Politics
Guilfoyle Spent Her Pre-Confirmation Weeks Fundraising, Just Not For Greece
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Kimberly Guilfoyle, the United States Ambassador to Greece and a person who has apparently never met a problem that couldn't be solved by calling a rich acquaintance, spent a portion of her pre-confirmation period privately soliciting donors to help retire her personal debts, according to reporting published this week.
The White House was informed. The president reacted.
"I just heard about it," Trump told reporters outside the White House on Friday. "Too bad."
He then boarded Air Force One to attend a political rally in Alabama, which is either a statement of priorities or the standard operating procedure, depending on how long you have been paying attention.
Guilfoyle, for her part, was confirmed as ambassador in February after a process that, in retrospect, appears to have served multiple purposes simultaneously. The Senate was reviewing her qualifications to represent the United States government. Guilfoyle was reviewing her outstanding balances.
Sources familiar with the outreach described it as a private effort to resolve financial obligations before she took office, which is a careful way of saying she called people with money and asked them for some of it, weeks before a committee of senators asked her about her fitness to manage diplomatic relationships with a sovereign nation.
The Greek government, reached for comment through channels that do not actually exist, had no statement.
Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who has known Guilfoyle for years and reportedly knew nothing about the debt solicitation either, offered the following when contacted by a reporter: "Kimberly is a fighter, she has always been a fighter, and I have every confidence that she will continue fighting in whatever capacity this situation requires." Asked what capacity that was, Pirro said the connection was breaking up.
What makes the episode genuinely clarifying is not that a wealthy political appointee had debts, which is unremarkable, or that she asked wealthy people to cover them, which is how wealth works in every social ecosystem the Republican party has ever operated in. What is clarifying is the timeline. There is a version of this that happens after confirmation. There is a version that happens before the nomination is announced. Guilfoyle appears to have threaded a very specific needle between those two moments, which suggests either poor timing or an unusually precise read of the window in which consequences are least likely.
The president's "too bad" is doing a lot of work as a moral framework. It is not a defense. It is not a condemnation. It is the verbal equivalent of walking past something on the floor and deciding it is someone else's problem. Which, to be fair, is also a diplomatic posture. Greece can relate.
As of Friday afternoon, Guilfoyle remained the United States Ambassador to Greece. Her debts, sources said, are in better shape than they were.
The story we are making fun of: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6139973-trump-guilfoyle-debt-controversy/