Natalie Harp rarely strays more than a few feet from Donald Trump. The 35-year-old former One America News host, who joined his team in 2022, is known around the West Wing as the “human printer,” trailing the president with a portable printer so he can hold paper copies of news stories and social media posts. That closeness has drawn scrutiny before, and now it comes with a dollar figure attached.
The Daily Mail reports that newly disclosed financial records show Trump gave Harp $45,000 as a holiday gift. Two other female aides, Chamberlain Harris, 26, and Margo Martin, 31, each received the same amount, bringing the total for the three women to $135,000.
Each disclosure reportedly listed Trump as the source and described the money as a “cash gift for the holidays.” All three already earn $150,000 salaries, meaning the gift alone works out to roughly 30 percent of a year’s pay.
Harp wasn’t the only aide to get cash
A White House spokesman defended the payments as personal, not official business. “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 spokesman told Politico, per the Daily Mail. “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.”
Walt Nauta, Oval Office operations director and Trump’s longtime valet, reportedly received a separate $20,000 gift, according to his own disclosure. He was also among the handful of aides who stayed with Trump when he quietly switched to a decoy jet in Turkey this summer over an Iranian assassination threat.
Cabinet officials including Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent remained on the original plane, while Harp was among those who traveled with Trump. Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff later cited the detail when he told a rally the president would rather “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” than tend to his job.
Just how close Harp is to Trump has surfaced in more personal ways too, including a series of letters she wrote him in 2023, detailed by her own brother in a separate account of her attachment to the president. In one, Harp told him, “You are all that matters to me,” and elsewhere called him her “Guardian and Protector in this Life,” according to letters reviewed by the New York Times. Trump has spoken about her in similar terms, telling people in 2023 that Harp was the only one on his team who genuinely cared about him: “All of you will go off and make money … she’ll never leave me.”
Reactions to the story have run in a few different directions. One reader saw nothing unusual in it at all, writing, “Trump caught being generous, the horror!!” Another was less forgiving of the official explanation, arguing it amounts to “small money for acting as Trump’s conduit to a warped reality where he isn’t the worst president ever.” A third zeroed in on where the money actually came from, saying, “If this was taxpayer money, then it needs to be investigated immediately. If this came out of his own pocket, then that’s a different matter completely.”
For now, the White House maintains the gifts were personal and had nothing to do with the women’s official duties. Whether the payments raise an ethical issue remains open to interpretation, with no confirmed violation established in the reporting.
Published: Sep 10, 2026 08:10 am