On this day six months ago, Donald Trump started his war with Iran, saying it would be over in four weeks.
Happy Friday! It’s Swin again. Despite the best efforts of Abdul El-Sayed, it appears the Donald Trump-Natalie Harp news cycle is calming down. There’s a ton of war and ethnic cleansing to report, so I am more than OK with that. I just got back from Springfield, Ohio, where Trump’s campaign of terror against the city and its Haitian residents is reaching its most barbaric stage yet. I’ll have more reporting on that for you here at Zeteo very soon.
But before we leave behind this month’s round of Harp coverage, it’s important to remember (beyond the jokes, beyond the innuendo, beyond the astonishing weirdness of her devotion to The Donald) why what she does truly matters.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get right into how some of the most prominent MAGA zealots in the country use Harp to get Trump to sound more like them. Plus, we are now precisely six months removed from the start of a war Trump told us would last four weeks – and he seems completely disengaged. Cheery stuff. Let’s get to it.
Playing Him Like a Harp
If you’re a senior administration official, Cabinet-level appointee, or a political activist close to the White House who wants Donald Trump to blast something out on social media, you can just ask the president directly. You can shoot him a text, even. Or, as is now common practice, you can ask the one and only Natalie.
When Georgia’s Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, highlighted the extremely odd Natalie Harp-Trump rapport – how the U.S. president seems to take his 35-year-old “human printer” wherever he goes – it inspired a screeching, hysterical reaction from the White House and Trumpworld, and a deluge of reports on the aide. Since at least 2024, one of the things that’s cropped up in my own reporting is that Harp, as strange and off-putting as the idea may be, is one of the most influential people on the planet today. That is largely because of her direct access to President Trump and how she feeds him a constant diet of online agitprop and kookery. It is also due to the fact that she helps control his MAGA social-media megaphone.
For years, Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s other top White House aides and loyalists, reigned supreme as the man running the president’s social-media operations. Yes, when it came to Trump’s Twitter account (now Truth Social), Trump did tap out some posts. Others, he dictated. Some were ghostwritten, or found and reposted, by advisers like Scavino. But when it comes to his signature Truth Social account, even if President Trump doesn’t find, repost, or write posts himself, they are still effectively his own. He signs off on drafts or recommendations and approves or edits before his “Truth” is posted.
However, sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell me Harp is the new Scavino.