The grubby spectacle of Trump handing a £33,000 gift to his favourite aide

Most of us would appreciate a token of appreciation from our boss, especially at Christmas. Even if we get a bonus from the organisation that employs us, a small present or a card for everyone on the team shows we’re valued by the boss themselves – who could object to something like that? Maybe that was the reasoning running through Donald Trump’s head when he decided to send some gifts to three members of his team, which – due to federal government transparency rules – have just been publicly disclosed. Where some bosses might buy a Toblerone for everyone on their staff, the President has gone his own way: he seems to have given $45,000 (£33,200) each to three of his team, and nothing to almost everyone else – at least according to disclosures so far. Shorts The three lucky recipients were Margo Martin, a White House communications adviser; Chamberlain Harris, a White House receptionist in Trump’s first term, who now helps oversee the President’s ballroom renovation; and – inevitably – Natalie Harp, Trump’s aide and close confidante, who was only just starting to drop out of the headlines. (Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office operations, received a $20,000/£14,755 gift.) Let’s be honest: three gifts of $45,000 is nothing to Trump, a billionaire who has dramatically increased his own net worth and that of his family during the time he’s been in office. But to each of the three women receiving the “gifts”, it represents almost four months of their salary. Harp, Martin and Harris make $150,000 (£110,669) annually while Nauta earns $175,000 (£129,114) a year, the White House’s salary disclosure report to Congress said. That would be a distinctly weird gift for any boss to give to members of their team – especially when they manage a huge team and singled out mainly a handful of women to be the subjects of his generosity. Trump has always liked to cultivate an image of himself as a benevolent rich man, often promising lavish sums to charitable causes while on camera during The Apprentice (sums which, it later emerged, were never once shown to have come from Trump’s own pocket). White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, then press secretary Karoline Leavitt, communications adviser Margo Martin and Harp. The latter two have recieved almost four months’ salary as a gift from the President (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty) But these gifts will look different to some people, coming as they do from a man who used to operate the Miss Universe Organisation, and who has a documented history of crossing women’s boundaries. Others may be concerned to see federal employees – whose loyalty is supposed to be to the US and its citizens, not the president personally – festooned with personal largesse. Others, possibly including First Lady Melania, may simply raise an eyebrow to see yet another level of weirdness and compromise added to Trump’s already complex relationship with Natalie Harp, the aide who wrote the President devotional notes allegedly reading, “you are all that matters to me”, who ran alongside his golf carts rather than leave him to play without her, and rode along in the boot of a car instead of face the prospect of travelling separately. The White House insists that there is nothing unusual about Trump’s gifting. “The President has a long-standing practise of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit,” it said in a statement, which later went on to explain that “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’s team are caught between what federal ethics rules require, and what looks straightforwardly weird to any outside observer. Isn’t it weird for any boss – let alone the President of the United States – to give tens of thousands of dollars to three of his employees, supposedly for reasons that have nothing to do with work? Whatever the actual intent behind Trump’s gifts, they serve to represent yet another way Trump is turning himself into an American king – with the White House staff as his royal court, and Mar-a-Lago increasingly resembling Versailles. Trump is even gluing elaborate gold decorations onto everything that moves to match that aesthetic. We mostly remember Versailles today as a lavish and beautiful – if over-elaborate – building. But at the time it had political intent: the French kings were intentionally pulling their court away from the rest of society, where they could be constantly monitored, and where their prospects relied entirely on their relations with the king himself. In the world of courtly politics, lavish gifts showed who was in favour, and what kind of behaviour the king was looking for from everyone else. Looked at through that lens, the fourth gift from Trump to Walt Nauta, the long-time aide who was for a time charged in connection to Trump’s classified documents case, might also raise eyebrows. The charges were dropped by the US special counsel after Trump won the 2024 election because of Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Then last year an appeals court granted a request by prosecutors to drop the case. Versailles was a gilded cage, but it was one that shut off not just the French king, but everyone with access to him, from the outside world. They grew increasingly unaware of the problems and mounting misery of the country they led – which in time led to the spectacular ructions of the French Revolution. Trump and his courtiers might be enjoying, for now, their recreation of Versailles. But they might do well to bear in mind how that ended the first time around.