Donald Trump’s eyebrow-raising cash gift to his fawning aide could have come with strings attached, his longtime biographer suggested.
Appearing on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast, author Michael Wolff theorized that the president’s $45,000 “Cash Gift for Holidays” to his 35-year-old assistant Natalie Harp was not just out of the goodness of his heart.
“Why are they getting this money? It’s the classic rhetorical question,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles. “There isn’t an answer, except that I think I have an answer.”
“I know that in the past, in other situations, Trump has come up with amounts of money at certain moments when he felt that he was not... covered enough by the NDAs in place,” he continued, referring to nondisclosure agreements. “So essentially, he is buying a further NDA.”
“This is commonplace in business. You... sign an NDA because you’ve been given something,” the author added. “As a matter of fact, it’s hard to enforce an NDA when you have not been given something. It’s a transaction.”
Harp, who makes $150,000 a year as the president’s special and executive assistant, received a cash gift worth nearly a third of her salary, The Washington Post reported late Tuesday, citing financial disclosures released by the government.
Trump, 80, also paid out large sums to two other young aides: Margo Martin, 31, and Chamberlain Harris, 26. His director of Oval Office Operations, Walt Nauta, also received a $20,000 holiday gift.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Post that Trump “has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit,” but experts say a sitting president giving gifts of this magnitude to employees is unprecedented.
Wolff said Trump has used the NDA route before with others who had inside access to his “very small bubble,” and that Harp was no different. However, he said Trump’s presence in the White House complicated things.
The author said that though NDAs are common in government work, enforcing the contracts is “very problematic.”
“How do you enforce an NDA when you’re in a political situation?” he asked. “You’re essentially on the payroll of the United States government—the people’s payroll, you might say.”
Wolff added that he doesn’t know whether or not the cash gifts were paid out with taxpayer money.
“If this were a matter of getting... a transaction that got you an NDA, that would probably be relevant where the money comes from,” he said. “But I don’t know... This is my theory... of the case based on what he has done in the past.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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