Donald Trump’s fawning aide was spotted at the president’s side after it was revealed that she accepted a jaw-dropping cash gift from her boss.
Natalie Harp, 35, was photographed accompanying the president on Wednesday as he embarked on a trip to Dallas, Texas, for his two-day “Trump-a-Palooza” convention.
Harp was seen hauling a large black backpack as she boarded Marine One, which Trump had to remain aboard for several minutes after his Qatari-gifted Air Force One experienced an issue with its emergency evacuation slide.
The Washington Post reported late Tuesday night that Harp, who serves as both a special and executive assistant to the president, received a $45,000 cash gift from Trump as a “Cash Gift for Holidays,” citing financial disclosures the administration released last week.
The president’s “human printer” earns $150,000 annually in her White House role, making the cash gift nearly a third of her salary.
The disclosures showed that two other young female aides, Margo Martin, 31, and Chamberlain Harris, 26, also received equivalent cash gifts, while Trump’s director of Oval Office operations, Walt Nauta, received a $20,000 gift.
The White House did not respond to a previous request for comment from the Daily Beast on Harp’s cash gift, but White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Post that the gifts were legal and intended as Christmas presents.
“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,” Ingle, who makes $92,500 a year, 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.”
However, some ethics experts have questioned the legality of Trump’s gifts to his subordinates.
Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, told the Post that he compared the president’s gifts to “tipping the doorman on Fifth Avenue.”
“He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House. You can’t do that,” Painter said. “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.”
The Post reported that “it is unprecedented for a U.S. president to give employees large cash payments and that no other public instances of such behavior occurred in past administrations.
Former Office of Government Ethics acting director Don Fox concurred, explaining to the Post that a large payment from a president to one of their subordinate is “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned.”
Harp has become a major figure in Trump’s second administration, largely thanks to her apparent obsession with the president.
In letters first published in full by the Daily Beast, Harp praised her boss as her “Guardian and Protector in this Life” and said that she never wants to let him down.
“You are all that matters to me,” Harp wrote in one letter to Trump from 2023.
