Prominent Democrats and Republicans have spent the last three days fighting about Natalie Harp — a White House insider many Americans had never heard of until now. But why?

A former host on the far-right One America News Network who has served as President Trump’s executive assistant since he returned to office in 2025, Harp, 35, rocketed to the center of the national political conversation — and instantly became a trending topic online — after Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff briefly alluded to her while criticizing Trump during a campaign speech Sunday.

“While the sailors on the [USS Abraham Lincoln] fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He 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,” Ossoff said, referring to a recent incident when Trump secretly flew out of Turkey on a military jet — rather than Air Force One — amid a possible Iranian threat.

As far as anyone can tell, Ossoff — a rising Democratic star who is already generating 2028 presidential buzz for his viral attacks on Trump — may be the first national figure to mention Harp in a political context. Republicans reacted to his remarks with outrage, accusing him of being a “sexist arrogant jerk” and “suggesting a young woman is having an affair with her boss.”

“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on social media. “Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat.”

When MS NOW anchor Jen Psaki asked him on Monday why he decided to invoke Natalie Harp specifically in that speech, Ossoff insisted that his “point” was that the president “retreats into this bubble of West Wing aides who are his ‘security blanket’ to make him feel good about himself.”

“They’re not telling him what he needs to hear,” Ossoff continued. “They’re telling him what he wants to hear. And the nation is at war, and we cannot afford that. We need a team in the White House — we need folks at the State Department, at the Defense Department, in the United States Congress — who take their jobs seriously.”

Is this your first time hearing about Harp? Here’s what to know about her and why Ossoff’s comment set off a political firestorm.

‘You are all that matters to me’

A devout Christian who grew up in California and earned an MBA from Liberty University in 2015, Harp has long been the subject of Beltway buzz — and concern among other Trump aides — for her intense devotion to the president, according to various reports.

Harp’s father, Robert, was a commercial real estate businessman and marketing executive with advanced degrees from Christian theological institutions, according to his obituary. He later worked at a private evangelical Christian university in California.

Harp’s estranged brother, Preston, told the Daily Mail in June that their father died by suicide in July 2020. In the same interview, Preston said that he views his sister’s relationship with Trump as “very unhealthy.”

Harp and Trump first crossed paths when she appeared on Fox News in 2019 to thank him for signing 2018’s Right to Try Act, which she says saved her life by giving her access to experimental treatments for bone cancer.

Trump called into Fox & Friends and said he watched the interview, calling her “that young, beautiful woman.”

“I think she’s one of the best guests you’ve ever had,” Trump said. “I thought it was amazing.”

The following year, Harp spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention about her experience. At the time, the Washington Post reported that medical experts had “cast doubt” on Harp’s story, writing that “Harp’s description of the treatment she received and her timeline for receiving it make it unlikely Trump had any effect on her case.”

After a stint supporting Trump at OAN — including falsely claiming that Democrats stole the 2020 election — Harp officially joined his staff in 2022. By the time Trump won a second term in November 2024, Harp had become one of his closest aides: a ubiquitous figure who was “nearly always at Mr. Trump’s side,” according to a contemporaneous New York Times report, “acting as the conduit for a largely unsupervised flow of information to and from the president and helping him with his social media feed.”

Speaking anonymously to the Times, other Trump aides reportedly described Harp as someone who enabled the president’s impulses by serving as a conduit for unvetted information, including conspiracy theories.

Colleagues also reportedly said Harp was nicknamed the “human printer” during the 2024 campaign because she followed Trump around with a portable printer so she could hand him information in hard copy (his preferred format).

The Times went on to quote extensively from letters that Harp reportedly left for Trump in his “personal spaces,” which the paper said “unnerved people around him, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.”

“You are all that matters to me,” Harp wrote in one of the letters. The New York Times said it reviewed the letters and confirmed their authenticity with two people with direct knowledge of them.

“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Harp wrote in another, thanking Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

In another letter, Harp told Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

In his 2025 book about the previous year’s election, All or Nothing, longtime Trump chronicler Michael Wolff reported that “every effort by the staff to create distance between Natalie and the boss was met by redoubled efforts on her part to remain close, her doggedness amusing and impressing Trump.”

When the Trump campaign decamped to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., during the summer of 2024, for instance, Harp was deliberately denied a room in an effort to end “the Natalie situation,” according to Wolff. But she materialized anyway.

“[Harp] had reached out to the grounds staff at the country club and gotten herself a maid’s room,” Wolff wrote. “And when that proved too far from the main house to respond quickly enough to Trump’s calls, she relocated herself to the much closer women’s locker room, where, with undiminished proximity to Trump, she would spend the summer.”

Another campaign book, Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power by Alex Isenstadt, described Harp as someone who “didn’t do well with boundaries.”

At one point, according to Wolff, the Secret Service even advised that “as a security consideration,” Harp represented “a potential danger to herself as well as to the president.”

In a February 2025 post on Truth Social, Trump derided Wolff as a “so-called ‘Author’” and described All or Nothing as “a total FAKE JOB, just like the other JUNK he wrote.”

“He called me many times trying to set up a meeting, but I never called him back because I didn’t want to give him the credibility of an interview,” Trump added. “Others in the Administration were also called, they reported his calls, and likewise, did not talk to him.”

Harp ultimately followed Trump back to the Oval Office in January 2025. There, she has continued to supply the president with printouts and post updates directly to his Truth Social account.

As for Trump, he has reportedly rejected concerns about Harp as “nonsense,” saying “she just loves her president.”

According to the recently published book Regime Change by New York Times White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump once told his team that Harp was “the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids.”

“All of you will go off and make money,” he reportedly said. “She’ll never leave me.”

Shortly after Regime Change came out in June, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in an email statement to People that “no president has cultivated as much loyalty among their staffers and administration officials as President Trump; this is a testament to his commitment to our country and its people.”

“Natalie Harp is a beloved White House Official,” Desai added. “The Fake News Media will never understand what it’s like to be as trusted and admired as her.”

Trump’s ‘comfort blanket’?

Speaking Monday on MS NOW, Ossoff said he’d singled out Harp because he’d “heard this particular aide referred to as his ‘security blanket.’”

That’s likely a reference to an earlier MS NOW interview with Haberman. On Aug. 11, Trump confirmed that he secretly switched planes while traveling back from the NATO summit in Turkey in early July, saying that a security threat prompted the covert operation. According to the Washington Post, Harp joined Trump on his separate military jet along with White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta — all members of Trump’s inner circle. Meanwhile, Cabinet officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly flew on the “decoy” plane with the White House press corps.

When asked why Harp accompanied the president, Haberman speculated that it was “because she is sort of his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it — a comfort blanket.”

In response to Haberman’s comments, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told People that the Times reporter “constantly speaks like she’s a Trump psychologist when in reality she just has a creepy obsession with the president and clings onto him for relevance. It’s been very sad to watch for years.”

While Ossoff has claimed that he was criticizing Trump for surrounding himself with “enablers,” some Republicans have accused the senator of “insinuating” a more intimate relationship.

In a statement to Fox News, White House spokesperson Ingle defended Harp as “one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team” and described Ossoff as “a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama.”

When asked on Monday to respond to Ossoff’s remark, Trump didn’t mention Harp. Instead, he dismissed Ossoff as a “Pee-Wee Herman look-alike.”

Afterward, the White House’s rapid response account wrote on X that the CNN reporter who asked about Harp “is a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the post continued. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”