Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia criticized President Donald Trump’s relationship with his aide Natalie Harp during a rally on Sunday, accusing him of preferring to “travel with Natalie” than performing his job.
The Democratic senator was discussing the war in Iran and the record-setting deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier when he launched a sharp attack against Trump.
“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
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Harp, 35, is the president’s executive assistant and was one of three aides who joined him in his recent plane-swap, which was prompted by a potential threat of an Iranian missile attack. White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office operations, also joined the president.
Meanwhile, Trump left behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the White House press pool.
Preston Harp, the executive assistant’s estranged brother, told the Daily Mail in June that her relationship with Trump was “very unhealthy.” He also told the New York Times reporters who authored Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump that his sister was so devoted to the president that she left admiring notes for him.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement at the time, “Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team.”
Newsweek contacted the White House for comment by email on Monday morning outside standard working hours.
Who Is Natalie Harp?
Born in California to a devout Christian family, Harp earned her MBA from Liberty University in 2015.
She first came to the president’s attention in 2019, when she praised him for signing into law the federal Right To Try Act a year earlier, which she said gave her lifesaving hope while battling cancer. Harp, who had Stage 2 bone cancer, said being able to try experimental medication helped her achieve great results.
“They wrote me prescriptions for opioids, and they walked on. Next, the political establishment, they saw me there, and they stopped just long enough to come over and tell me how to die, how to speed up my death so I could somehow die with dignity,” she said at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority annual conference in Washington, D.C., that year.
“But then an outsider, my Good Samaritan, President Donald J. Trump, he saw me there and he didn’t walk by; he stopped,” she continued.
When Trump introduced her onstage, he said, “She lit up the television screen.”
Harp was a television presenter for One America News Network between 2020 and 2022. Upon his return to the White House in January 2025, Trump appointed her as executive assistant to the president.
Harp’s father, an estate agent who founded a consultancy for travel companies, died by suicide in 2020. After his death, she and her brother became estranged, the latter said.
Ossoff is among the first members of the political opposition to spotlight Harp while criticizing the president, but social media users were quick to note that the aide’s presence had not gone unnoticed.
The Republicans Against Trump X account shared Ossoff’s comment and a clip showing the president and Harp leaving his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Freelance journalist Michael Rusch, a former global news curation director at BuzzFeed News, said Ossoff’s comment on Sunday felt “like a pretty significant shift in the Natalie Harp story.”
He added, “What has mostly lived in books, reporting and conversations about the strange inner workings of the trump white house is now making its way directly onto the campaign trail.”
Others have dismissed the senator’s comment. Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham told 68,000 followers on X: “Natalie Harp is the President’s personal aid. It’s her job to always be in Trump’s presence, to always travel with him.”
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and Shakeema Edwards.