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Joyce Carol Oates Compares Natalie Harp’s Trump Devotion to Charles Manson Girls

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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.”

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Rosie O’Donnell Name-Drops Natalie Harp in Trump Jab on ‘Kimmel’

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Rosie O’Donnell very subtly touched on the fascination surrounding Donald Trump’s relationship with White House assistant Natalie Harp, referencing both of them at the start of her monologue.

Specifically, O’Donnell kicked off Wednesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” which she is guest hosting for the week, with a special message for the president.

“A special hello to those of you watching from home and from the White House,” O’Donnell said at the top of the show. “But I do have some bad news for President Petty Roosevelt. That’s all I’m going to say about you tonight, sweetheart.”

After a round of applause from the studio audience, O’Donnell let one more zinger rip, noting, “You got to realize it’s time to hang up your wig and let Natalie tuck you in.”

This comment prompted a big reaction from the crowd, who could be heard gasping in delight while erupting into applause.

She added: “Time to go nighty night.”

Watch O’Donnell’s Trump comments and the rest of her monologue below. Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

O’Donnell’s mention of Harp came amid growing questions about Trump’s dynamic with the White House staffer. The drama started when Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) suggested in a speech Sunday that Trump simply “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

While conservative media responded by blasting Ossoff’s remark as misogynistic and problematic, liberal media capitalized on the moment to dig deeper into Trump and Harp’s bond.

For instance, CNN’s Erin Burnett had Harp’s estranged brother Preston on “OutFront” Tuesday, where he suggested his sister may have an “unhealthy obsession” with the president after learning she reportedly jumped into an SUV trunk to remain close to Trump.

The conversation drew ire from Trump’s son Eric, who blasted the interview as “absolute trash.”

“Natalie is an incredible young woman — a cancer survivor, a genuinely good person, and arguably one of the hardest-working people in the White House,” he added. “She’s deeply committed to my father, to her job, and to this country. From the looks of it, she got all the family genetics. @CNN continues to be a joke.”

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Fallon Pokes Fun at Trump’s Friendship With Kim Jong Un: ‘Their Bellies Bump’

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Jimmy Fallon took aim at Donald Trump’s friendship with Kim Jong Un during Wednesday’s monologue after the president said he plans to meet with the North Korean leader soon.

“Well, guys, today, President Trump announced that later this year he expects to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first time since 2019,” Fallon started off at the start of Wednesday’s broadcast of the “Tonight Show.” “Man, you know you’re depressed when you’re texting an old hookup from seven years ago.”

After holding for a laugh, Fallon joked that Trump and Kim “could meet in November,” but that it all depended on “how their couple’s Halloween costume goes.” Fallon then did his best Trump impression, quipping to the crowd, “I’m chips. He’s guacamole.”

The late night host then drew the audience’s attention to a photo from the last time Trump and Kim met. In the image, the two leaders are seen shaking hands, with their stomachs nearly touching during the friendly moment.

Fallon couldn’t help but call out this tidbit, quipping to his studio audience, “I think it’s cute how their bellies bump like the two soon-to-be moms at lamaze class.”

This wasn’t the only jab Fallon made at Trump, as he called out the president for his latest update in the Iran War.

“Meanwhile, the big news this week is that Trump said that he’s no longer talking to Iran,” Fallon shared. “After months of negotiations, he announced that they’re not speaking. Check out what happened on his last call with the Ayatollah.”

The “Tonight Show” editors then cut to a mock scene, in which a parodied version of Trump attempted (and failed) to give Iran’s leader the silent treatment.

Watch the bit play out in Fallon’s monologue footage above.

“The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET on NBC.

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Naomi Watts to Receive Zurich Fest Golden Eye Award

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The Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) will honor two-time Oscar nominee Naomi Watts this year with a Golden Eye Award for her performance in Ben Shirinian’s The Housewife.

In the ’60s-set drama, based on a true-story, a young New York Times journalist, played by Tye Sheridan, tracks down a man he suspects of being a Nazi officer living secretly in Queens (Luke Evans). But when the reporter befriends the suspect’s elegant and enigmatic wife (Watts), the implications of his investigation become much more unsettling.

The Housewife will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival before heading to Zurich. Watts will accept her Golden Eye honor in person in Zurich on Sept. 26 and take part in a ZFF masterclass.

“Since her breakthrough in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts has been one of the most fascinating actresses of our time,” said Zurich Festival CEO Christian Jungen, announcing the honor on Thursday. “Her greatest performances thrive on the tension between glamour and darkness, between what a character reveals and what she conceals — making her the kind of character actress Hitchcock would have loved.”

In The Housewife, said Jungen, Watts “masters this ambiguity as an elegant and mysterious woman [and] delivers one of the most compelling performances of her career.”

Watts is a two-time Academy Award nominee, nominated for best actress in 2004 for her turn as a grieving mother in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams; and in 2013 for her role as a survivor of the 2004 tsunami in J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible. On the small screen, her performance as Baby Paley in the second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud earned her an Emmy nomination for best actress in a limited/anthology series or TV movie.

Previous winners of Zurich’s Golden Eye Award include Kristen Stewart, Jude Law, Benedict Cumberbatch and Dakota Johnson. The 2026 Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24 – Oct. 4.

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