Extra! Extra!
This week, as the trial over Stormy Daniels’ hush money began, New York Times US reporter Maggie Haberman noted the presence in court of a person whose job description sounded like a joke. She wrote that her job was to carry around a “wireless printer” to provide the former president with a “continuous stream of good news from the Internet”.
But it turns out that the assistant is very real. Her name is Natalie Harp, a former News about One America Moderator who joined Trump’s communications team in March 2022. According to reporting by Washington PostHarp even accompanied the former reality TV host on golf outings in a golf cart “equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him encouraging news articles, online posts or other materials.”
There’s nothing really surprising anymore in Trump’s chaotic inner circle, but an aide tasked with printing good news for the technophobic former leader might be the ultimate in unintentional character studies.
Harpo Marx
Per WaPoOther staff members were tasked with asking Trump’s allies to call him and “encourage him with positive words.”
Harp has an unusual relationship with Trump: she claims he saved her life by approving an immunotherapy drug that allegedly enabled her to survive a rare form of cancer.
However, experts say Trump’s “Right to Try” law, which gave the green light to a range of drug treatments, is nothing more than a smokescreen.
“The FDA already had a process in place that approved more than 90 percent of the people who wanted access to these drugs and treatments,” said former senior FDA official Peter Lurie WaPo back in 2020.
Harp’s two years at Trump’s side must have been a real rollercoaster ride. In just five months, Trump was indicted on four counts ranging from falsifying business records to election interference.
Jury selection continues today in a case in which Trump is accused of trying to cover up a $130,000 payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels in late 2016 to prevent her from testifying that she had sex with him 10 years earlier.
In short, it is a sad state of affairs, made even more depressing by the existence of an assistant whose job it is to print out good news on a golf course.
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