Natalie Harp’s brother has spilled new details about her upbringing in California and what he described as their mother’s strict control over her life.
Preston Harp told the Los Angeles Times about his 35-year-old sister’s social isolation amid their mother’s conservative Christian homeschooling, which he said explains her intense devotion to 80-year-old President Donald Trump.
“My mom raised us as super conservative, and [Trump is] everything that she taught us to respect,” he told the Times.
He said that rather than socializing with kids her age, Harp mostly spent time by herself reading and playing with dolls or hanging around adults.
At the Baptist megachurch in San Diego County that they attended as children, Preston said, his sister sat with the adults instead of the youth group.
“There would be like skateboarding demos, there would be cool stuff going on, but my sister was just with all the grown-ups, and she preferred it,” he explained.
Their mother, Jill Harp, instituted a biblical education based on a curriculum from Bob Jones University Press, whose website says that “scripture serves as the blueprint for how we put together our textbooks so that every lesson begins with truth.”
“We were raised with the idea that America was God’s gift to the world and it’s the only place that people really live in freedom,” he explained.
But as Preston developed more progressive beliefs while growing up, he said his mother saw that as a threat to Harp.
“I wasn’t really allowed to be in her life,” he said. “If we ever talked on the phone, my mom was listening to everything we’d say, and they were talking on the phone together with me on speakerphone.”
Harp moved with her parents to Irvine, California, during her mid-20s, as her father, Robert Harp, worked at Biola University, a Christian private school.
There, the family lived in a private, gated community in the Woodbridge neighborhood, which fit the insular environment Jill sought to cultivate.
“My mom likes living in bubbles,” Preston told the newspaper.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for comment.
Trump’s fawning aide was thrust into the spotlight after Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff referenced her in a jab at the president earlier this month.
The Georgia senator said that Trump would much rather “travel with Natalie” and build his White House ballroom than perform his duties as the commander in chief, setting off a chain reaction of MAGA backlash over Ossoff’s mention of the president’s special assistant.
Harp, known as the “human printer” for printing physical copies of positive news stories for Trump, has written notes expressing her effusive affection for the president, whom she claims saved her life with his 2018 Right to Try Act.
The letters, first published in full by the Daily Beast, reveal that Harp called Trump her “Guardian and Protector” and said the president is “all that matters” to her.
Vic Verbalaitis