US President Donald Trump gave $45 thousand in cash to his assistant Natalie Harp and two other White House employees, writes The Washington Post (WP) citing their financial statements. According to the annual report before Congress, each of the women receives $150,000 a year in the White House, so the gift amounted to almost a third of their annual salaries.
In addition to 35-year-old Harp, 31-year-old communications adviser Margot Martin and 26-year-old White House aide Chamberlain Harris reported receiving $45,000 from Trump in their financial statements. All three women listed the payments as “cash gifts for the holidays.”
As RTVI reported, Natalie Harp works as Trump’s executive assistant. In the White House, she is nicknamed the “human printer”: she constantly accompanies the president and prints out media publications and posts on social networks for him, since the head of state prefers to read them on paper. According to several senators, Harp plays an important role in the president's inner circle. She handles both domestic issues and sensitive international affairs and content management on Trump's social networks.
In August 2026, Harp became the center of media attention. She was part of a small group of close aides that Trump took with him on a secret trip after the NATO summit in Turkey, when the president quietly changed planes for security reasons. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth was also with him.
Among those accompanying Trump was Oval Office Director of Operations Walt Nauta. He earns $175,000 a year and also reported a $20,000 gift from the president on his financial return.
Nauta, who previously worked as Trump's valet, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos Deoliveira were indicted along with Trump in the 2023 secret documents case, the Associated Press (AP) adds. Investigators alleged that they were trying to obstruct an investigation into the storage of classified documents that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago after the end of his first presidential term. In 2024, a judge dismissed the case, ruling that special prosecutor Jack Smith had been improperly appointed.
Martin is a key member of the White House communications team and produces videos featuring Trump to post on social media. During the first Republican administration, she worked as an assistant press secretary, and after Trump left the White House, she continued to work for him in Florida, CBS News clarifies.
Harris began her White House career during Trump's first term and became known as the “receptionist of the United States” in the final months of his administration. After Trump left the presidency, she continued to work as his executive assistant.
In February 2026, Trump appointed Harris to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that reviews major architectural projects in Washington. His oversight includes the White House Ballroom and Arlington Memorial Bridge projects.
“There are no other publicly known cases of US presidents paying large sums of money to White House staff. Government ethics experts said they were also unaware of other payments of this magnitude from a superior official to a subordinate government employee,” WP noted.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush and a Trump critic, told the outlet that the payments appeared to violate federal law that prohibits supplementing a federal employee's salary with payments from outside sources.
At the same time, former acting director of the US Office of Government Ethics (OGE) Don Fox told WP that from the available information it cannot be definitively concluded that the payments violate this prohibition. He said the situation would be more obvious if, for example, an employee was about to leave the government because of low pay, and Trump offered him money to make up the difference with earnings in the private sector. Still, Fox called such large gifts to subordinates “problematic” because they can make employees feel beholden to the president.
White House Assistant Press Secretary Davis Ingle told WP that the gifts “have nothing to do with the official duties of these individuals in the government” and are therefore “fully consistent with legal and ethical standards.”
“The president has a long tradition of giving Christmas gifts to people around him, including sometimes his staff and aides, both in government and during his time in the private sector,” Ingle said.
