Natalie Harp and Donald Trump: What Happened Before Fox & Friends
Donald Trump may have first noticed Natalie Harp on television in 2019. By then, she had already been supporting him for years — and the professional trail around her family reached into Trump’s business world even earlier.
This reporting was developed with research and insight from Heather Ashley on Substack. You can also follow @theheatherashley on Threads.
President Donald Trump watches Natalie Harp speak after calling her onstage at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference on June 26, 2019. Official White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian.
A story does not begin halfway through.
The familiar version of Natalie Harp’s story begins on June 14, 2019, when she appeared on Fox & Friends to talk about cancer, healthcare and Donald Trump’s Right to Try law.
Trump later said he was watching.
And just a short time later, during his own call-in to the show, he brought Harp up without being asked.
“I watched Natalie Harp,” Trump told the hosts. He praised her appearance, her spirit and the story she had just told about Right to Try. He tweeted about her that morning, too. Less than two weeks later, on June 26, Harp was standing beside him onstage at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference.
To be clear, I have not found evidence showing that Donald Trump personally knew Natalie Harp before June 14, 2019.
He very well may have first become aware of her while watching television that morning.
But Harp’s documented connection to Trump politics — and her family business’s connection to Trump’s professional world — did not begin that morning.
The first thing I found that challenged the timeline was campaign finance data.
Federal election records show that Natalie Harp made six separate contributions to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee in August 2016.
They are not altogether remarkable.
The first came on August 2 for $184. Then $3 on August 6. Another $35 on August 9. $100 on August 12. $50 on August 20.
And finally, $5 on August 24.
Altogether, $377.
The records identify the contributor as Natalie Harp of Irvine, California. Her employer is listed as GlobalHotelNetwork.com and her occupation as Director of Marketing and Operations — details that independently match Harp’s documented professional history. Our transaction-level review identified six reported contributions, made on six separate dates, totaling $377.
The amount isn’t extraordinary by any means.
What is notable is when those payments were made.
This was August 2016.
Before Trump won the presidency.
A lifetime ago, it seems.
Nearly three years before the Fox & Friends appearance that would become the public beginning of their relationship, Harp was already contributing to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. The Federal Election Commission identifies it as a joint fundraising committee registered on May 25, 2016.
Alone, that changes the timeline of Harp’s documented political support.
And then I started looking at the company listed as her employer.
I was not the first person to notice that the Harp family business overlapped with Trump’s hotel world.
In an August 21 deep dive into Harp, investigative writer Heather Ashley found archived GlobalHotelNetwork.com advisory-board pages showing Eric Danziger — then CEO of the Trump Hotel Collection — on GHN’s board in October 2016 and still listed there in July 2018.
@TheHeatherAshley was careful about the limits of what those records established. She wrote that she could not say whether the connection went any further than “company + board member.”
I started pulling on that thread.
And the timeline moved backward again.
GlobalHotelNetwork.com was part of the hospitality business run by Natalie’s father, Robert G. Harp Jr. Natalie was not simply the daughter of the man who ran it. She worked inside the company as its Director of Marketing and Operations.
And one of the documents carrying her name survives.
It is a 2017 GlobalHotelNetwork publication about Trump Hotel Group’s expansion and its chief executive, Eric Danziger.
Inside that document is a reference to something GHN says it had published five years earlier.
“In our 2012 GHN Executive Profile with Donald Trump,” the publication begins one passage.
And then it cites the original file.
DonaldJTrump_GHN_2012.pdf
Not once.
Twice.
The 2017 document reproduces material attributed to that earlier Trump profile and its footnotes preserve the old GlobalHotelNetwork.com path.
The original PDF itself is no longer available at that location. Despite trying multiple archival routes, I have not recovered it.
Yet.
I want that PDF.
Badly.
Because without it, there is an obvious question I cannot answer: who actually conducted the 2012 profile with Donald Trump?
Was Robert Harp speaking with him directly? Was somebody else at GHN responsible for it? Did the profile come together through written responses or material supplied by Trump’s organization?
I do not know.
And I am not going to use a missing document to fill in blanks that the surviving evidence cannot.
What the surviving record does establish is narrower: by 2017, GHN itself was citing a 2012 executive profile with Donald Trump, reproducing comments attributed to him from that profile and preserving the original filename and URL.
A 2017 GlobalHotelNetwork.com publication authored by Natalie Harp cites a 2012 “GHN Executive Profile with Donald Trump.” The surviving publication identifies Harp as GHN’s Director of Marketing and Operations. The original 2012 Trump profile is no longer available at the cited URL.
If that were the only connection, I probably would have treated it as an interesting but unsurprising piece of hospitality-industry history. Trump was already a prominent figure in the hotel business. A hospitality publication profiling him is not, by itself, remarkable.
But the trail doesn’t end there.
Five years later, we’re at Trump Tower.
On June 5, 2017, Trump Hotel Group announced the signing of three American IDEA hotels at a private reception at Trump Tower during the NYU Investment Hotel Conference.
According to GHN’s own publication, the next day its CEO and publisher, Robert G. Harp, sat down with Eric Danziger to discuss Trump Hotel Group’s plans in greater detail.
That is not an inferred connection.
That is the Harps’ company documenting the meeting.
And the same publication contains another important detail: GHN describes Trump Hotel Group as a “long-standing member” of GlobalHotelNetwork.com and identifies Danziger as a member of GHN’s Advisory Board.
Then, on the final page, under “About the Author”:
Natalie J. Harp, MBA, Director of Marketing and Operations at GlobalHotelNetwork.com.
That is considerably more specific than saying the Harps worked in hotels and so did Donald Trump.
Robert Harp sat down with the chief executive of Trump Hotel Group to discuss the company’s expansion. GHN described Trump Hotel Group as a long-standing member of its network. GHN’s surviving publication cites an earlier executive profile with Donald Trump himself.
And Natalie Harp authored the document recording those connections.
There is an important caveat here.
GHN’s documented history with Danziger predates his leadership of Trump Hotels. The same 2017 publication cites a 2013 GHN Executive Profile with Danziger. So it would be inaccurate to suggest that Trump brought Danziger into GHN’s world. The document establishes that GHN had already profiled Danziger before he became CEO of Trump’s hotel company.
What I still cannot tell you is whether Robert Harp personally knew Donald Trump, whether Natalie ever met Trump through the family business, or whether any of those professional connections had anything to do with what happened in 2019.
Those are separate questions.
But by this point, the idea that Natalie Harp simply arrived from a completely unrelated world on Donald Trump’s television one morning was becoming difficult to reconcile with the record.
And then I reached March 2018.
On March 25, Harp posted a video to Twitter.
Her bio at the time read: “Strategist @LCGpr • Storyteller • Director @GlobalHotelNtwk • #MAGA.”
The archived page confirms it. The bio continued with “Genesis 50:20” and listed her location as Los Angeles.
Strategist.
Storyteller.
Director of the family hospitality network.
And #MAGA.
In March 2018.
The tweet itself centered on Harp’s medical experience and Donald Trump. She wrote that she had been a victim of medical error, had cancer and chronic pain, and that Trump had made her a fighter.
This was not a post that disappeared unnoticed.
The archived page shows 1,747 retweets and 3,212 likes.
Heather Ashley had already identified a broader problem with this period of Harp’s timeline. Her reporting pointed to a March 27 tweet, previously reported by The Washington Post, in which Harp said she was already receiving a chemotherapy treatment months before the federal Right to Try Act became law.
But the March 25 archive gives us something more specific.
It shows that Harp was already publicly connecting Trump himself to Right to Try.
At 7:29 that evening, Harp wrote that she was hopeful and thankful that Trump was “speeding up the FDA approval process and prioritizing Right to Try.”
Then, at 8:12, responding to a user who had asked how Trump had actually affected her healthcare situation, Harp wrote:
“President Trump has sped up the FDA approval process and is fighting for patients like me to have the Right to Try.”
She went on to say that Trump had inspired her to fight against what she called a rigged system and that “he is also fighting for my life.”
The date was March 25, 2018.
The federal Right to Try Act became law on May 30, 2018.
I want to be precise about what that does — and does not — establish.
I am not saying that Harp obtained her treatment through a federal law that did not yet exist. There are separate questions about her treatment, the applicable medical pathways and the later versions of her Right to Try story. Those deserve their own careful examination.
That is not what I am trying to resolve here.
For this story, the significance is much simpler.
The political narrative already existed.
More than a year before Harp appeared on Fox & Friends, she was publicly tying Donald Trump, her medical experience, FDA policy and Right to Try together.
The basic political framework of the story that would later introduce her to a national audience was already there.
And then her story began moving beyond Harp’s own account.
On the evening of June 28, 2018, Pacific time, Kareem Lanier promoted Natalie Harp to his followers. He tagged Trump and explicitly connected Harp’s medical story to Right to Try. Our archive work confirms that Lanier was amplifying the same Trump-centered medical narrative Harp had already been making publicly that spring.
Lanier was not simply an unidentified Trump supporter on Twitter.
Contemporary reporting from March 2018 identified him as a director of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump and reported that he and Darrell Scott had been working with Trump on an urban revitalization plan.
But there was another piece sitting inside the archive.
Lanier’s post survives on an archived Twitter page belonging to Ryan Fournier.
The archived metadata preserves Lanier’s original tweet ID, a separate retweet ID and RyanAFournier as the retweeter.
Fournier was not an unrelated account, either. The Library of Congress’s archived record for Students for Trump identifies Ryan Fournier and John Lambert as the organization’s founders.
So by June 2018, we can document a transmission that moves beyond Harp herself:
Harp had already built the Trump-and-Right-to-Try message.
Lanier promoted it.
Fournier amplified Lanier.
I still cannot tell you whether Fournier ever spoke to Harp. I cannot tell you whether he sent the story anywhere else. And I cannot tell you whether Donald Trump ever saw any of these posts.
The archive does not establish those things.
But it does establish that by the summer of 2018, Natalie Harp’s story was no longer confined to Natalie Harp’s own social media account.
It was circulating through people who were active in Trump politics.
Look at where we are at this point.
It’s not 2019.
Natalie Harp is already publicly identifying herself as a strategist, storyteller and #MAGA supporter. She is already using her medical experience to make a political argument centered on Donald Trump. She is already publicly talking about Trump and Right to Try.
Her message had already drawn thousands of public engagements.
And that message has begun moving through identifiable figures in Trump’s political network.
All of this sits on top of what came before it.
The six contributions in 2016.
Robert Harp’s documented meeting with the man then running Trump Hotel Group.
GHN describing Trump Hotel Group as a long-standing member.
And somewhere behind all of it, still sitting stubbornly beyond my reach, that missing 2012 GHN Executive Profile with Donald Trump.
Only then do we arrive at June 2019.
On June 12, Harp published a LinkedIn essay titled I’m Living Proof — the Party of Healthcare is Trump’s. Heather Ashley’s archival work independently preserves that publication date and the essay’s place in the chronology.
Two days later, Harp appeared on Fox & Friends, making the same broader argument about Trump, healthcare and Right to Try. Fox’s contemporaneous account says Harp credited Trump’s policies and Right to Try with changing the course of her illness.
Later that morning, Trump called into the program.
“You know, I watched Natalie Harp,” he said.
He told the hosts he thought she was one of the best guests they had ever had and immediately connected her story to Right to Try.
He tweeted about her that morning, too.
“Natalie Harp fighting Stage 2 Cancer and doing really well was a GREAT guest on @foxandfriends,” Trump wrote, before mentioning Right to Try and adding, “Proud of Natalie!”
Twelve days later, while speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, Trump returned to the story.
He told the audience he had been watching television when he heard about Harp. He said she had “lit up the television screen” and, after learning she was in the room, called her onto the stage.
During that same appearance, Trump said he had replayed the segment and that Melania had watched it.
From that point forward, the relationship is easy to see.
It is everything before that morning that has largely disappeared from the familiar telling.
I still cannot tell you that Donald Trump personally knew Natalie Harp before June 2019.
Nothing I have found establishes that.
But I also cannot tell you who put her on Fox & Friends.
And that question has become more interesting as this timeline has grown, not less.
Two days before the appearance, Harp published an essay about Trump and healthcare.
Somewhere between that essay and the morning of June 14, she was booked on Fox & Friends.
There may be an entirely ordinary explanation.
A producer may have found the essay.
Someone may have forwarded it.
Someone at Fox may already have known her work.
There may be one painfully boring booking email sitting in an inbox somewhere that explains the final step of this story in thirty seconds.
I would very much like to find it.
But I do not need that email to make the point this record already supports.
The question is not whether Donald Trump secretly knew Natalie Harp before Fox & Friends.
I have no evidence that he did.
The question is why Harp’s story so often begins at the moment Donald Trump noticed her.
Because Natalie’s documented side of that story begins much earlier.
She had contributed to a Trump joint fundraising committee before he became president.
By March 2018, she was publicly advancing a healthcare argument that directly linked Trump to FDA policy and Right to Try.
By that summer, the message was being amplified beyond her own account by figures active in Trump politics.
And the company where she served as Director of Marketing and Operations had a documented professional history with Trump’s hotel business — including a Trump executive profile it said it published in 2012, a long-standing membership relationship with Trump Hotel Group, and a 2017 meeting between her father and the head of Trump’s hotel company.
None of that proves the Fox appearance was arranged.
It does not prove Donald Trump knew Natalie Harp personally before June 2019.
And it does not turn every business connection into a political one.
But it does change where the documented story begins.
Maybe Donald Trump really did discover Natalie Harp while watching Fox & Friends on June 14, 2019.
The evidence we have does not give me a reason to say otherwise…yet.
But that morning is not the beginning of Natalie Harp’s story.
This reporting is — and will always remain — free. If you’d like to support the time, research and records that go into this work, you can leave a tip here. Every contribution helps me keep digging.
