Donald Trump gave Natalie Harp and two other young, female White House aides $45,000 cash gifts, bombshell financial disclosures reveal.
The 80-year-old president’s gifts to Harp, 35, Margo Martin, 31, and Chamberlain Harris, 26, were listed in the disclosures obtained by The Washington Post as “Cash Gift for Holidays.” The amount comprises just under one-third of each employee’s $150,000 salary.
Martin, who joined the Trump White House on the press side in 2019 and was his press secretary while he was out of office, is Trump’s communications adviser. Harris, who was also part of Trump’s first term as “receptionist of the United States,” is his executive assistant and sits on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which oversees construction of the White House ballroom.
Trump also gave Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office operations, $20,000, the documents show. Nauta, Trump’s co-defendant in the federal indictment over the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, earns $175,000 in his role.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Post the gifts were intended as Christmas presents and maintained they were legal.
“The President has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector,” he said. “The gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals’ official government duties, and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.”
Harp and Nauta were among the select few who accompanied Trump on his secret flight out of Turkey in July—a covert move that required first spending time in a catering truck.
Some ethics experts say the gifts may be illegal. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who served in the George W. Bush administration, cited a law against supplementing federal employees’ salaries from outside the government.
“He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House,” Painter told the Post. “You can’t do that.”
“It’s not like tipping the doorman on Fifth Avenue,” he added. “These are U.S. government employees. If you want a job where you get tips, you shouldn’t be working for the U.S. government.”
Don Fox, an acting director of the Office of Government Ethics in the Obama administration, told the publication that it was unclear whether any law was broken. Still, he said, “I would feel somewhere between really uncomfortable and then beholden to the person who gave me such a large gift.”
The Post notes that Trump’s payments to his aides are unprecedented, since experts couldn’t cite any other instance of payments of such a high amount going to subordinates in the federal government.
Harp has been known as Trump’s “human printer,” showing him stories, conducting internet searches for things he wants to hear, and helping him post on Truth Social. Her proximity to the president came under further scrutiny after the Daily Beast published two adoring letters she wrote him in 2023, either during or after she went along with Trump to Scotland and Ireland.
“You are all that matters to me,” Harp writes in one. “I don’t want to ever let you down.”
Also evident in Harp’s typed communications with Trump is the random capitalization of words—a longtime trait of the president’s social media posts. For instance, she calls Trump her “Guardian and Protector in this Life,” and in the same sentence mentions a “Cash Register.”
