As the list of scandals surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle grew longer and more serious, Donald Trump faced a limited number of choices. The president had the option of throwing his enthusiastic support behind her and expressing indifference to the evidence; he could have waited and let her twist in the wind a while longer; or he could have ended the fiasco and brought Guilfoyle home.
He went with the third option. MS NOW reported:
Kimberly Guilfoyle on Tuesday said she is stepping down as U.S. ambassador to Greece after the White House announced it had asked her to resign following allegations of misconduct during her tenure as Athens envoy and before her confirmation.
President Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, announced the request during her first briefing.
“We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” Zacharia told reporters. “She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.”
The outgoing ambassador confirmed her departure a short time later in a lengthy statement published to social media, which included a fresh denial regarding her ongoing scandals. “These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity,” she wrote.
The denial is of particular interest because Guilfoyle’s ouster does not mark the end of her troubles. On the contrary, several congressional Democrats have suggested that she should be criminally prosecuted for corruption, and as retired Ambassador James Story wrote in a compelling piece for MS NOW, the allegations surrounding Guilfoyle are so serious that the need for accountability is unavoidable.
While we wait to see what, if anything, comes of such investigations, I couldn’t help but notice a curious response to the developments from the president who chose her for the post in the first place.
During a brief Q&A with reporters, Trump was reminded that Guilfoyle, a former fiancée to Donald Trump Jr., was “almost a member of your family.”
“No, she wasn’t a member of my family,” the president replied. “She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago, but she wasn’t.”
Not to put too fine a point on this, but they more than dated — they were engaged to be married — and their relationship was ongoing as recently as 2024, which is hardly “a long time ago.”
The reaction, however, is consistent with Trump’s habit of pretending to barely know his former friends after they get into trouble.
A few years ago, for example, after attorney Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to election-related crimes in Georgia, Trump wrote on his social media platform, “Despite the Fake News reports to the contrary, and without even reaching out to ask the Trump Campaign, MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS.” (Reality told a different story: Powell was a member of his legal team in 2020, and he bragged about it at the time.)
Similarly, after Steve Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury, Trump acted as if he barely knew him, saying his former White House strategist had merely worked “for a small part of the administration.”
Similarly, in 2019, Trump described then-U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland — part of “a small cadre of ambassadors who enjoy direct and frequent access to Trump,” according to one journalist — as “a really good man” and a “great American.” Soon after Sondland got caught up in the Ukraine scandal that led to the president’s first impeachment, Trump said, “Let me just tell you, I hardly know the gentleman.”
A month earlier, Trump said he didn’t know Igor Fruman or Lev Parnas after their arrests, despite previous interactions with them.
Even after his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, was indicted, the president argued, in reference to the former vice president of the Trump Organization, “Michael Cohen was a PR person who did small legal work, very small legal work.”
When Paul Manafort was indicted, Trump’s former campaign chairman became some random staffer “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.” When former White House national security adviser Michel Flynn was forced to resign in disgrace, Team Trump decided he was “a former Obama administration official” who did some “volunteer” work for the president.
Former campaign adviser Carter Page was described as someone Trump “does not know.” George Papadopoulos, another former campaign adviser, was dismissed as a “coffee boy.” Trump world even tried to downplay its association with Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign’s data firm.
Guilfoyle, in other words, has plenty of company.
Let this be a lesson to Trump’s associates: If you run into trouble or become inconvenient to the White House, your loyalty will not be rewarded.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post As Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns, she joins a list of people Trump pretends not to know appeared first on MS NOW.
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