Natalie Harp has returned to the White House with Donald Trump after his team had to address a viral image appearing to show the pair getting intimate.
Harp, 35, Trump’s favorite aide, who earns $150,000 a year as an executive assistant, traveled with the 80-year-old president to a campaign rally in Gastonia, North Carolina.
The pair, who are rarely far from each other, then sat together aboard Marine One as they flew back to D.C. on Wednesday.
Hours earlier, the White House had to shoot down suggestions that a “clearly” fake, AI-generated image of Trump kissing a blonde woman was a genuine photo of the president and Harp.
Two versions of the same image—one grainy and one in higher definition—had gone viral, showing Trump kissing a woman with his hands on her waist.
However, both images were obvious fakes, with telltale signs such as the woman having six fingers on her right hand.
While the woman’s face is largely obscured, it was strongly suggested that she was supposed to represent Harp, whose devotion to the president has sparked concerns and rumors about the extent of their relationship.
“This is clearly a fake photo,” a White House official told the Daily Beast.
A reverse image search showed that the image’s oldest available use was as a thumbnail for a YouTube video by political commentator Keith Edwards, who denied responsibility for the fake photo going viral.
“My thumbnail team found the image online,” he told fact-checking website Snopes. “We did not create or alter the underlying image, but we also did not independently verify its original source or that the woman pictured is Natalie Harp. Given that only the back of her head is visible, I don’t think her identity can be confirmed from this image alone.”
Harp has been a near-constant presence in Trump’s inner circle during his second term.
The 35-year-old, a former host at the far-right network One America News Network (OANN), first came into contact with Trump when she thanked him for signing the Right to Try Act in 2019, which she claimed allowed her to receive experimental treatment for bone cancer.
She later joined Trump to work on both his 2020 and 2024 campaigns. She eventually earned the nickname “the human printer” because she follows Trump around with a portable printer, producing paper copies of emails, news articles, and other documents for the 80-year-old to read rather than showing them to him on a screen.
Her devotion to the president became so intense a few years ago that it raised concerns within the Secret Service.
Harp also left fawning letters around for Trump to find, including one that read: “You are all that matters to me.”
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Preston Harp, the estranged brother of the Trump aide, said he believes his sister considers the president a replacement for their father, who died in 2020.
“The way my sister interacted with and treated my dad throughout the years, it was like she wished she had a different dad,” he said.
