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Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s always-at-his-side executive assistant, appears to have now taken control of the president’s personal mobile phone and is deciding who can and cannot speak to him.
For months, the White House has boasted of Trump’s accessibility to reporters and pointed to the fact that numerous members of the White House press corps are able to dial the president’s phone and connect with him for brief phone interviews at all times of the day and night.
But as Trump’s approval ratings have reached a nadir and as his party was taking a humiliating drubbing in the midterm elections, it appears that his so-called “human printer” Harp, is screening his calls to prevent him from having any uncomfortable conversations with journalists — apparently at her discretion.
Multiple journalists confirmed to The Independent that attempts to reach the president over the last 48 hours have found them speaking to a young female who answers the number known to belong to Trump’s personal phone and demands to know who is calling. The Independent had a similar interaction Tuesday night as midterm returns were rolling in.
The call screener was recorded asking who was calling when Politico’s Dasha Burns tried calling Trump during an election-night live stream on Tuesday, and the voice on the other end appeared identical to Harp’s voice based on a recording of her speech to the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Another journalist and longtime White House reporter told The Independent that his recent call to Trump was answered by a young woman, who only put him through to the president after Trump overheard him identifying himself to her and told her that he’d take the call.
The newly-instituted gatekeeping is a departure from Trump’s longtime practice of answering his own phone, something he and his aides have for years boasted about when referring to his accessibility and comparing him favorably to his predecessors in the White House.
But Harp’s apparent involvement comes at a time when the young White House aide appears to be exerting more and more control over the president’s consumption of news and information.
According to multiple reports, it is Harp who has repeatedly connected him with self-described “Islamophobe” and activist Laura Loomer over the objections of other senior members of his staff, and Harp was reportedly responsible for Trump’s decision to bar CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the White House in September.
The 30-something aide has long been known as Trump’s “human printer” for her practice of following him around and providing hard copies of fawning news coverage to boost his mood.
She has grown increasingly close to Trump, and in recent weeks is understood to have abandoned the desk where she usually sits outside of the Oval Office for a place in his private dining room, printing off hard copies of news articles and documents for the president to read.
Harp, who reportedly posts on Truth Social on the president’s behalf, has been pictured at Trump’s side on the campaign trail and is one of the small group the president has been “increasingly cloistered” with, according to The New York Times, which also reported that it was Harp to whom Trump reportedly dictated his furious 1,300-word rant about Bill Maher aboard Air Force One last week.
