Trump’s Mysterious $45,000 Cash Gift to Natalie Harp

The national gossip over Natalie Harp, President Donald Trump’s most devoted aide and “human printer,” has now reached the natural stage to which most stories closely associated with the president land: a glaring, potentially illegal ethics violation. According to financial disclosures released by the Trump administration, Trump gave Harp and two other White House staffers, Margo Martin and Chamberlain Harris, $45,000 as “Cash Gift for Holidays,” a highly unusual practice that appears to violate federal law prohibiting outside sources from offering supplemental income to federal employees. “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 White House said in a statement posted to social media. “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.” Trump indeed has a habit of dropping random wads of cash onto unsuspecting beneficiaries, from DoorDash drivers delivering his McDonald’s to undocumented workers at his golf resorts. It’s the kind of showy generosity that has a helluva lot more to do with the instant satisfaction the benefactor gets from looking like the big guy in the room than any actual magnanimity. But if gifting $45,000 to Harp feels like something else entirely, that’s because Harp is eerily, if not freakishly, close to the president. And we all know this now after MAGA freaked out over a small line Sen. Jon Ossoff tucked into a recent campaign speech: “While [Trump] fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” The subtext—that Harp’s near-constant presence around the president is the stuff of cult-like devotion—only works, of course, because of the slew of anecdotes demonstrating exactly that: a fierce, unrelenting love for Donald Trump. That includes Harp crediting him with saving her life after a cancer diagnosis, living in the locker room of his Bedminster golf course just to be closer to Trump, and stuffing herself into the trunk of an SUV to accompany the president after initially being denied a normal human seat. Which is to say, all behavior that not even $45,000 could get this writer to replicate, ever.