A bizarre video has emerged raising yet more questions about the blonde 35-year-old who is constantly at President Donald Trump’s side.
The social media clip, recorded nine years ago, shows Harp, who was in her mid-20s at the time, claiming that she was the sole survivor of serious medical malpractice thanks to Trump.
Harp would go on to repeat the claim that the president’s policies had saved her life in a viral online essay in 2019, but many of the eyebrow-raising details listed in this first video were not repeated.
The resurfaced clip, which is thought to have been recorded in 2017, shows that the letters that alarmed the Secret Service were certainly not the only clues that Harp had an unusually strong devotion to Trump. The Daily Beast published an astonishing new set of love letters from Harp to Trump on Thursday.
Trump’s fawning relationship with his aide has come under intense scrutiny since Sen. Jon Ossoff’s comments at a Sunday rally in Atlanta. The Georgia Democrat accused Trump, 80, of not actually wanting to be president, and instead being happy just to travel the world with his assistant, a woman four and a half decades his junior.
Harp’s place at Trump’s side and her control of communications that he receives have raised serious national security questions about their relationship.
The latest video deepens those concerns.
Harp tells the camera that she lost “100 percent of the average person’s blood platelets, but only 30 percent of my own” after a sterile water infusion. She says she went into hemorrhagic shock, had a rare blood condition, paid her own medical bills, and was denied appointments. She left all of these details out of an essay she later wrote on LinkedIn, which caught the attention of Fox News and then the president, after she appeared on the network to share her tale.
The unearthed clip features Harp sitting on a bench in what appears to be a court building—not a hospital—while she explains that she’s “been denied appointments.”
She concludes that Trump’s political interventions changed her fortunes. “The elites thought they held the Trump card,” she says into the lens, wearing a pink MAGA hat. “But they didn’t count on Donald Trump—like I did.”
Harp, whom New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has dubbed Trump’s “human binkie” because she acts as his “comfort blanket,” works as special assistant and executive assistant to the aging president, earning about $150,000 a year.
She has long freaked out other MAGA aides and even White House security over her fixation on Trump, and is currently locked in a behind-closed-doors power struggle with his wife, first lady Melania Trump.
Reports have revealed that she is now screening his calls from other world leaders, though she initially refused to secure a basic security clearance.
The video unearthed by the Daily Beast was published online in 2018, although it appears to have been recorded the year before. It shows how deep Harp’s devotion to the president ran two years before she said she first entered his orbit.
The 96-second clip, filmed selfie-style beside a lake and intercut with footage from Trump’s speeches, was posted on Twitter in June 2018 by MAGA activist Kareem Lanier. Lanier ran the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, a surrogate organization set up by the president’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.
Harp says that a nurse accidentally hooked her up to an IV bag of sterile water instead of saline solution in 2015. She claims the mistake almost killed her and left her housebound. She said she later developed a rare form of bone cancer that did not respond to two rounds of chemotherapy, and that she was rejected from clinical trials.
“Two years ago, I was the victim of a medical error,” Harp says in the video. “Accidentally infused with sterile water, I went into hemorrhagic shock, losing 100 percent of the average person’s blood platelets, but only 30 percent of my own. Thanks to a rare blood condition, I became the only survivor of sterile water infusion.”
None of those details feature in a subsequent LinkedIn essay she wrote about her illness. That essay has since been deleted.
Medical studies have described accidental infusions of sterile water as extremely rare, and there are documented cases of other patients surviving it, which doesn’t match Harp’s statements in the clip or the caption from Lanier describing her as the “only survivor of a Medical error that’s taken 4,000+ lives.”
On LinkedIn, she wrote that the health-care system in California, her home state, told her that she should prepare to die, offering her “opioids, barbiturates, medical marijuana, disability, Do-Not-Resuscitate orders, and yes, Death With Dignity.”
That essay went viral, securing her a June 2019 interview on Fox & Friends that caught the president’s eye, during which she credited a Trump-backed law with saving her from cancer.
Days after that TV appearance, the president invited Harp onstage at an event in Washington, telling followers he’d watched with awe as she “lit up the television screen.”
Harp has claimed that Trump saved her life by backing a law called Right to Try. The measure, which the president signed in May 2018, allowed terminally ill patients who’d exhausted approved treatments to request experimental drugs. It formed part of Trump’s wider war on Obamacare, for which his administration had been publicly soliciting horror stories since he first took the White House. He bragged that the move would save “thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands” of lives. Her June 2019 interview on Fox News turned Harp—young, telegenic, and above all, grateful—into the face of that drive.
She went on to join his 2020 campaign advisory board, and spoke at that year’s Republican National Convention.
At the convention, her story had become even more terrifying. She said her doctors told her she was a “burden to my family and my country,” and that “by choosing to die early, I’d actually be saving the lives of others.”
Two of Harp’s aunts, Karen Fine and Tina Norris, died of cancer. Norris died in 2016, around the same period that Harp says she first fell ill herself.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story. Spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s team.”
“The Fake News’s continued attacks on President Trump and his Administration prove exactly why trust in media is at historic lows,” Ingle went on. “The media should get back to reporting real news and stop regurgitating Trump-Deranged liberal talking points.”
