Just a reminder: No, President Donald Trump did not save Natalie Harp’s life.
As the president’s close relationship with his female aide has come under scrutiny, a litany of MAGA social media accounts have jumped to her defense. Notably, numerous accounts have claimed their relationship is nothing if not honorable—after all, Harp credits Trump’s 2018 Right to Try Act with saving her life.
In an emotional address at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Harp claimed that after she was diagnosed with stage 2 bone cancer, she was a beneficiary of Trump’s policy intended to give patients access to experimental medical treatments.
“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” Harp said. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”
But experts have long cast doubt on Harp’s supposedly heartwrenching story.
Harp claimed she received “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use,” but Trump’s Right to Try law only applies to drugs that have not been approved by the FDA. Healthcare providers were already allowed to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for off-label uses long before Trump ever entered office.
In reality, Trump’s Right to Try was a massive failure—a repackaging of the expanded access that patients already had with decreased federal oversight. The president’s claims that the program has saved thousands of lives couldn’t be further from the truth. The most recent report shows the policy supported access to only six drugs in 2025.
Years after helping him sell his lame duck policy, Harp is still glued to Trump’s side. After the president tapped his “human binkie” to join him on his secret flight out of Turkey last month, people are starting to suggest there may be more to the story—and the White House’s wild reaction did little to ease concerns.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used an anti-LGBTQ slur completely unprompted at an Iowa State Fair on Monday, referring to transgender people as “trannies.”
“At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies,” he said at a Salute to the Troops military fundraiser at the fair, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported. The event was initially supposed to be in March, but was delayed when two Iowa service members were killed in an Iranian airstrike that Hegseth downplayed at the time
“It is a day and night difference,” he continued. “Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness—the bedrock of what it means to be an American warrior—is the only focus of our department. Colorblind, gender-neutral, merit-based. That’s it.”
Transgender people have become a constant target of the right’s outrage machine. The Trump administration has made them the focus of many of its cultural attacks in the war on “woke,” casting trans people as an imminent threat to Western values even as they make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. adult population. That political disdain is embodied in perhaps no one more than Hegseth, who casually tosses out slurs and recently introduced mandatory testosterone screening for older soldiers.
Last year, President Trump signed an executive order banning transgender and nonbinary people from the military, calling them purveyors of “radical gender” ideologies that were “not honorable,” “truthful,” or “disciplined.” The Supreme Court upheld the order in May, though legal challenges continue in the lower courts.
“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” the order read—equating gender dysphoria with mental illness and moral deficiency, and assuming that your assigned gender at birth has something to do with how well you can fight a war.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is suing Texas Governor Greg Abbott to compel the extradition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Christian Castro, who faces charges of assault and falsely reporting a crime during the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year.
