Trump aide accused of unhealthily close relationship with Trump

An aide to Donald Trump has been criticised by her own brother for her “very unhealthy” relationship with the US president.

Natalie Harp, 34, a former conservative TV anchor, is Mr Trump’s executive assistant who has unfettered access to the president and reportedly has a designated chair outside the Oval Office.

Mr Trump, 80, once allegedly remarked that she “loved” him as much as his own wife and children.

On Thursday, her estranged brother, Preston Harp, criticised their relationship, calling it “very unhealthy”. “She’s just like his fan club,” he told The Daily Mail.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Ms Harp became known as the “human printer” for following Mr Trump around with a portable printer so she could hand-deliver him hard copies of emails, news articles and social media posts.

The New York Times, citing people close to the president, reported at the time that Mr Trump treated her like a daughter.

Since he returned to office, Ms Harp has rarely been seen far from his side.

According to a new book, Regime Change, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, New York Times reporters, Mr Trump told his team early in his second term that Ms Harp “was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and his kids”.

“All of you will go off and make money,” Mr Trump reportedly told other staffers. “She’ll never leave me.”

The book also alleged that before she joined his campaign team in 2022, Ms Harp would leave adoring letters to Mr Trump in his “personal spaces”. One note allegedly read: “You are all that matters to me.”

The Secret Service reportedly considered Ms Harp’s letters and extreme attachment to Mr Trump a “potential danger to herself as well as the president”, according to Michael Wolff’s 2025 book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America.

Mr Wolff wrote that she was part of Mr Trump’s “Charlie’s Angels”, a group of female staffers with whom he had an “avuncular and flirtatious” relationship.

The book also detailed that Eric Trump, Mr Trump’s son, also questioned Ms Harp’s closeness to his father and reportedly “took a turn at trying to solve the situation in a set of annoyed queries to the legal team”.

Ms Harp first came to the president’s attention in 2019, when she appeared on Fox News to praise him for signing the federal “Right to Try” law, which gives terminally ill patients access to experimental treatments.

She claimed that his law saved her life after she was diagnosed with bone cancer. Experts have since cast doubt on her claim because of discrepancies in the timings of her treatment and the law coming into force. The treatment she said she received was available before the Right to Try law came into effect.

Ms Harp was rewarded with a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in August 2020.

She went on to work as a presenter for the conservative One America News Network, where she peddled Mr Trump’s false claims of election fraud, before joining his election campaign.

Her brother, who now lives in Nicaragua, said he has no desire to reconnect with his sister and has no plans even to return to the United States.