President Donald Trump's executive assistant Natalie Harp disembarks Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, August 16, 2026. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
President Donald Trump is an outspoken supporter of AI — but that support is coming with a price on his personal life, particularly his controversial relationship with Natalie Harp.
Referring to a false image of Trump and Harp kissing, MS NOW's Kaivan Shroff reported on Sunday, "The image of Trump and Harp does not survive a close inspection. Snopes reported that the clearest version of the image was watermarked as having been edited with artificial intelligence tools. Harp’s hand in the image has six fingers."
Shroff added, "Debunking a claim when a falsehood spreads so quickly is already a challenge. Asking people to question what they have just seen with their own eyes is even harder. But Harp’s close relationship with Trump has been widely reported in recent weeks, including reverential letters, in which she calls him her 'Guardian and Protector in this Life,' and his $45,000 gift to her and two other aides. That was all the fuel the fake image needed to spread like wildfire. Its existence was consequential enough that it merited an official denial from the White House."
He continued, "No one in American politics has done more than Trump to make fake imagery a routine tool of political communication — and now, fittingly, it has been turned back on him."
Shroff then reviewed the history of misinformation in modern American politics, from the pre-AI lies about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden's refusal to spread AI slop to the various ways Trump has utilized AI to both promote his brand and denigrate his enemies. Now, with incidents like the fake image of him kissing Harp, the AI trend that Trump has capitalized on has boomeranged against him.
"After all, whether the Harp story or the next one that comes around, media outlets can publish fact-checks, the White House can offer denials and social media users can try to correct one another," Shroff wrote. "But a meaningful number of Americans will never unsee what they saw with their own eyes or read the debunking hours or days later. Trump has set the rules of the game on generative AI in our modern politics. At least for this round, he is losing. The rules need to change sooner rather than later. Maybe they finally will as more of the politicians who weaponize AI slop inevitably get burned by it themselves — and Trump has volunteered to go first."
Despite Trump being hoisted by his own AI petard, he has been a vigorous defender of the technology.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump posted on Truth Social earlier in September, “and the USA has that, in spades!”
He also accused critics of AI of being manipulated by the Chinese government.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump added. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
Trump has done his best to bury the story about his unusually close relationship with Harp. She reportedly is by his side as often or more so than most of his other staffers, constantly showering him with compliments, leaving him affectionate notes and printing out articles she wants him to read. When Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) briefly mentioned in August the fact that Trump allowed innocent people to be used as unknowing decoys during a reported possible assassination attempt while fleeing on a jet gifted to him by Qatar, Trump supporters immediately claimed Ossoff's attack on Harp was below the belt (even though he never explicitly accused them of having an affair).
“He didn't attack a young woman for doing her job,” Bryan Lanza, Communications Director for President Donald J. Trump's Transition Team, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt at the time. “That young woman, Natalie — she has parents who are probably appalled by Ossoff's behavior today, and by what he implied. So I think, you know, where we've seen the Democratic Party go is a race to the gutter.”
He added, “The Republican Party has sort of been there already — we've floated in that space. But now the Democratic Party, and like Ossoff, who's the leading potential frontrunner for the Democratic Party — people are cheering the fact that he maligned somebody who has sacrificed a significant amount of their livelihood to serve this country.”
Lanza concluded, “I think they're both the gutter, but that's gutter politics. That's where we are today. That's where we've been for a while. It's where we've landed. And that's where we're going to stay.”
Former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams laughed at Lanza's indication during that CNN segment.
“I love you, man, I appreciate that,” the laughing Williams said. “I just — it's a little rich, after nearly a decade of Donald Trump, for anyone in the United States to start pointing a finger at someone for rhetoric or language around, frankly, sex.”