White House defends Trump's $45,000 gifts to aides amid ethics scrutiny

The White House has defended President Donald Trump’s $45,000 gifts to his close aide Natalie Harp and other young women in the administration.

Harp, 35, along with the president’s 31-year-old communications adviser Margo Martin and his 26-year-old executive assistant Chamberlain Harris, each received $45,000, which they listed on public financial disclosures as “Cash Gift for Holidays,” The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Not only do the more-than-generous gifts pose ethics concerns, but they also add to the scrutiny Harp has faced in recent weeks over her unusually personal relationship with the president.

But a White House official dismissed any claims that Trump’s gift-giving crosses any legal boundaries, telling The Independent, “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.

“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.”

The public started to pay closer attention to Harp after the Post reported last month that she was one of the select few who got to ride with Trump in a catering truck that transported them from Air Force One to a smaller jet amid a potential assassination threat from Iran while they were leaving the NATO summit in Turkey.

The move, which seemed straight out of an action movie, used Air Force One, which carried unsuspecting D.C. reporters and senior Trump officials, as a decoy.

Harp — nicknamed the “Human Printer” for printing physical copies of social media posts and news clippings for the president while on the go — has reportedly slept in the locker room at Trump’s Bedminster golf club and even hopped in the trunk of an SUV just to stay close to him.

Harp wrote in a letter to Trump in 2023, “You are all that matters to me,” The New York Times reported shortly after the president’s 2024 election victory in an article announcing that she would follow him to the White House after joining his team in 2022.

Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said Trump’s $45,000 gifts to Harp and his other aides appear to violate a law that bans the supplementation of federal workers’ salaries from anyone but the government.

“He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House,” Painter, a critic of Trump, told the Post in Tuesday's article. “You can’t do that.”

Don Fox, former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics under the Obama administration, said it remains unclear that Trump’s gifts violated this law, but emphasized how unusual the situation was.

“A large cash gift to a subordinate is “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned,” Fox told the Post. “This just doesn’t happen.”