According to financial disclosures released by the Trump administration and reviewed by The Washington Post, President Donald Trump personally handed $45,000 cash gifts to three young, loyal White House aides – executive assistant Natalie Harp among them.
On the paperwork, the payments carry a simple label: "Cash Gift for Holidays." That label undersells the scale – each $45,000 sum equals nearly a third of the $150,000 salary its recipient earns from the White House, per an annual report to Congress.
Former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who served under President George W. Bush and has since become a Trump critic, told The Washington Post the gifts likely run afoul of a federal law prohibiting outside supplementation of government salaries. Painter didn't mince words: "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."
The White House dismissed the report's unethical implications entirely, with spokesperson Davis Ingle insisting the gifts broke no rules.
Trump 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 told The Washington Post. He drew a hard line around the aides' official duties: "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." None of the three women responded to requests for comment.
Meet the "human printer." That's Harp's nickname inside the White House – 35 years old, rarely more than a few feet from Trump, carrying a portable device so she can hand him fresh hard copies of news and social media the moment he wants them. She's been under a brighter spotlight lately. The Washington Post reported last month that Harp was among the small group who rode with Trump aboard a catering truck – used to move him under concealment as he secretly swapped planes fleeing Turkey amid a suspected Iranian assassination plot.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) pounced days later. At a campaign rally, he mocked Trump's priorities, claiming the president would rather "travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace" – a barbed reference to the jet Qatar's royals gave Trump. The line landed hard: both the White House and conservative media pushed back, and Harp found herself facing even more scrutiny.
Communications adviser Margo Martin, 31, and White House aide Chamberlain Harris, 26, also each received $45,000 from Trump. Martin often positions herself closer to Trump than his own Secret Service detail while filming his day-to-day activities for social media, while Harris, whom Trump appointed in February to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts overseeing his ballroom project and other regional construction, serves as his executive assistant. A fourth aide got a smaller sum. Walt Nauta, who directs Oval Office operations and earns $175,000 a year, disclosed a $20,000 gift.
He too rode the Turkey catering truck. Nauta's Trump ties run deep – he was a first-term valet, then became a key witness and co-defendant when the Justice Department pursued the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case. A judge tossed those charges in 2024, ruling special counsel Jack Smith had been improperly appointed.
Nothing like this has happened before, according to The Washington Post's reporting: nN other US president is known to have given White House staff cash gifts this large, and ethics experts consulted said they'd never seen a comparable payment from a superior to a subordinate.
Painter frames the usual ethics worry differently. Typically, he said, the concern is a former employer trying to smooth a federal official's transition into government by sending extra money their way. A holiday gift from an employer to household help, he added, normally just counts as income. He wasn't gentle about it: "It's not like tipping the doorman on Fifth Avenue," Painter said. "These are US government employees. If you want a job where you get tips, you shouldn't be working for the US government."
Both sides of the transaction carry legal risk – giver and recipient alike are liable under the statute. Enforcement, though, is up to the Trump Justice Department, which could simply decline. The five-year statute of limitations still leaves room to act; Trump has just over two years left in office. Separate gift restrictions apply to federal employees too, designed to keep government decisions free of outside influence.
Don Fox has a different read. The former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics under Obama said available facts don't clearly prove a violation. A real breach, he explained, would look like this: an aide announces plans to quit for the private sector, citing an unlivable salary, and Trump responds with a gift designed to close that gap.
Regulators usually watch for gifts flowing upward – employees to superiors – worried about influence-buying. This is the reverse, and Fox says nobody planned for it: "not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned," he told The Washington Post. "This just doesn't happen." The most expensive gift Fox ever got from a superior, during his own federal career? A holiday fruit basket.
All four share a history with Trump that predates his second term. Harp, Martin, Harris and Nauta were part of the tight inner circle who worked for him in Florida between presidencies. Three of them – Harp, Martin and Harris – have built little career outside their work for Trump.
Harp's national profile began in 2019, with a LinkedIn post crediting a Trump-signed 2018 law – one expanding access to experimental treatments – with saving her life after a Stage 2 bone cancer diagnosis. Medical experts have since raised doubts about that claim. She told her story again at the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Before joining Trump's staff in 2022, she anchored at One America News, where she regularly repeated Trump's false claims about winning the 2020 election.
Martin's Trump-world career started in 2019 as a press assistant, and she kept working as his press secretary straight through Joe Biden's presidency. Harris took a different path, starting at the White House and earning the nickname "receptionist of the United States" during Trump's first term.
Nauta's story starts in Guam. He enlisted in the Navy in 2001, rising to senior chief culinary specialist by 2021 – military records confirm the rank. Already on White House staff, he caught Trump's attention and was promoted to valet, court records show. The role has a nickname of its own: "body man," someone who stays close enough to a politician to handle everything from snacks to scheduling.
One detail unites all four disclosure forms The Washington Post examined: none reported income or employment assets belonging to a spouse.
