Today, Explained - Trump's human printer

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Natalie Harp may be the most powerful executive assistant in the world, and her unusual relationship with her boss — the president — is getting a lot of attention. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra and Ariana Aspuru, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. President Donald Trump and his executive assistant Natalie Harp at Dover Air Force Base on July 22, 2026. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dear Mr. President, I want things to always be right between us. I also know I've been distracted all week, forgetting to eat throughout the days and even forgetting to sleep. I never want to bring you anything but joy. I'm sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don't ever want to let you down. Thank you for being my guardian and protector in this life. I have learned so much about myself on this trip.

For the first time in, I don't know how long, you've found. forced me to unplug. I didn't have to be human printer. Thank you for always being there for me. To modify a classic, I could not have parted with you to anyone less worthy. And I will add, it is I who is unworthy. With all my heart, Natalie. What is going on with Natalie Harp, President Trump's Human Printer on today, explained from Vox? Recommendations can't be amazing. I mean, maybe someone recommended that TV show you been obsessed with lately. But when it comes to home projects, it's different.

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so you actually know what's in your stack and what to do about it. AI on, risk off. dot com slash TPRM. The golden age of America begins right now. On today. Explained. All right, we open the show with selections from various letters. Natalie Harp wrote to her boss, the president of the United States.

Shoutouts to The Daily Beast and the New York Times for getting a hold of the letters. And shoutouts to Margaret Hartman from Intelligencer for joining us to explain what's going on in them. It's a very sad story. She lost her father. He committed suicide while she was living. living with him in 2020, and that's right before Trump had her speak at the Republican National Convention in 2020. And she does refer to losing her dad in these letters. Thank you for always being there for me. I'll never forget when he made that promise to me after losing my dad.

And I know how happy he is right now that I did get to go to Scotland and Ireland, as he always wanted for me. And then she uses a pride and prejudice quote of the Elizabeth's father, says this when Elizabeth is leaving the home to go marry Mr. Darcy. I could not have parted with you to anyone less worthy. And then Natalie adds, and I will add, it is I who is unworthy. It's very sad. She also is doing some highly questionable things and has unfettered access to the president, which is concerning. But, you know, when people see Trump with a 35-year-old blonde, woman who is hopelessly devoted to him, they obviously start going to a place where they're

talking about affairs and sexual impropriety, but there's actually never been anything that came up some smoking gun of, oh, they were caught in a trist together or something like that. Like, she's definitely devoted to him to a strange degree, but it really could just be that he stepped into this father-like role with her. So I guess like two things can be true at the same time. One is that this person has had a tough life. And the other thing is that this person might have a very unhealthy relationship with her boss, the president of the United States. Tell us more about Natalie Harp, the person and how she came to be so obsessed with and close to the president of the United States.

Natalie Harp rose to fame online from these posts that went up around 2015 to 2017 in which she described her health struggles and credited Donald. Trump with saving her life. Thanks to a rare blood condition, I became the only survivor of sterile water infusion. But today, I have cancer in chronic pain. I've had to pay my own medical bills, then denied appointments, prescribed opioids, given access to life-ending drugs, and every problem could be traced back to politics. And she claimed in these posts in these videos that she was putting up online around this time that she grew up in California and that all the doctors in her Democratic-led state just wanted her to die.

That they coached her on assisted suicide and told her she was a burden on her family and a burden on society, and they weren't interested in finding medical solutions until she saw Trump talking about health care and encouraging her to fight. The elites thought they held the Trump card, but they didn't count on Donald Trump like I did. The thing that really landed on the national radar was in June 2019. She published a LinkedIn post titled, I'm Living Proof, the party of health care, is Trump's. As a millennial woman, a demographic that Democrats take for granted, I actually have cancer. And I want to know if Joe Biden can promise to cure cancer, why didn't he do so while Senator for 36 years or vice president for eight? So Fox News saw this blog post that Harp put up online criticizing Biden, and it wasn't even a very long post, but they asked her to go on.

Coincidentally, it was Trump's birthday in 2019. Harp appeared on Fox and Friends to discuss her criticisms of Biden. As I like to say, I'm not dying from cancer anymore thanks to President Trump. I'm living with cancer. And Trump happened to be on the very same episode of Fox and Friends. So right after the appearance, he wrote on Twitter, Natalie Harp, fighting stage two cancer and doing really well, was a great guest on at Fox and Friends.

Right to Try is producing some truly spectacular results. Proud of Natalie! So after Natalie Harp appears on Fox News, she starts doing more conservative media hits and she eventually gets a job at One America News Network. As President Trump says, nothing's easy, but who wants nothing? And right now we're realizing, We're going to end up with nothing if we don't fight back.

And she works there until 2022. And then she goes and leaves to work for the Trump 2024 campaign. And she didn't even have a job description during this time. But it's around somewhere during the 2024 campaign. She gets the nickname the Human Printer. She has no official title. She seems to just run around after Trump printing out things she sees on the internet that would be of interest to him. Like if he wants to see, oh, show me that article, Tucker Carlson Rose, she'll print it out.

If he wants to see what memes are being passed around, she'll print it out and hand it to him. She doesn't have a very high profile at this point, but within political circle, she earns that nickname. So people have known about her role as like a human printer for a minute now, but why does she? start getting so much more attention? This is about the plane and the diversion and like a catering truck, isn't it? Yeah. So she started getting a lot more attention earlier this year. It seems some colleagues leaked to the press about her after Trump posted to truth social some very controversial truths. One showed a brief clip of the Obama's as apes and another one depicted Trump as Jesus, though he later claimed that it actually was me as a doctor, whatever that means.

But it seems that colleagues on the Trump team did not love that she was just going through truth social and finding the craziest maga memes and having the president repost them. And they start sort of in the spring, like there were a few stories about maybe this is her fault. And, you know, it seems like the intent was perhaps to make Trump rethink, letting Natalie have so much unfettered access to his truth social account. It seems that backfired. She was as close to him as ever. And that was proven when we found out that in early July, Trump was coming back from a summit in Turkey. And he was taking an older Air Force one plane. and it seemed that there was some security issue with a new plane from Qatar.

We found out many weeks later that it seems there was actually a threat from Iran to target the plane. Trump and several of his aides were secretly shuttled minutes later onto this airport catering truck, which was elevated and positioned at a door out of the view of the cameras. He downplayed the risk to those he left on the original plane while he flew on a separate one. I don't worry about anything, to be honest. Whatever it is. You know my attitude? Whatever.

Well, one of the aides who came with Trump was Natalie Harp. And that got a lot of attention because why did he decide to save Natalie Harp but leave Marco Rubio and other cabinet members on the plane that was possibly in danger? But what really gets this Natalie business back in the public eye isn't really that news as much as it is. Georgia Senator John Assov. Yes. So John Ossov was speaking at a rally, and he said... See, he doesn't want to do the job.

No, no. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless Flying Palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar. And the White House just has this huge reaction to Osaf saying this. They hit back at Ossov really hard. They called him a loser, a miserable person

who hates the country, and a cringe-worthy feminine theater kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. You mean pee-wee-Herman? Pee-Weirman look alike. And then the thing that really pushes it over the edge is in the Oval Office, CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asks the president directly

about Asoff's comments. And the White House rapid response account hits back at her saying she is a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession. And they say, Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It's quite troubling.

But the huge response from the White House really drew more attention to this and outlets that had previously not been paying all that much attention to Natalie Harp suddenly said, like, why are they so defensive about this aid and start digging into her past? and then all these other details came out. I think it's very notable and worth covering that there is a woman who told her colleagues that she does not answer to anyone else on the team. She only answers directly to the president.

She is digging through the most extreme parts of right-wing media and feeding these very incendiary memes to the president. there's no oversight. She apparently worked for more than a year without security clearance. She's the person who connects the president when foreign leaders want to get a hold of him. She has tremendous, tremendous power. Of course, everyone wants to know if they're having an affair. I personally don't think so.

Like, there's yet to be any smoking gun on them having an affair, and it's possible they just have a very weird devotional relationship between a young aide and her much older president. But importantly, the person who's among the closest to the president who prints out his articles who maybe issues some of his most incendiary posts has like a deep and perhaps problematic obsession with him. Exactly. So Trump reportedly told his team early in his second term that harp is, quote, the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids,

and then told his aides, all of you will go off and make money. She will never leave me. You can read and support Margaret Hartman's work at nymag.com. When today explained is back, we're going to talk about the person who got us talking about Natalie. We're going to talk about John. Support for the show comes from hymns.

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And here's Natalie. Natalie. Craig Bluesteen, I'm the chief political reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and also the co-host of the Politically Georgia podcast. And I think it's time on this show, Greg, that we remind people who John Ossoff is. And I'm told that is a job with which you can help.

I go way back with Senator Ossoff, the first time I met him, or at least I talked to him, was way back in early 2017, where I got a call out of the blue from a name, a number I didn't recognize, and the voice on the other line said, hi, I'm John Ossoff, and I'm running for U.S. House, this special election. And I said, well, welcome to the show. There's about 17 other candidates already in the race. And he goes, well, I've got something they don't. I have John Lewis's endorsement, and I have about $250,000 in cash commitment.

So I was like, okay, you know, it still was an uphill battle because we're talking a deep red Republican seat in the northern suburbs of Atlanta at a time when all those suburban seats were still Republican held. So I said, okay, you know, good luck, you know, sir. But lo and behold, he became a national figure in that loss. With polls predicting a neck-and-neck race, Republicans fear that Asoff's powerful donor network and his millennial appeal could cost them a seat they've held for years. Well, the U.S. Senate race has now drawn a familiar name. John Ossoff is most famous for narrowly losing the most expensive congressional race in history. So you've been covering Senator Osaf just about as long as anybody since he asked you to start covering if it sounds like. At any point over the course of that almost decade, did you expect Natalie from him?

No, I mean, look, you expect him to be. really, really careful and calculated about what he says. He's rarely, even back then, he rarely, you know, uttered an imprecise statement. There's been times where folks have kind of caught him off message, but has been very, very rare, even at the beginning of his political career, certainly now. So when he uttered the Natalie line that sparked a thousand thought pieces and national takes and all that, that was done by design. Tell us a bit about his backstory for people who have.

kind of forgotten maybe since 2020 who John Asaph is? Yeah, well, when I first got that call in early 2017, I had no idea who he was. Little did I know he'd become a national figure that we'd be talking about in the context of a presidential campaign, you know, about a decade later, right? Not even a decade later. But he's a former documentarian, a former intern of the legendary Georgia Congressman John Lewis. whose parents were involved in Democrat, especially his mom were involved in Democratic politics in Georgia,

but definitely not household names, definitely not a known quantity when he called me all those years ago to say I'm running. And Aosov came within a whisker of an outright win, which would have been a huge monumental upset, but in the process showed Democrats have a path, have a sort of resonance with suburban voters that long voted Republican in the Trump era.

He started with the sort of campaign slogan of Make Trump Furious, He was kind of leaning into like the Democratic activism. But then within weeks kind of shifted his message more towards a more friendly, more mainstream argument about bringing jobs to the district, bringing more investment, tech savvy investment to the district. And then listen, when he announced for U.S. Senate against David Perdue, very few people gave him a shot when he got on the race. I think it was in 2019 in that 2020 race.

But that race ended with this epic double-hundred. header runoff because Senator, well, Reverend Raphael Warnock was also in the race against Kelly Lefter, John Osloff going up against David Purdue. Democrats hadn't won in Georgia in decades. So it was an epic election and a real nail-biter to the end. And Osaf becomes the first Jewish US senator in Georgia history. Warnock becomes the first black U.S. senator in Georgia history. And together, they flip control of the Senate and allow Joe Biden to actually implement some of his broad-seeking, broad-ranging agenda, those first two years that they were in office. Okay, so it makes a lot of noise when Asov helps sort of flip the U.S. Senate along with Warnock.

And he's making a lot of noise now, obviously, with Natalie. But I can't say that I feel like he's made a lot of noise in the intervening six years. What's he been like as a senator? That's kind of by design. I mean, it's only been really recently where he's been very willing to go on the national cable shows, to go, you know, talk to national reporters more to go do a lot of the things that you see other nationally prominent democratic figures do much more regularly. I mean, we both know there are folks in Washington who love going to the White House Correspondents dinner and they love going to this or that luncheon or this or that dinner. Senator Osavis is, much more likely to quietly go home and spend time with his two kids. And I'm not just saying that because, like, that's, I mean, that's the senator I know. He is much more reserved and guarded about his private life and will bend over backwards to figure out ways to get back to Georgia. Even when there's important votes, right, find ways after those votes to get back for, you know,

events with his kids and that kind of thing. It feels a little contrary to think about this guy who keeps a low profile who wants to go back home to Georgia. to be with his family, it doesn't want the limelight. Because as you've already mentioned here, he isn't just running for re-election in the Senate right now. Everyone seems to believe that he's running for president. People are already looking around the corner and saying, hey, this guy could be a 2028 contender.

Holy shit, we have our 2028 frontrunner. They just don't know it yet. And I'm guessing neither to you. And I'm going to go out on a limb saying that I believe him when he said publicly and privately too, right, to folks all over the spectrum, media folks and activists and supporters and you name it, that he is focused on this election and he's not running for president.

Let me reiterate. I have zero interest in running for president in 2028 and frankly, zero interest in the 28 fantasy football right now. If someone like Senator Assoff wins by a huge margin over Mike Collins in an important battleground state that is tilted, both ways the last decade, then yeah, the chatter will not stop it, only get louder. And someone who is adept at making the arguments that so many core Democratic voters want to hear about President Trump.

This morning, Berean, I'd like to share with you some brief words on the subject of misrule as we endure the daily spectacle of this broken man and his ruined presidency. This is a government of by and for the ultra-refer. It is the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class. But at the same time, can win over swing voters like he has in 2021, and he's already seeming like he's certainly making that outreach to them in 2026. Yeah, I think it'll be, the calls could be deafening for Asoff to run.

You think if he does end up there, we'll look back at Natalie Gate as a big moment for him. as a moment where it was just clear that this guy was, you know, had the stuff? Or, I mean, does this feel like, I don't know, a week and a half out or whatever it is now that it's already kind of fading into the background?

The biggest takeaway from that to me was how, and I think Jay Martin from Politico was the first to say it. Osloff was essentially the nation's assignment editor because it spurred, you know, I feel like countless stories for the next week and a half. about who Natalie Harp is.

It was Ossoff who showed that he has this extraordinary staying power in the media. These rallies have become, he doesn't hold them every day or every week. These are like once every month or so rallies. Because he's like a scandal piñata. The stagecraft is impressive. You know, he's got these multi-camera shots that are immediately farmed out to all these social media accounts who amplify them. Is it just me or is John Osif, like,

so fucking hot. Senator Ossoff, now I see why all the ladies online call you, Senator My Boo. It's very, very impressive how he pulls this off, and they've become these sort of national spectacles

that have inevitably given rise to more ruminations about whether he'll run for president or not, but also, of course, boost his campaign itself. So that, to me, was one of the takeaways that he has this sort of impressive grip on what, you know, not only what the media is covering,

but triggering them to cover even more of it. One more time, Greg's podcast is politically Georgia. You may have heard Georgia's super important. This election, the last one, the next one. So is Greg's podcast. And so was this one. Ariane Spuru and Denise Guerra produced it. Jolie Myers edited.

David Tadishore and Patrick Boyd mixed it. Gabriel Donatow. Fact-checked it. I hosted it. I'm Sean Ramoseram. It's today explained. How many third-party vendors does your company use? 20, 200.

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