We’re pretty sure we’ve found the human printer’s printer.
Natalie Harp is a former TV personality and current presidential executive assistant. She’s also what I guess you might call a rising star within the Trump White House.
She wasn’t a complete unknown before this month, but she became part of a big national story when publications including the Washington Post reported that she was one of the Trump staffers secretly shuffled off of Air Force One with the president in Turkey last month and spirited across an airport tarmac in a box intended for food. Harp rose to full celebrity status on Sunday thanks to a snide remark about her closeness to the president during a recent campaign speech by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, and the surprising amount of umbrage taken by the Trump side.
Of particular concern to Gizmodo as a tech publication, however, is Harp’s Epson WorkForce WF-110 Wireless Mobile Printer, a passable, if not ideal, tool for Harp’s apparent use case. We’re pretty sure that’s what she’s using in these frames.
According to a 2024 story in the New York Times, Harp is known by Trump’s staff as the “human printer” because she makes a habit of traveling with a printer along with a battery pack. Trump apparently prefers that any information he needs to read be printed out, and Harp reportedly obliges. Once, on a golf course in Scotland, according to the Times, she apparently “ran behind his cart to keep him up to date with positive stories and social media posts.”
When these factoids started circulating heavily earlier this week, they struck me as odd: why would she need a separate battery pack to charge a portable printer—meaning one with a battery of its own. Just what sort of printer are we talking about here? And she’s running around outdoors while schlepping all this?
I needed to know what her setup is. In recent press pool photos on Getty Images, you can clearly see that these days she’s hefting a massive Osprey tote, or maybe I should just call that thing a duffel bag. It’s colossal. What’s going on in there?
Fortunately, after some hunting, I discovered that in a few frames from a 2024 documentary series called The Art of the Surge: The Donald Trump Comeback, you can actually see Harp’s setup: the aforementioned Epson WorkForce WF-110, plugged into a MARBERO Portable Power Supply.
In one shot, it also looks like she has a separate phone battery bank—brand unknown—that she uses to charge her phone wirelessly, while also running a cord to her printer.
Gizmodo hasn’t reviewed the devices in Harp’s setup, and in fairness it seems like they’re getting the job done, but our main takeaway is that by sheer mass, this is way too much gear for what she’s doing with it.
Carrying around that entire MARBERO power supply is redundant bordering on bizarre. According to the Epson website, the WF-110 boasts an on-board battery that can be charged with USB or AC, but if you really need extra juice, Epson offers an extended battery that snaps on. According to Epson’s promo video, the printer with its extended battery form a tidy single unit that you can stick in your bag.
According to Amazon listings, the Epson extended battery weighs 0.55 pounds. A MARBERO power supply weighs about 2 pounds, 5 ounces. Harp likely also carries around paper and backup ink cartridges. And for whatever reason, she apparently also carries around a smaller battery bank exclusively for her phone. This stuff adds up.
So while the Epson WorkForce WF-110 is a good, full-color solution for professionals on the go, it’s also much bulkier than what I was expecting before I started this search. And bulk likely matters a great deal. Reporting on Harp’s lifestyle indicates that sneaking off in food containers and running around golf courses aren’t momentary deviations from normality.
According to a story last year in Vanity Fair, Harp’s duties require her to be able to scramble to the president’s side at a moment’s notice. She reportedly rejected the option to stay in maid’s quarters at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey when the president was housed there recently. A women’s locker room was closer to where Trump slept, so she reportedly slept there instead.
The nimbleness this job evidently requires makes even the relatively lightweight WF-110 seem like it would be a burden at 4.6 pounds, according to Amazon. And according to PC Mag, the WF-110 prints in black-and-white at a ho-hum 6.7 pages per minute, or a downright sluggish 3.5 pages per minute in color. That’s good for such a small printer, but need I remind you that our country is at war? Our president needs social media posts printed out, and he needs them fast. Millions of lives could be at stake.
So with that in mind, Harp should probably make the jump to a truly portable, ink-free, and blazingly fast thermal printer. I myself have not used one of these, but they’re impressive, and when I asked for a reputable option, my consumer tech colleague Kyle Barr pointed me to the Brother PJ-883.
Just look at this blistering speed:
There’s plenty more to say about the gear Harp has sprawled out on that table in a Mar-A-Lago conference room in the documentary. Her cord spaghetti is headache-inducing, and it’s not clear why she’s using a cord at all when her Epson has bluetooth. And I’m not sure if she’s aware that she could have left that MacBook back in her office (or locker room) and just printed X posts from her phone. You don’t always get an intuitive result when printing from a phone, so this part is understandable.
But Harp’s setup is, on the whole, a lot. It’s wild how much stuff she carries. She needs to offload and consolidate, or else next time the Trump Gang gets into one of its crazy scrapes—going over Niagara Falls in a barrel together?—how can she be sure everything will fit?
Gizmodo reached out to the White House to confirm that Harp owns and uses these specific devices. We also asked if Harp had upgraded at any point. We did not receive replies to our questions.
Read the full article here
