission is free. (For more information, click here.) If you drop by, be sure to say hello. And if you haven’t yet checked out info on the book, go to HowRussiaWon.com.

As part of MAGA’s continuing war on Dr. Anthony Fauci and the public health system, MAGA loudmouth Jack Posobiec declared, “Every single miscarriage, every single death from the COVID shot should be attributed as a victim of communism.”

Since Trump oversaw the development of the Covid vaccines, should he be blamed for these supposed deaths and miscarriages? In any event, an estimated 20 million Covid deaths worldwide were avoided due to the vaccines, according to a 2022 study published by The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Does communism get credit for saving all these lives?

As for vaccines, CNN host Jake Tapper asked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) about his decisive vote to confirm anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. Cassidy replied, “People always bring that up, and all I can say is that you have to live life living forward.”

That saccharine sentiment won’t help Cassidy escape a harsh verdict. He’s a vaccine champion who buckled and voted for RFK Jr. He now bears a portion of the responsibility for all of Kennedy’s anti-vax moves that are leading to death and disease. Cassidy doesn’t want to look back because he can’t handle the truth.

On Monday, during an interview with Fox News, Jared Kushner was asked about negotiations between the United States and Iran. He said, “The conversations between the US government and different areas of the Iranian government at all areas is probably more robust than it’s ever been. So there have been a lot of good dialogues…They are engaging in a very strong way…We are having very positive and active conversations.”

He also said: “We continue to have communications. And when the deal is ready, the deal will be ready.”

The next day, his daddy-in-law posted:

So which is it? Robust talks or no talks? Who’s lying?

The Likud Party of Israel put up a billboard in Israel that shows New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani with Mojtaba Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey; and Naim Qassem, the leader of Hezbollah, a terrorist group. The Hebrew reads: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don't let them win.”

This is blatant Islamophobia and brazen smearing of an American. Why should the United States provide aid to a government led by a party of goons and bigots?

Pondering what will happen if the “state is not actually able to meet the physical needs of those who are impoverished,” Christian nationalist Joel Webbon this week opined,

The church will have to tell modern feminist pagan women, no…So if there’s a woman who is elderly, but she chose by her own volition, because she hates the patriarchy and she hates Christ, she hates traditional marriage and all these different things, she chose never to marry. She’s 65 years old with blue or purple hair. She has no children, not because she couldn’t conceive but because she was on SSRIs, birth control, and all these things, her entire life, and of her own volition. She hated children, refused to have them. Then, if that time ever comes, and she’s unemployable and she made bad financial decisions, and she’s fallen on hard times, and our bloated welfare state is no longer operational, then the church needs to be able to look at her and say, “You starve. You starve. Glory be to God. You starve.”

I’m no scholar of the New Testament. So I asked Claude, “Did Jesus in the Bible ever tell someone they should starve?” The answer: “No—there's no passage where Jesus tells anyone they should starve. Nothing in the Gospels has him wishing hunger on a person or commanding someone to go without food.” It added, “If anything, the Gospels run hard in the opposite direction. Feeding people is one of his recurring acts and themes…and in Matthew 25 he makes ‘I was hungry and you gave me food’ the very measure by which people are judged.”

I don’t know how Webbon gets away with calling himself a Christian.

The to-do over Natalie Harp prompted just about every MAGA influencer to rush to the ramparts to attack Ossoff as a chauvinist pig. Megyn Kelly, Newt Gingrich, Scott Jennings, Marc Thiessen, Posobiec, and others were just so outraged by this supposed slight against a woman.

It was a bizarre moment—as if these people live in a universe in which the Access Hollywood tape doesn’t exist, let alone the hundreds of misogynistic statements Trump has made about women, the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him by dozens of women, and the E. Jean Carroll verdict. The judges couldn’t select any one comment to be honored above all the others. So this week’s prize goes to the entire MAGAsphere. It’s fueled by Trump worship and greased by hypocrisy.

Joan Lobell sent in a request:

Please write about the president as a businessman who is using his historic business model of bankruptcy to rule the country. Every one of his personal businesses eventually ended in bankruptcy. Thanks to the American legal structure, he spends more than the business takes in, and he walks away with the money while the workers lose their jobs, etc. 

Bankruptcy is a good metaphor for Trump and what he’s doing to the United States—especially when you consider how he’s ballooning the national debt after promising to end it. But the mob tactic called a bust-out is applicable. That’s when a criminal crew assumes control of a business, maxes out on its credit line, sells off and drains its assets, and leaves it an empty shell, sometimes torching it for the insurance money. Goodfellas provided a tutorial on this.

Replying to the recent issue in which I wrote about an experiment in which I asked AI to write a novel, a reader replied:

On the AI front, I found the basic Google AI very helpful recently in composing a difficult text. I had to tell someone I was not interested in seeing them again and ask them to please never contact me in future. As we have many mutual friends, it was a bit tricky. I asked AI to make the text kinder and more polite than what I had written without watering down the message. It did a pretty darn good job, which has thus far proven effective.

In response to the issue on how Democrats should start to think about mounting various Trump investigations should they win the House in November, Iris wrote,

SCOTUS demolished presidential accountability with its outrageous presidential immunity decision. An urgent topic worth exploring by Dems now is the clash between congressional investigations (and impeachment proceedings) that seek any kind of presidential accountability and the president's non-compliance and outright obstruction of justice, based on his total immunity for "official actions." These issues will take years to resolve judicially, or by constitutional amendment. Congress ought to have a plan B to focus on, when every single one of their investigations is immediately stalled in court.

There are plenty of hurdles ahead for the Democrats if they win the House and launch investigations, let alone impeachment. Trump will not cooperate and try to block these probes. It could be one constitutional crisis after another. Which is better than nothing happening.

Ned Lane emailed:

Your list [of potential investigations of Trump] doesn't include urgent mental health evaluation. A report by multiple doctors was sent to Congress. These recent days continue to reveal Trump’s dangerous behavior and his inability to be a responsible commander-in-chief.

Trump does appear more rattled (and somnolent) by the day. But submitting Trump to a mental evaluation is not within Congress’ power. The framers, alas, never thought it would come to this. But anyone can read this report from a group of doctors, which was entered into the Congressional Record. It noted:

It is our professional opinion, based on previous and ongoing assessments, that Donald Trump’s mental state since our 2024 statement has deteriorated even further. In keeping with our professional ethics, and for those of us who are physicians, with the Declaration of Geneva—the successor to the Hippocratic Oath that binds us to the humanitarian principles of medicine since the Nuremberg trials—we are compelled to warn of a President of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.

The docs conclude, Trump “presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world” and “is mentally unfit to be the President of the United States.”

Karen Turley sent in this note:

I totally agree with your picks for what Democrats should pursue if they gain one or both houses of Congress. I think the Justice Department should be the first item, because Congress won't be able to do much if they don't correct the mess inside the Justice Department.

That may be the best place to start. But I’d take into consideration what’s most likely to resonate with the public. Might that be the crypto scandal and Trump's unparalleled personal corruption?

Cathleen Belmonte wrote:

If Dems act smart, the answer to your question of what to investigate Trump for is all of the violations!!

Reason? It’s a move in the Trump playbook: With so many egregious violations, bombarding him at once will drain his resource. The investigations must take enough time and be of a quantity to show his deep-pocket supporters that he has become a losing proposition for them. Why? If they hope to do any business in a Big D administration and a Democratic Congress, they will choose their next play carefully. Hopefully, we may have strategists that can outmaneuver whatever moves Trump’s lawyers make. And they need that playbook before the election not afterward.

That's an interesting tactical approach. Whatever the plan might be, I do hope the Ds are prepping, as you suggest, before the election.

“Moxie, what are you looking at?”
“The future.”
“What does it look like?”
“Almost heaven.”
“Very funny. Because we’re in West Virginia.”
“What does that have to do with it?”