Donald Trump gave sizable holiday gifts to four White House aides, according to new financial disclosures released by the administration.
The gifts of $45,000 each to executive assistant Natalie Harp, communications adviser Margo Martin, and deputy director of Oval Office operations Chamberlain Harris as well as a $20,000 gift for director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta were noted in the staffers’ annual financial disclosure forms that were published by the administration last week. Harp, Martin and Harris make $150,000 annually and Nauta is paid $175,000 a year, according to the White House’s salary disclosure report to Congress.
A White House official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said 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.”
The founders didn’t really give the Presidency that many powers, things just kinda devolved that way over the years because Congress didn’t want to make tough votes, e.g. the Vietnam war wasn’t ever technically a war because Congress didn’t want to own it by declaring one, so they just told Eisenhower/Kennedy/LBJ/Nixon to figure it out for them with a bunch of vaguely worded resolutions and lots of military funding in budgets.
Also, it is the founders’ fault that they gave us a system with an undemocratic Senate where Wyoming gets as many votes as California that distorts everything in our politics because they wanted to protect the little state government fiefdoms they’d made for themselves.