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Trump handed out six-figure holiday cash gifts to a handful of his fiercely devoted young female staffers who barely leave his side, and ethics experts believe the gifts may be illegal. Trump’s top advisers have effectively stopped trying to talk him out of his worst ideas because he simply won’t listen. MAGA merchandise store owners across the country are watching their sales plummet as everyone blames Trump for the sagging economy. And the president is lashing out after everyone exposed his 9/11 story of being carried out of rubble by first responders as bogus.
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New financial disclosures released last week show Donald Trump gave $45,000 cash gifts to three of his young, intensely devoted female staffers. The payments may be a direct violation of federal law.
Natalie Harp, Margo Martin, and Chamberlain Harris each got the gift, which they labeled as “Cash Gift for Holidays” on their financial disclosure forms. But $45,000 is a lot more than most people’s Christmas bonuses. That’s roughly a third of the $150,000 salary each woman earns as a White House staffer.
Richard Painter, who was President George W. Bush’s top ethics lawyer, said the money appears to be illegal under a federal statute that prohibits outside sources from topping off a federal worker’s taxpayer salary.
According to Painter, Trump is trying to make it easier for the three women to keep working for him by artificially inflating their salaries. The law makes it clear he’s not allowed to do that.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended the gifts, saying Trump has always given holiday bonuses to people in his inner circle and that the money was gifted outside of those staffers’ official duties.
But Painter said there’s a big difference between giving a generous tip to the doorman at your apartment building and handing tens of thousands of dollars to an employee who reports directly to you.
35 year-old Natalie Harp’s name has recently dominated the headlines. She’s known as “the human printer” for her propensity to follow Trump around with a portable printer to constantly hand him physical copies of flattering news articles and social media posts. She was also one of the few White House aides who was with Trump when Secret Service smuggled him on a catering truck to a military jet while the actual Air Force One jet carrying top Cabinet officials served as a decoy amid an assassination threat from Iran.
Trump staffer Walt Nauta also got a gift, albeit a slightly smaller one of just $20,000. He’s the former Trump body man who got indicted alongside the president in Jack Smith’s classified documents case for allegedly helping Trump hide boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Don Fox, who is the former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, said he’s never seen anything like this during his entire career as a federal employee. He added the biggest holiday gift he ever remembers getting from one of his bosses was a fruit basket. He went on to say says even if the cash gifts don’t technically violate federal statute, they’re still problematic in that an aide who got a $45,000 gift from the president is not in any position to push back on him, and that they would at first feel “uncomfortable” and then “beholden.”
The statute Painter’s pointing to was passed by Congress in 1962, after President Kennedy warned lawmakers that public office was turning into a place where people went to get paid by private interests. The whole point was that a federal worker answers to the public and not to whoever’s writing the biggest check, and when that check comes from the president himself, the line between public servant and personal retainer simply disappears.
Meanwhile, many of the people closest to the president have apparently all but given up trying to talk him out of his worst impulses.
Top White House officials, Republican members of Congress, and wealthy GOP donors recently told Axios they feel like there’s really no point in trying to get through to Trump. They’ve watched him disregard sound advice so often that pushing back feels like a waste of time.
One longtime adviser anonymously told the outlet: “Why bother? He’s the boss.”
During the course of Trump’s second term, some aides quietly admitted that they’ve simply become worn down by Trump’s obstinance, while others have made peace with the fact that Trump is a lame duck who will be gone in two years, so they’re content to simply watch the clock tick down to zero.
So far, Trump’s second-term record is objectively dismal: he’s gotten us into an unwinnable war with Iran, imposed sweeping tariffs driving up the cost of goods across the country and is obsessed with building a White House ballroom whose cost continues to soar to new highs. The GOP fully expects the midterms to be especially brutal, with the possibility of losing control of both chambers of Congress.
Rather than try to change course, Trump’s answer to all of this has apparently been to double down on putting himself at the center of everything. He’s planning to spend millions on television ads celebrating his second term, hosting rallies on a near-daily basis and is now about to speak on both nights of a two-day midterm convention in Dallas, Texas that many Republicans are calling an expensive waste of time.
But at the same time, GOP strategists say a historically unpopular president whose approval numbers are in the toilet say that making him the core argument of the midterms is precisely the wrong move. But one unnamed advisor cautioned Americans against writing him off entirely, saying he still “wields enormous power in the party, in politics and culturally.”
Abraham Lincoln filled his cabinet with the very men who’d run against him for the nomination, because he wanted people in the room who’d look him in the eye and tell him he was wrong, and that habit is a big part of why the Union survived. A White House where nobody bothers to argue anymore isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a government run on one man’s impulses, which is precisely the thing the Framers built this whole system to prevent.
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Trump merchandise sales are plummeting at MAGA stores in multiple states. And store owners aren’t shy about pinning the blame on the president’s handling of the economy.
The Wall Street Journal recently spoke with retailers who sell pro-Trump memorabilia and found a lot of them are barely able to keep their doors open, while others have had to go out of business.
Donald “Whitey” Taylor, who owns Trump Town USA in a former church in Boones Mill, Virginia, told the paper his store used to make over $15,000 a day back in 2024. Right now he’s only pulling in around $1,500 a day. He said high gas prices and persistent inflation mean he gets hardly any customers these days, and that today’s economy “is just not worth a crap anymore.”
Taylor hopes business will pick up once Trump leaves office in January 2029 and the MAGA faithful get nostalgic for when their favorite president was in office. But that’s a long time to wait for business to pick up.
The Trump Store in Manchester, Tennessee is one of the retailers that didn’t make it. One former worker said traffic in the shop slowed down to a mere 12 customers a day before the owner finally gave up and closed permanently.
Syracuse, New York-based sales rep Liz Hall said Trump merch sales had already been dropped off precipitously after the 2024 election, and then sputtered completely after he attacked Iran in February. She’s now getting radio silence from clients who used to blow up her phone constantly.
Even wholesalers who supply the stores are registering a notable lack of interest in Trump gear. Quan Ngo, who helps run a MAGA store supplier in Washington, D.C., said his firm is ordering a lot less Trump merchandise due to the decline in demand.
A recent Financial Times poll found Trump’s approval has stalled out at just 33 percent among registered voters. That’s the lowest number the paper has recorded for the president.
The last time a Republican president kept insisting prosperity was just around the corner while working people watched their wallets empty, Americans started naming their shantytowns after him and then threw him out in the 1932 landslide. Political loyalty has never been able to survive an empty bank account for long, and the people who bought the hats are now finding that out at the cash register.
Trump recently shared a dramatic tale about how he was rescued from rubble on 9/11 by two New York City firefighters who feared his building was about to collapse. But the president wasn’t actually anywhere near Ground Zero on the day of the attacks.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale said he heard nothing back from the White House when he asked for solid evidence or even basic details of the supposed rescue.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle notably didn’t provide details, but he did take time to attack the media for its scrutiny of the president’s claims. He also accused reporters of trying to twist a tribute to first responders into an attack on Trump, taking a sho at CNN’s reputation for good measure.
When the Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act in 2012, it said the government can’t jail a man for lying about his medals because the answer to a false statement is a true one, spoken out loud. That’s exactly what Daniel Dale did here, and a president who responds to the truth by attacking the person who told it is showing you how much he fears the one check on power that no court and no Congress can take away.
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