Natalie Harp and the American Don (Juan)

“I see myself being lowered in your eyes and good opinion. That is the fear you see, because I never want to bring you anything but joy. I'm sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don't want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life [sic]…”

“I need to reunite my past self with my current into a better version who will make you proud. And please, when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more.”

Those are excerpts from letters written by Natalie Harp to Donald Trump, published this week by The Daily Beast.

The following is a letter written to Benito Mussolini by a young Italian woman, as rendered in Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book Strongmen:

Our eyes met. I told you of my admiration, devotion, revealed my feelings to you. ... Before your visit I was the unhappiest woman in the world. Stuck in a bad marriage, with a cold man.... I feared I would never know love in my life. Now I know that I love you... I understood that I had touched your heart from the heated way you looked at me just before I fainted.

Harp’s letters are intimate, obsessive, tinged with romance and a slavish devotion to the man currently laying waste to the American republic. They are the sign of someone who, if not in love, is undeniably taken with Trump in a way that goes beyond even the intensities of schoolgirl adoration.  As one commenter put it, her writing is “not a love letter, it’s a cult devotional.” The love question, at least in its physical dimension, strikes me as a superficial concern anyway. I agree with commentators like Jonathan V. Last that this is almost certainly not a sexual relationship. 

I have argued previously that the psychosexual unmooring of the American right is a central part of our descent into authoritarianism. The obsession with Trump himself has often veered into a set of lurid, fantastical projections. He is often depicted in MAGA fan art with bulging muscles, rippling pectorals, and a square jaw. As Ben-Ghiat notes in Strongmen, the sexualized fan worship of Trump is part of a long tradition of authoritarian rulers being held up as symbols of virility: 

Many strongmen boast of their virile powers. Bare-chested photographs advertise the fitness and potency of Mussolini and Putin. Gaddafi, Berlusconi, and Trump vaunt control of desirable women, the former by surrounding himself with attractive female bodyguards and nurses, the latter two with former models and beauty pageant queens.

But Harp is displaying something else here, something that doesn’t require intercourse to nevertheless be a submissive and sensuous display of fealty. She is, after all, making herself—her body, mind, and spirit—his. 

I’ve also asserted that a kind of oppressive and prurient body politics defines Trumpism. In that essay, I wrote, “What’s inescapable through all of this is the sense of the human form—particularly as a subject of violence or abuse—as a source of inextricably political and sexual excitement.”

Trump and Harp’s relationship appears from our current vantage point to mirror this kind of submission-domination politics. She is his, wants to be his, and he is sustained by her presence as a dutiful, fawning, perhaps slightly nurse-like attendee. Last has called Harp “cray-cray.” That seems fair enough, but she’s also a manifestation of more general maladies, the perversions of MAGA and the wider social degradations of a decade of Trumpism. 

Harp takes this to a metaphysical place. She offers Trump her whole self, her service and the whole of her thoughts. She chastises herself for being distracted by her father’s death and offers Trump the place of instructor and teacher, imploring him to dole out praise and punishment as he sees fit. This is not so different from what MAGA desires politically. It is not so far from when Tucker Carlson promised in October 2024 that America needed to be disciplined by Trump like a naughty child—specifically, like a little girl by her father. As Carlson put it:

When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl.’

This strikes me as hardly any different from Harp telling Trump “you have the absolute right to cuss me out,” because she knows that she might “deserve it.” Yes, Trump’s most devoted fans want Trump to dispense punishment against their enemies. But they also crave his discipline themselves because the populist-authoritarian relationship is at least partly libidinal. Whether any explicit sex is occurring, it’s the right that’s getting off over all this. 

Featured Image is Don Juan y el Comendador, by Francisco Goya