“No One Knows or Cares About Me More”: What Natalie Harp's Letters to Trump Reveal About Access, Devotion, and the Machinery of Power
There is a particular kind of letter that only gets written inside a court, and Natalie Harp wrote two of them. “Dear Mr. President,” each begins, the way you might address a stranger — except what follows reads less like correspondence between a boss and a special assistant, and more like something out of a devotional. “You are all that matters to me,” she tells the president of the United States. “I don’t want to ever let you down.”
The Daily Beast published both letters in full this week, after Trump biographer Michael Wolff obtained them while reporting his book on the 2024 campaign, and after The New York Times had already run shorter excerpts. Harp, now 35 and Trump’s $150,000-a-year executive assistant, wrote them in 2023 during or after a golf trip to Scotland and Ireland. She was 31 then. He was 76. Two years later, she sits ten feet from the Oval Office desk, and the letters are no longer a curiosity from the campaign trail — they are a window into how this White House actually runs.
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The Apology
The first letter is an apology, and it is worth sitting with how much a 31-year-old aide felt she owed the president for things that were, by any normal workplace standard, not her fault.
“I thought I was the only one left behind last night... Since I was alone in the van outside Customs without my passport, I panicked, and should have just called Secret Service instead of you.”
She apologizes, too, for walking a golf course instead of riding in a cart — explaining she’d been told to set an example for “any other girls” so the club wouldn’t need extra carts — before pivoting to something rawer:
“I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time). I haven’t been myself, dwelling on the Past, and the pain of losing my Dad... I see myself being lowered in your eyes and good opinion.”
Then the line that has now been quoted in nearly every outlet covering this story:
