Why is the White House being so weird about Natalie Harp again? | Arwa Mahdawi

Passport, money, emotional support human: Donald Trump had all the travel essentials on his recent trip to Ireland. The president flew into Dublin on Saturday morning to play golf, meet the country’s leaders and make provocative comments about unification. Melania didn’t accompany her husband on the trip (“Uh, she sends her regards,” Trump said), but his devoted aide Natalie Harp was obviously at his side.

You’ll know Harp: the 35-year-old assistant was headline news last month after Democratic senator Jon Ossoff quipped that Trump didn’t want to do his job; he just wanted to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie”. That comment would have been quickly forgotten were it not for the Trump administration’s unhinged response (sample: “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics”), which sparked a media frenzy. There was suddenly a spotlight on Harp, who is nicknamed the “human printer” because she trails the president with a portable printer, ready to hand him hard copies of flattering coverage. She appears to be disturbingly obsessed with her boss and he seems to appreciate the attention: it was recently revealed that Trump gave her (and two other female aides) a cash gift of $45,000 (£33,000) for a nice holiday.

Harp may be a subject of intrigue, but the news cycle is frenetic. The human printer’s recent business trip to Ireland would not have been particularly noteworthy were it not for the fact that the White House is once again being extremely weird about it. On Saturday, the independent journalist Aaron Rupar posted a photo of the aide with the comment: “Look who made the trip to Ireland! #TravelWithNatalie.” This appeared to incense the White House’s Rapid Response 47 X account, which issued a personal attack in reply. “President Trump does, in fact, travel with staff,” they wrote. “Aaron, on the other hand, is a sick, deluded freak (in his 40s) who sits behind a keyboard and posts creepy things like this.”

Sick deluded freaks in glass houses probably shouldn’t throw stones. And while we’re on the subject of best practices: anyone working in a professional comms capacity should probably understand that ignoring Rupar’s tweet would have been the sensible thing to do. Instead, they chose to amplify it and get people talking about the Harp-Trump relationship again.

Which leads us to a question that comes up frequently in the Trump era: is all this some sort of cunning distraction technique? Does Team Trump prefer it if people are focused on Harp rather than Iran or the Epstein files or the economy? Or, alternatively, does the president just surround himself with idiots? My money is on the latter.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist