1. Munchausen?

The Trump-Harp relationship turns out to be even weirder than we already knew.

Let’s jump back to the beginning—the very beginning—with the story Harp used to catch Donald Trump’s attention.

Last week the Daily Beast unearthed a video essay Harp recorded circa 2017. (She would have been in her mid-twenties at the time.) In the 96-second video, Harp narrates a montage of still photos explaining how Donald Trump saved her life. She claims that on November 9, 2015 she was the victim of “medical error” when she was “accidentally infused with sterile water.”

I went into hemorrhagic shock, losing 100 percent of the average person’s blood platelets, but only 30 percent of my own. Thanks to a rare blood condition, I became the only survivor of sterile water infusion. But today I have cancer and chronic pain. I’ve had to pay my own medical bills, been denied appointments, prescribed opioids, given access to life-ending drugs, and every problem could be traced back to politics.

Then, miraculously, Harp’s video transitions to Donald Trump speaking exactly one year later, on November 9, 2016, saying that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

The video closes with Harp saying, “The elites thought they held the Trump card. But they didn’t count on Donald Trump. Like I did.” At the end of the video there’s a title card with the name of the video (“The Forgotten”) and the cast of the production. “Natalie J. Harp, MBA” is identified as playing “The Patient.”

In June 2019 Harp published an essay on LinkedIn that took elements of this story and did some more worldbuilding:

Guys, I don’t make promises idly so trust me when I say: You do NOT want to miss the rest of this. The story will blow your mind...