The Southern California blonde has become emotionally intimate with the president-elect

Trump confidant has San Diego roots

A graduate of San Diego’s Point Loma Nazarene University is Donald Trump’s new It Girl.

Natalie Harp, a 33-year-old aide with blonde hair and delicate features – just the type he likes – has grown increasingly close to Trump over the years and will follow him to the White House after Inauguration Day, reports the New York Times. Harp attended the Christian liberal arts university that overlooks the Pacific Ocean between 2009 and 2012.

Although Harp, a devout Christian, has little political experience to speak of, she wields enormous influence, not only helping Trump with his social media posts but, more importantly, deciding what information does and doesn’t get to the president-elect. During the campaign, she was known for following Trump at events and even on the golf course, accompanied by a portable printer, enabling her to hand him social media posts and articles in which he or his adversaries were mentioned. As such, she was known throughout the campaign as the “human printer.”

To enable her gatekeeping duties in the new administration, she will be conveniently positioned just outside the Oval Office. Harp’s role isn’t on the org chart and is an unsupervised position, a point of consternation for many in Trump’s inner circle who want to exert more control over the president-elect. But what matters to Trump is that he trusts her—even more, suggests New York Times’ reporter Maggie Haberman, than he trusts anyone else in his political orbit.

While Trump is said to be taken with Harp’s bubbly personality, which keeps him in high spirits, their connection goes deeper: Trump once remarked that Harp “was the only member of his staff who cared about him,” according to the NYT piece. In 2023, Harp sent Trump a series of what the NYT described as “devotional letters,” which suggest that Harp has achieved a remarkable level of emotional intimacy with the president-elect, about which his advisers are uneasy. In one letter, she wrote that “You are all that matters to me,” that “I want to bring you joy,” and that “I don’t ever want to let you down.” In another, she mentioned wanting them to return to that feeling of “synergy” where “we’d talk about everything and nothing” and “get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’” Harp referred to Trump as her “guardian and protector in this life,” language that can be regarded as secular but also religious.

According to the NYT’s reporting, Trump calls Harp “sweetie” and treats her like a daughter. After the article on Natalie Harp appeared in the NYT, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, and posted a blistering attack on the article’s writer, Maggie Haberman, with whom Trump normally has a good relationship. Some interpreted that as Trump protecting Harp.

After graduating from Point Loma Nazarene University, Natalie Harp attended Liberty University, an evangelical college in Virginia that also serves as a recruiting ground for conservative thinktanks and members of Congress, where she received her MBA in 2015.

If Trump treats Harp like a daughter, she in turn may view him as something of a father figure, particularly after losing her own father unexpectedly in 2020. In the ‘90s, Bob Harp was a board member and president of the San Diego chapter of CCIM, or Certified Commercial Investment Member; an adjunct business professor at San Diego’s Point Loma Nazarene University from 2009 to 2015; and, in 2020, before his untimely death, the executive director of the Office of Innovation at Biola University, a private, evangelical Christian university in La Mirada, CA.

But her defining moment occurred in 2019 when, as a guest on Fox News, Harp – who’d been diagnosed with bone cancer – credited Trump with saving her life. She was referring to the ‘Right to Try’ law that Trump signed in 2018, which afforded access to experimental medications and treatments. According to The Washington Post, experts doubt the law had any direct effect on Harp’s illness, implying she may have dramatized the story for Trump’s benefit.

Either way, her appearance on Fox News led Trump to invite her to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Harp began her August 24^th speaking slot by claiming to be a “formerly forgotten American,” a term usually associated with coal miners and the rural working class. (Harp grew up in Southern California, attended private universities for undergrad and graduate school, and was the daughter of a professor and entrepreneur.)

Her speech, in which she attacked Obamacare and credited Trump with saving her life, caused a bit of a ruckus back in San Diego, at her alma mater. Although Point Loma Nazarene University is regarded by many as a Christian conservative university (it allegedly fired its dean for supporting LGBTQ+ rights), it’s also a liberal arts university, more ideologically diverse than many think, and emphasizes the importance of critical thinking. So, it is perhaps not surprising that, in response to Harp’s RNC address, more than 500 students at the university signed a letter titled, “Natalie Harp doesn’t speak for us.”

On the heels of her RNC speech, Harp was hired as an anchor for the One America News Network, which is described on her Wikipedia page as “a far-right, pro-Trump cable channel known for its promotion of falsehoods and conspiracy theories.” At the network, according to The Bulwark, she promoted “the lie that the 2020 election was stolen,” presumably, further endearing herself to Trump. Two years later, Harp joined Trump’s communications and social media team.

Harp isn’t the only person in the upcoming Trump administration that has a connection to San Diego. The wife of Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, Usha Chilukuri Vance, graduated from Mt. Carmel High School in 2004. Her father, Krish Chilukuri, teaches at San Diego State University in the department of aerospace engineering, while her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a biology professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she also holds the title of provost of UCSD’s Sixth College.

Editor’s Note: Read “San Diego Firebrand Makes Rare Apology“ about La Jollan Dinesh D’Souza.

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