I’ll confess I was leery when Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff turned long-standing speculation about the relationship between Donald Trump and his 35-year-old aide Natalie Harp into a hot topic of national debate. It’s long been known that Harp is obsessed with Trump to the point of creepiness, and that the president is all too happy to bask in the glow of her fawning gaze. Their bizarre bond, which seems to have unsettled many in the White House, was already documented in two books of access journalism: the recently released Regime Change, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and All or Nothing, by Michael Wolff, which was published last year. But such books are for hardcore political junkies; they don’t necessarily move political debate or even get noticed by the broader public.

Ossoff, who nurses presidential ambitions and knows he can warm the hearts of Democratic voters by taking potshots at Trump, saw his opportunity amid fresh and hilarious reports that, in early July, Trump, fearful of an Iranian attack on Air Force One, sneaked off in a catering truck and moved to another plane. When the president made this evasive maneuver, he reportedly had Harp by his side. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were left playing the unenviable role of decoys on Air Force One, their only consolation being that the so-called Iranian threat was likely a fiction.

Speaking at a rally last Sunday, Ossoff riffed on this story, telling an appreciative crowd that Trump “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.”

While I enjoy polemical attacks on Trump as much as anyone, I wasn’t sure there was much mileage to be gained from trying to stoke another presidential sex scandal, which was what Ossoff seemed to be implying. The fact that Trump is a brutal sexual predator is not only well documented (serious allegations of assault against him have been made by more than two dozen women); it has also been established in a court of law thanks to the brave testimony of E. Jean Carroll. Given Trump’s lifetime of truly vile behavior, a consensual affair (if that is what is going on) seems like a minor sin.

But my mistake was in thinking of the Trump/Harp story as a sex scandal. Their relationship doesn’t have to be sexual to be disturbing. Its true significance is that it proves just how deranged the cult of personality around Trump has become.

Born in 1991, Harp is an evangelical Christian. She finished her undergraduate degree at Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012 before getting an MBA from Liberty University in 2015. But, as with many politicized Christians, Harp’s focus of devotion has shifted to the unlikely person of Donald Trump.

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Earlier this year on Easter Sunday, the president posted an AI image that seemed to show him as a Christ-like figure healing a sick man (who, bizarrely, resembled Jeffrey Epstein). The conflation of Christ with Trump might seem to many as either absurd or even blasphemous. But Harp believes that just as Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, so she herself was given a new lease on life by Trump.

The New York Times reports that Harp “has said that she suffered from bone cancer and that it was legislation Mr. Trump signed in 2018 that provided her access to experimental treatments.” This story carries an emotional punch, although, as The Washington Post reported in 2020, when Harp told her tale to the Republican National Convention, experts doubted its veracity. The drugs she most likely received were already legal without any assistance from Trump.

The factual veracity of Harp’s claims is beside the point, since she’s not interested in accurate reporting. Rather, Harp is a mythologist, creating lore to glorify the object of her worship, Donald Trump.

The intensity of Harp’s devotion to Trump can’t be gainsaid. Haberman and Swann describe her with Homeric epithets worthy of a priestess of Zeus: “The ever-present Natalie Harp” and “the ubiquitous Natalie Harp, laptop at the ready.” Trump, they write, was

accompanied on the golf course by Natalie Harp, an aide who supplied him with a fresh stream of positive news stories and social media comments that she would often read aloud and later follow up with copies from the portable printer she carried around. Harp wrote Trump adoring letters that she left in his personal spaces, including one that read “You are all that matters to me.”

An endless fount of flattery and upbeat (if dubiously sourced) reports on Trump’s achievements, Harp has worked hard to earn her place beside the president. Trump clearly enjoys her adulation. According to Haberman and Swann:

Harp’s devotion to the President had remained undimmed through the hectic early months of the second term. Trump had taken to telling his staff that Natalie (or “Nathalie,” as he would call her, using a French pronunciation) was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids. “All of you will go off and make money,” he would say. “She’ll never leave me.”

On Thursday, The Daily Beast published two more letters Harp had written to Trump, both full of effusive praise. On one she wrote, “Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.” In another letter, she echoed a line from Jane Austen and wrote, “it is I who is unworthy.”

Harp might be Trump’s most assiduous devotee, but she is hardly alone. Trump’s monumental narcissism has made self-abasement the surest path to his inner circle. This is a dangerous dynamic, since it means Trump is not listening to any critical voices that might warn him away from his capricious impulses.

Harp’s success in turning toadying into access also explains why she is now the topic of controversy: because the other courtiers and cronies in Trump’s orbit are jealous. Tell-all accounts—such as the ones written by Haberman and Swann or Wolff—aren’t coming from Democrats, who hardly have a chance to near Trump. They’re coming from inside the White House, from people who object to Harp because they want to take her place. After all, the current scandal might lead to Harp’s being exiled from Trump’s A-list, but the president himself will remain a needy man-child. Which means the job of high priestess in the cult will have to be filled by another eager applicant.