Kimberly Guilfoyle Is the Purest MAGA Figure in America

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After reading a bombshell new Wall Street Journal report on Kimberly Guilfoyle’s dealings with a donor from whom she allegedly managed to wrest hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am left with two possibly conflicting thoughts. The first is that Guilfoyle should absolutely lose her ambassadorship and possibly be sent to prison. The second is that, if that does happen and Guilfoyle leaves the public eye, I’ll miss her antics, dammit. She’s consistently been one of the most entertaining characters in the Trump orbit over the past few years, especially since her breakup with Donald Trump Jr. led to her being dispatched to Greece . There’s just something about Kimberly.

The biggest revelation in the WSJ piece is that in the lead-up to her congressional hearing to become U.S. ambassador to Greece last year, Guilfoyle allegedly asked Eric Deters, a former Republican congressional candidate from Kentucky and self-styled “legal outlaw,” to give her $100,000 that she apparently owed to American Express. Deters shared text messages to corroborate his account, so the article includes screenshots of Guilfoyle’s asks. (Guilfoyle’s lawyer disputed that the messages were authentic.) If you were ever curious how one broaches asking some guy to pay off your card balance before Congress gets wind of it, take it from Guilfoyle: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote, according to the screenshots. She added a prayer-hands emoji and a PDF containing instructions for wiring money to American Express. “You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all that will show,” she went on, adding, in a separate message, “Please.” Reading this, I was reminded of something Guilfoyle once said in a speech to conservative high school students that was eventually quoted in a Washington Post piece : “What can I tell you? Mama’s a closer.” Mama may not have closed this one, but mama can’t close if she doesn’t ask, I suppose.

Deters declined to wire the money, citing his marriage, intriguingly—perhaps the missus wasn’t a fan? Deters’ relationship with Guilfoyle started in 2020, when he paid her to speak at an anti-COVID-19-mask-mandate event. After the 2024 election, he asked her to use her connections to get him a meeting with an IRS official so he could try to finesse his way out of some tax issues he was facing, as well as for ins with Tucker Carlson and Kid Rock.

Guilfoyle was open to his requests and the cash that would come with them, but wary of Deters’ habit of putting them in writing. “I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” she wrote to Deters at one point. “It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal.” In hindsight, she was right to be worried—but wrong about it not being helpful to Deters, since he seems to be having a grand old time exposing her.