President Donald Trump gave cash gifts totalling $157,000 to four White House staffers last year, according to financial disclosure documents made public by his administration. Three of the recipients — executive assistant Natalie Harp, communications adviser Margo Martin, and White House aide Chamberlain Harris — each received $45,000, roughly equivalent to 30 percent of their $150,000 annual salaries. Walt Nauta, director of Oval Office Operations and a longtime Trump confidant, received $22,000 on top of his $175,000 annual salary. The payments, described in filings as "cash gifts for the holidays," are without known precedent for a sitting US president.

All four recipients are widely regarded as among the most trusted figures in Trump's inner circle. Harp, 35, has been dubbed Trump's "human printer" for her habit of supplying the president with printed copies of documents and posts; she was also among the small group of aides who accompanied him on a secret plane change during a security operation in Turkey earlier this year. Nauta, a US Navy veteran who served as a White House military valet during Trump's first term, was indicted alongside the president in 2023 on charges related to the mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — a case later dismissed. Martin is known for filming behind-the-scenes footage of the presidency for social media, while Harris, 26, was appointed earlier this year to the US Commission of Fine Arts, which oversees construction projects at and around the White House.

The White House has moved quickly to defend the payments, stating that Trump 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." Officials insist the gifts have "nothing to do" with the recipients' official duties and are "entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards." Federal law prohibits government employees from receiving outside compensation for their work, but the administration argues these were personal, social gifts — not compensation. One notable legal question left unresolved by the disclosure documents is whether the money came from Trump's personal funds or public resources.

Legal experts, however, are not fully convinced the matter is straightforward. Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor and ethics specialist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, told reporters that distinguishing a personal gift from compensation is "not an easy call." Even if the payments are ultimately found to be legal, she warned they could deepen a broader perception of conflicts of interest, particularly given recent controversies surrounding the president and cryptocurrency and prediction markets. Former government ethics officials who served under both Barack Obama and George W. Bush have described the cash gifts as unprecedented. While many presidents have given personal mementos to staff — Obama, for instance, gave a former press secretary a framed necktie — no other sitting president is known to have distributed cash in this manner. Of the 91 other White House staff members listed in the same disclosures, none declared any gifts from the president.