WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump gave sizable cash gifts to four White House staffers last year, including $45,000 to longtime aide Natalie Harp, according to financial disclosures released by his administration and reported Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, by the BBC.

Two other staff members received the same $45,000 figure as Harp: communications adviser Margo Martin and Chamberlain Harris, a White House aide who also serves as Trump’s executive assistant. Longtime aide and director of Oval Office Operations Walt Nauta received $22,000. The four gifts total $157,000 and are marked as a “cash gift for the holidays.”

No other White House staffer on the disclosure list declared gifts from the president, the BBC reported. Federal employees are prohibited from receiving outside compensation for their official duties — which is why the White House’s framing matters.

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,” a White House official told the BBC.
“The gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals’ official government duties, and are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards,” the official added.

The White House did not answer a separate BBC query on why the other 91 listed staff members — including other top aides and First Lady Melania Trump’s top advisers — did not receive gifts. The four recipients are among those widely considered closest to the president.

Who got the cash

Harp, 35, is among Trump’s longest-serving aides and is often trusted with typing his frequent Truth Social posts. She drew national attention last month after being named among a small group who stayed with Trump as he secretly swapped planes leaving Turkey.

Nauta, a Navy veteran and former White House military valet, was indicted alongside Trump in 2023 on charges tied to mishandled national security documents; that case was ultimately dismissed. Martin is known for documenting Trump’s activities on social media. Harris, 26, was appointed in February to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which oversees the White House ballroom and other Trump-directed projects in Washington.

Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor and director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University, told the BBC it is “not an easy call” whether the gifts were ethical. “If it were compensation, it’s not allowed,” she said. “Of course, that’s where the administration’s argument comes in, that it’s a social gift done out of friendship. Not compensation.”

Even if legal, she said, the gifts — alongside recent controversies involving prediction markets and cryptocurrencies — can feed “a generalised perception of really rampant conflicts of interest.” The BBC found no other known instances of a sitting U.S. president giving cash gifts to White House staffers; past presidents have typically handed out souvenirs or personal mementos.

Cash from the president to the aides who sit closest to him is either a harmless Christmas tradition or a soft form of personal patronage that ethics rules were written to police. The disclosure forms force that debate into public view. Whether Congress, inspectors general, or voters treat $157,000 in holiday envelopes as friendship or compensation is now a political question the paperwork cannot answer by itself.

Sources