A former anchor for the far-right One America Information Community (OAN), Natalie Harp, will serve in a key, although yet-to-be-specified communications function for the Trump White Home. She is believed to already be a crucial info gatekeeper to President-elect Trump and somebody who could have performed a task in a number of the marketing campaign’s extra controversial choices and statements over the previous yr.
Rise to prominence
The 33-year-old Harp hails from a conservative Christian household in California. Her father, Robert Harp, was a professor within the Cromwell Faculty of Enterprise at Biola College, a Christian establishment, and handed away in 2020. Natalie Harp graduated from Level Loma Nazarene College in 2012 earlier than acquiring an MBA from conservative Liberty College in 2015. A bone most cancers survivor, Harp first landed on the general public radar in 2019, when President Trump acquired a letter she had written crediting his “Proper to Attempt” legislation, which supplies terminally unwell sufferers entry to experimental medicine, with saving her life.
Consultants have forged doubt on the veracity of Harp’s declare. The timeline reveals that “two months earlier than Trump even signed the legislation, Harp had already spoken on-line about receiving her new remedy,” stated William Wan at The Washington Submit. Utilizing sure medicine “off-label,” as Harp’s docs apparently did with an immunotherapy drug, was “frequent in most cancers remedy and lengthy predated the legislation,” stated Wan.
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Harp “first caught nationwide consideration and the attention of the president” when she instructed her story on Fox & Pals in June 2019, stated Lillian Abbatacola at Liberty College. Two weeks later, the president invited her onstage on the annual convention of the Religion and Freedom Coalition. She labored on Trump’s re-election marketing campaign in 2020, and her speech on the Republican Nationwide Conference that yr earned her a job as an anchor for the far-right OAN in 2021, the place she stayed till she joined Trump’s marketing campaign. At OAN, Harp conveyed lots of the identical falsehoods in regards to the 2020 election that landed Fox Information in authorized jeopardy.
Function in Trumpworld
Harp joined Trump’s marketing campaign in 2023, and he or she is named “the human printer, stated a number of information studies. Harp “travels with a conveyable printer (plus paper and rechargeable batteries in a big bag) whose job is to feed Trump a gradual stream of data on 8.5-by-11-inch items of paper,” stated Marc A. Caputo at The Bulwark. Due to Trump’s well-known desire for studying printed materials, “her function has develop into vastly necessary,” stated Sarah Ewall-Wice at The Each day Mail. “What Trump has is, functionally, an algirlrithm sifting by means of the algorithms that comprise our daily,” stated Luther Ray Abel at The Nationwide Overview.
Harp additionally reportedly manages Trump’s Fact Social account, which was the reason for quite a few controversies pushed by Trump’s consumption of far-right media throughout the 2024 presidential marketing campaign. Trump’s account exercise at Fact Social was “a part of a stream of conspiracy theories, typically originating from right-wing on-line instigators and extremists,” stated an October 2024 New York Instances report. Based on Caputo, Harp was answerable for reposting a video on Could 20, 2024, that imagined a Trump victory ushering in a “Unified Reich.” The video was deleted from his account, and the marketing campaign blamed a “junior staffer.”
Her exact function within the transition or what she might be doing within the Trump White Home isn’t clear. She would be the “conduit for a largely unsupervised move of data to and from the president,” stated Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan at The New York Instances. Haberman and Swan’s reporting provides “new perception into how the president-elect’s deranged social-media exercise has advanced,” stated Danielle Cohen at The Minimize. Sources, stated Haberman and Swan, famous that Harp wrote Trump a collection of fawning letters in 2023, together with one which stated, “You are all that issues to me.”
Trump reacted angrily to Haberman and Swan’s report on Fact Social. “Magot Haberman” is “a 3rd charge author and fourth charge mind,” he stated. Haberman gained the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 2018.
