An adviser to First Lady Melania Trump waved off the speculation swirling around President Donald Trump and his executive assistant, Natalie Harp, calling it gossip in an interview posted on X on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. The conversation came during a week in which Harp, 35, surfaced as one of four staffers who had taken cash gifts from the president.
Marc Beckman holds the title of exclusive senior adviser to Melania Trump, a private role rather than a government post. He spoke with Stella Escobedo, an anchor at One America News Network who also hosts her own program. Escobedo opened by saying mainstream outlets refuse to cover what Melania Trump has done in her husband’s second term and fixate instead on tabloid gossip about Harp, whom she described as a loyal, hardworking aide and a cancer survivor.
A Blast at the Liberal Media
“The liberal media is ridiculous,” Beckman said. Reporters know nothing about the first lady’s personal and private life, he added, and they will not hand his team airtime to lay out what he called her achievements during the 47th presidential administration and the 45th.
“What they need to do is look in the mirror because they’re all attacking this hardworking, very talented, very intelligent person in Natalie Harp,” he continued. Escobedo said Trump “helped get off-label treatment for and saved her life.” Beckman added: “And they are obsessed with the gossip about this first family. And I can tell you firsthand that it’s time for them to become journalists and stop looking at the gossip.” The anchor said the coverage never lets up and urged critics to move on. Beckman called the speculation “absolutely ridiculous” and said, “The media doesn’t know about the first family’s private life. Period.”
Four Aides, $155,000
Harp was not the only one to get money. Annual financial disclosure forms made public in early September, and first reported on Tuesday, September 8, show the president handed $45,000 each to Harp, communications adviser Margo Martin and Chamberlain Harris, deputy director of Oval Office operations. Walt Nauta, who directs Oval Office operations, received $20,000, putting the total at $155,000. The paperwork logs the money as a “cash gift for holidays,” handed over during last year’s holiday season. For Harp, the sum is roughly a third of her $150,000 taxpayer-funded salary.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said the gifts “have nothing to do with any of these individuals’ official government duties, and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.” The press office pointed to a longstanding practice of Christmas gifts for people in Trump’s orbit. Federal rules bar employees from accepting gifts from subordinates or from officials paid less than themselves, but subordinates are not barred from receiving gifts from superiors; Harp’s title is special assistant and executive assistant to the president. Ethics lawyers were unconvinced. Richard Painter, who served as White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush, said the gifts could run afoul of the federal prohibition on supplementing a federal salary. “A White House staffer is not your Fifth Avenue doorman,” he said. Don Fox, who once served as acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, called the payments troublesome.
The Aide Known as the Human Printer
Harp presented at One America News from 2020 to 2022 and has spent years in Trump’s orbit, turning up at the 80-year-old president’s side more and more often. She goes by the nickname “human printer,” which comes from the portable printer she hauls around so she can hand him printed articles.
The gift is hardly the only reason her proximity to the president has drawn scrutiny. In their book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write that Harp alarmed the Secret Service during the campaign, when she left adoring letters in Trump’s private quarters. One of them read, “You are all that matters to me.” That perceived closeness has fueled unfounded rumors of an affair, and the White House and its allies have angrily rejected them.
A Senator’s Jab and the Backlash
A bruising August exchange set up Beckman’s comments. Sen. Jon Ossoff pulled Harp’s name into a broadside on the president’s work ethic at an Atlanta campaign rally on Sunday, August 16: “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 “flying palace” line