As scrutiny around Donald Trump’s relationship with 35-year-old aide Natalie Harp amplified Tuesday, author Joyce Carol Oates took to social media to compare the assistant’s devotion to the president to Charles Manson and his young female followers.

“The more one learns about Manson, the more disturbing. But Manson himself was very damaged; believed to have been brain-damaged in childhood,” Oates wrote on X, retweeting what she called a “fascinating” comparison that exclaimed Manson’s murderous cult of brainwashed young women may help to “understand the Natalie Harps and Trumpettes.”

“Whatever Trumpettes and the Natalie Harps and Manson girls didn’t get from their father, mother or family they found it in Trump the sex assaulter/Manson the murderer,” the X account @NationGrandma tweeted Monday. “That’s how that works. We are watching the brainwashing live in living color during the 21st century.”

Oates commented elsewhere on Harp as the presidential aide set the internet aflame Tuesday, writing on X that it would have been “easier just to go to graduate school and get an advanced degree” rather than commit her life to Trump. She added that as a fiction writer, she found Harp’s rise to prominence in the public eye “fascinating.”

“Quite a tale to tell of the young woman so bereft by life (apparently) that she has a sort of religious conversion fixing her life upon an elderly ‘father figure’ — (I know, it is absurd to think of T***p as fatherly or familial in any way, but what we call ‘transferences’ are illogical),” Oates reflected, adding that the story would best serve a movie adaptation or a “first-person novella.”

“Having never experienced the phenomenon called ‘transference,’ I can only speculate on its power to transform a life; often, to give meaning to a life bereft of meaning, even suicidal,” she wrote.

Read the author’s tweets in full below:

Oates was just one of the innumerable voices online weighing in on Harp and Trump’s relationship this week after Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) name-dropped her briefly during a campaign rally on Sunday. The senator said Trump wants to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” instead of doing his duties as president.

The nonspecific mention of “Natalie” led to a widespread effort to untangle what Ossoff meant by the aside — with many on the right railing against the senator for insinuating an inappropriate relationship between the president and his staffer simply for pointing out the fact that they travel together. Harp, after all, was reportedly the only female companion brought on the president’s secret third plane out of Turkey at the NATO summit last month while others, including former Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, were left on a decoy Air Force One flight while under threat from Iran.

White House officials responded to Ossoff’s Sunday speech by labeling him a “feminine theater kid” and “lightweight” (spokesperson Davis Ingle) and coining the term “Jon Jackoff” (communications director Steven Cheung).

In short, Harp is a devoted personal aide to Trump who began working at the White House in January 2025. She’s a former host from the One America News Network and memorably said at the 2020 Republican National Convention that Trump saved her life via his signing of the Right to Try Act that allowed her experimental treatment for Stage 2 bone cancer. (There have since been reports that Harp’s experience with the treatment was fabricated.)

“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” Harp said at the time. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”

That mentality has appeared to fan Harp’s desire to serve the president — and according to biographers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump knows it. In “Regime Change,” their book on Trump 2.0, the authors recount the president telling other staffers that “all of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me.”

In the wake of Hayden Panettiere’s death, the director of one of her last films is opening up about his experience with her on set, saying the “energy in her room was pretty dark” at the time.

The actress, who worked with Griff Furst on his 2025 film A Breed Apart, died on Sunday at age 36 at an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina.

“I had met Hayden about 10 years before that and I knew that she was insanely talented, so when she signed on to do this picture that we were shooting, I was psyched,” Furst began in a video recently posted on Instagram. “I really wanted to work with her.”

He then recalled realizing “something was off” with Panettiere while filming, making a point to mention the actress’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Brian Hickerson’s presence when he would visit the A Breed Apart set.

“So I’m on set, and I get word from the movie’s security team who picked her up from the airport that something was off,” Furst continued. “I didn’t think much about it, and so I left set and I walked over to greet her and her boyfriend Brian. He opened the door. Hayden was incredibly sweet and gracious and excited to work, but she was not OK.”

“I’m not going to get into the details of why that was, but having worked on over 100 movies and seeing just about everything, it was pretty clear that she wasn’t okay and the energy in her room was pretty dark,” the director added.

Amid the investigation into Panettiere’s death, a police report said Hickerson and his brother were at the scene when the actress was pronounced dead by authorities. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office said that her cause and manner of death remain pending further investigation, and that there were no obvious signs of trauma. However, officials were reportedly heard discussing an “overdose” and “cardiac arrest” on the 911 call at the time of her death.

Panettiere had been open about her struggles with alcohol and opioid addiction, further detailing her experiences in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, released earlier this year. In the book, she also detailed physical abuse by Hickerson.

The actress’ mother, Lesley Vogel, also recently broke her silence on her daughter’s death, criticizing Hickerson, saying, “This person in her life that we have been trying to get rid of for quite some time was with her at her death and that was Brian Hickerson.”

In Furst’s Instagram video, the director added that he “believed she was getting better” and that he and Panettiere “talked about doing another picture together recently, which is what makes this shitty news hit even harder.”

For Keke Palmer, the microdrama isn’t just another digital format. It’s a way to make the kind of comedy she’s been trying to bring back to Hollywood on her own terms.

The multi-hyphenate entertainer has spent years building Lady Miss Jacqueline, the larger-than-life Southern belle she created for her 2016 digital sketch series “Southern Belle Insults,” into a character with a life beyond social media. Now, Palmer is using the bite-sized format to push the character into a more highly produced format, while giving herself a platform to showcase the character work she says traditional Hollywood has not always offered.

“Microdramas take what we love about over-the-top soap operas and deliver endless histrionic moments, and that is right up Lady Miss Jacqueline’s alley!” Palmer said in an email Q&A with TheWrap. “Lady Miss Jacqueline has gone through multiple husbands and hostile takeovers. She is a walking soap opera.”

Palmer expanded her digital series into an Audible original project, featuring voice acting from Sheryl Lee Ralph, Audra McDonald and Danielle Brooks, to name a few. 

In promotion for her latest original “The Weddings of Lady Miss Jacqueline,” Palmer decided to create a three-part microseries “Southern Belle Insults: The Pre-Wedding Shenanigans of Lady Miss Jacqueline.”

The series rolled out on Audible and Palmer’s social channels starting Monday. Viewers will see Lady Miss in a pickle as she wakes up on her wedding day with several suitors (who are not her husband) in her bedroom. 

“The ‘Burbs” star considers herself, and specifically her character work with Lady Miss, as a “throwback to the old vaudeville days.” The microseries allowed her to play within a genre on a tight timetable while still feeling creatively fulfilled. 

“I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg and reruns of ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ with my grandmother, and I was truly fascinated with all the characters these women created and shared with the world,” she explained.  

“I wanted to do that kind of comedy as well. However, the traditional doors of Hollywood were not necessarily opening for me in this genre,” she said. “If I wanted to show people what I could do in comedy, I had to produce the content myself.”

The camp performance she delivers as the Southern belle is derived from her comedy inspirations. She even emulated her variety show heroes by performing standup as the character on “The Tonight Show” earlier this summer. 

“I kept going back to the original ‘Tonight Show’ with Johnny Carson and even Jay Leno, and how they would have comedians sometimes come out in character and do a whole routine as their alter ego, like the fabulous Flip Wilson as Geraldine, or Ruth Buzzi as the hilariously funny Gladys Ormphby,” she said. “It was scary, but in my heart, I am a throwback to the old vaudeville days, and doing it live was what they did.”

The microdrama series featured appearances from “Real Housewives of Atlanta” alum Phaedra Parks, comedy creator Zachariah Porter and E! News’ Justin Sylvester. 

As for the future of microdramas in Hollywood, Palmer said she sees a real opportunity for the short episodic format to lean into successful brand partnerships and proof of concept storytelling.

“The condensed format and shooting style allow for exciting storytelling possibilities without a long-term commitment, which I like,” Palmer said of the format’s turnaround time. “Also, the opportunity to launch and expand IP alongside promoting established properties within this space is only going to continue to grow, in my opinion.”

“Southern Belle Insults: The Pre-Wedding Shenanigans of Lady Miss Jacqueline” was produced in collaboration with Max Wyeth and Audible. The three-episode series was directed by Kristen Brancaccio, who directed Hoorae’s TikTok microdrama “Screen Time.”