Transcript: Trump Aides Unnerved by Natalie Harp as Ossoff Barb Lands

There’s a pblockage in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, Regime Change, where he says to some other aides something like, you all are going to go and try to make money, but Natalie’s never going to leave me. And there was a report in The New York Times in 2024 about some letters that the Times got, that Natalie Harp wrote to Trump, that really—I call this a kind of romantic, not necessarily ***ual, but just, it’s a kind of ecstatic devotion that she has to him. She writes in these letters, you’re all that matters to me, I want to bring you joy—like, stuff that, I don’t know, I’ve never said to any of my bosses.

So there is something, you know, so worshipful, obviously, in that relationship that she has with him. And it’s OK, maybe, that she’s not going to say no to him, because that’s not her job. But if she’s feeding him just kind of the craziest stuff that she comes across on the internet, and that is then influencing the decisions that he makes, then that makes the things that are already problematic even worse.

Sargent: Well, and then there’s the negative flip side to that as well. If she just wants to bring him joy at every turn, she’s obviously not going to allow criticism of Donald Trump to get to him. And we’re talking about criticism here that might be coming from members of his own party, or maybe leaks from inside the administration from people who are trying to alert the president to a policy thing that’s going really wrong.