At a rally inside the Choctaw Event Center in Durant, Okla., on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, President Donald Trump called his 31-year-old communications adviser, Margo Martin, onto the stage and spent close to two minutes praising her — telling the crowd she is a beautiful woman while his executive assistant, 35-year-old Natalie Harp, stood off to the side.
Trump, 80, was in Oklahoma after a quick trip to Texas to boost Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei. Harp was once again part of the traveling entourage, as was White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
A Two-Minute Tribute From the Stage
Trump said Martin, who grew up in Ada, Okla., “is known for a number of things,” then added, “I can’t mention one, because if I do, my political career will be over.”
He went there anyway. “You can never say that a woman is beautiful. If you say a woman is beautiful, that’s the end of your political career. But, I’ll say it anyway, she is a beautiful woman, inside and out,” he told the crowd, also calling the aide a social media “sensation.”
Martin regularly posts videos of the president on her own accounts, and Trump has previously called her “the most beautiful photographer in the world.” Fox News once mistook her for First Lady Melania Trump, and social media users have dubbed her “Fake Melania.”
The Racehorse Theory Resurfaces
Trump then gave Martin’s parents a shout-out: “I see why she’s good-looking, actually. You know, I believe in the racehorse theory. Fast horses, right? Great mom and dad.”
The president has argued before that humans are like racehorses and that genetics dictates who succeeds. When he raised the idea with a mostly white crowd in Minnesota in 2020, Jewish leaders pointed out its links to the notion that selective breeding can improve a country’s performance — a concept the Nazis used in pursuit of racial purity goals. Rabbi Mark Diamond, a senior lecturer on Jewish studies at Loyola Marymount University, condemned the remarks at the time and said the selective breeding theory sat at the heart of Nazi ideology. Trump made the same complaint about no longer being allowed to call women beautiful during a Women’s History Month speech in March.
Harp’s Place in Trump’s Orbit
Harp earns a taxpayer-funded $150,000 a year as special assistant and executive assistant to the president, and picked up the “human printer” nickname by fetching merchandise, running Google searches, printing out stories from right-wing websites and suggesting Truth Social posts. Photographs taken just outside the Oval Office on Sept. 29 showed a sour-faced Trump pointing a finger in her direction; the story behind the images was not clear. Days earlier, she was spotted holding up a laptop for him at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tenn., during the Tennessee Volunteers’ game against the Texas Longhorns.
A California native from a conservative Christian family, Harp credits Trump’s 2018 Right to Try Act with saving her life after stage 2 bone cancer. She spoke about it at the 2020 Republican National Convention, hosted a show at One America News Network after Trump’s 2020 loss promoting false claims that he had won the election, and left the network in 2022 to join his campaign. Her profile climbed again when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., 39, name-checked her at a campaign rally in August while mocking the president’s travel aboard the plane gifted by the emir of Qatar.
Scrutiny From Inside the Family
The criticism now includes a relative. “One thing that constantly mystifies me is the extent to which people on the right overlook just how creepy all of this is,” Mary Trump, the president’s 61-year-old niece, wrote in a Wednesday, Sept. 30 post on her Substack. She described Harp as a woman 45 years younger than the president who is with him practically around the clock, and questioned why Harp was among the handful of aides secretly moved with Trump in July from Air Force One onto a smaller military plane in Turkey after intelligence about a potential Iranian threat, while Cabinet members, other staff and journalists stayed aboard the larger aircraft.
White House communications director Steven Cheung responded: “Mary Trump is a stone-cold loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.” Financial records listed $45,000 payments described as a “Cash Gift for Holidays” to Harp, Martin and fellow aide Chamberlain Harris, 26 — just under one-third of each employee’s $150,000 salary.
Harp, Martin and Wiles were photographed boarding Air Force One for the Texas and Oklahoma swing, the opening stretch of a MAGA blitz that is set to take Trump to at least 17 states before the Nov. 3 midterm elections as Republicans fight to hold their control of Congress.
