Who among us hasn’t been fascinated with the relationship between Donald Trump andNatalie Harp? Well, at least those of us who are obsessed with politics and palace intrigue.
Why, only this week their relationship facedrenewed scrutiny following a Nebraska rally where onlookers criticized Trump for leering at Harp. He said that Harp was a “perfect person.” He’s also said that AI should be renamed SI for “super intelligence.”
Trump’s “perfect person” is prime for a clash with “super intelligence.”
Harp, for those who need an introduction, is the aide frequently spotted trailing Trump with a portable printer. She is tasked with scouring the internet for positive news clippings and physically handing the hard copies to her lazy, self-obsessed, bulbous boss.
She’s earned the infamous nickname “The Human Printer.” Her highly unusual role is built entirely around managing a fluffy information flow and curating an emotional cushion of pure praise for the insecure dictator. She may have other secret duties, which seem to be heavily guarded.
But be warned, Ms. Harp, and Donald! As tech companies race to automate white-collar professions, Harp’s daily workflow stands out as perhaps the most perfect candidate for total AI automation.
As a side note — and not having much to do with anything at all — I thought I’d add that millions ofpeople use apps like Replika, Character.AI, Chai AI, and Nomi to form romantic and emotional relationships with AI personas. So “perfect people,” so to speak, can be AI’d too. But I digress.
Back to AI as a “human printer” and sifter alternative. At its core, the job of a media filter is a series of basic data-processing steps. As a former PR guy, when we’d make an announcement, we would have the lowest person on the team totem pole scan the “interwebs” for all the placements, and then put them in an Excel spreadsheet and label the sentiment of each story we placed as positive, negative, or neutral.
Now, AI can do this in seconds, finding the stories and determining the sentiment. What took the most junior person days to do can now be done in minutes. If Harp’s job is to scrape the news and social media, well, in theory, there would be no need for Natalie, since AI can easily and more efficiently take over.
To replace the "Human Printer" with an AI pipeline, an engineer would only need to connect an Advanced Language Model (LLM) — something like ChatGPT — to a standard RSS feed. In even simpler terms: instead of having a human manually copy, format, or print out incoming articles or updates, a smart text-based AI can be plugged directly into the website's automatic update stream to handle the job automatically.
Again, we’d have the junior person physically print out each story that the PR team got placed in a media outlet for hard copies; unfortunately, that task, too, can be turned over to AI and done within minutes.
All told, AI does it all without human boredom, mistakes, lapses in judgment, and, most of all, a salary. And here’s the kicker: Harp earns an annual salary of$150,000 in her official role as Special Assistant and Executive Assistant to President Donald Trump. Her primary function, so far as we know? Scanning the internet for narcissistic news and printing out ego-boosting fluff. If Elon Musk is again called upon to look for places to slash government waste with DOGE, I have a stellar suggestion for his very first cut.
The irony, of course, is that the political world already relies on AI to generate much of its viral content. Trump is the king. Hissocial media feeds frequently feature wacky, surreal, machine-generated imagery of himself as Jesus, as George Washington, and as a Space Force Commander, among other outlandish depictions.
Removing Harp from the equation isn't just efficient; it completely matches how fake modern politics has become, and I don’t mean Trump’s constant cry of “fake news.” Now, a computer creates the image, humans on the internet react to it, an algorithm aggregates the praise, and a machine prints it out. Nothing real about that.
Trump doesn’t need Natalie to do this. AI can spit these out in seconds for him. AI can even schedule the Truth Social posts for him and provide him with automatic data behind the clicks and sentiment of comments.
And before she would leave, Natalie can connect it all to a printer to spit it all out automatically. When Harp’s primary job is to print out the positive public reactions to those very same AI graphics, her “perfect person” becomes an unnecessary middleman in a machine-to-machine feedback loop.
And if that isn’t super intelligence, I don’t know what is.
Furthermore, outsourcing this role to a literal machine eliminates the natural flaws of human gatekeeping. Human assistants, no matter how loyal, operate with emotional biases and career ambitions that can alter how they filter information. Mmm, does that sound like anyone you know?
AI, by contrast, is completely indifferent. It doesn't care about internal optics or palace intrigue; it simply executes its code to deliver unadulterated reassurance on a 24-hour cycle.
This is particularly relevant to Harp. Her volatile temperament and unchecked influence have been well documented, and increasingly draw skeptical scrutiny, raising questions about her presence near the Oval Office. Ithas been reported that she has a chaotic and erratic operational style, epitomized by an alleged lobby screaming match where Harp ultimately resorted toriding in the trunk of an SUV just to secure her spot in a court motorcade near dictator Donald.
Her influence worries Trump advisors, who, according toThe New York Times, described her as "poisonous." When a top aide’s primary function is to appease the boss, then all bets fly out the window.
If the tech industry wants a real-world example of AI's power, what Harp does is a perfect example. Replacing her with software does more than cut down on printing costs, travel expenses, and obsessive behavior. It would also squash all the scuttlebutt around Harp’s relationship with her boss.