On the menu today: The many sordid and embarrassing acts of our current ambassador to Greece; Ken Paxton fans, read to the end.
Our Ambassador Should Beware the Greeks, Even When They Bear Gifts
Kimberly Guilfoyle should not be the U.S. ambassador to Greece.
She is Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée and an outspoken supporter of President Trump, but those aren’t really the problems.
When nominated last year, it was clear Guilfoyle had a wide-ranging career, but little experience connecting to representing the U.S. government in Greece. In her confirmation hearing, it was obvious that she had barely a passing familiarity with the “3+1” working group involving the United States, the Republic of Cyprus, Greece, and Israel.
Alas, there is a long, frustrating, and bipartisan tradition of presidents appointing campaign donors or other ill-prepared friends and associates to ambassadorial posts; sometimes those nominees demonstrate an embarrassing lack of familiarity with their posts. Perhaps most infamously, in 2014, President Obama’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Norway, George Tsunis, declared in his confirmation hearing that Norway’s Progress Party was among “fringe elements” that “spew their hatred.” That party was part of the ruling coalition in Oslo with the third-most seats of any Norwegian party; the U.S. embassy issued an official apology. In a rarity, Tsunis’s nomination was withdrawn. A few years later, President Joe Biden nominated Tsunis to be the U.S. ambassador to . . . Greece. Tsunis was confirmed by the Senate by voice vote on March 10, 2022. Then there was the time that former Senator Max Baucus, the nominee to represent the U.S. in Beijing, said during his confirmation hearing, “I’m no real expert on China.”
As for Guilfoyle, it was less than ideal that back in 2015, while she was on Fox News discussing the Greek electorate voting down terms of a proposed bailout of the Greek government by international creditors, Guilfoyle said, “I mean, nobody likes freeloaders.” “It doesn’t matter if you made great yogurt. I don’t care. . . Nobody is punishing them. Like when the dog pees on the rug, the puppy, like train it.” In Guilfoyle’s defense, the Greek government had faked its data to qualify for entry into the European Union, an indication of deep-rooted Greek economic problems, and the rest of her argument — “You guys are retiring too early, and that’s part of the problem. You have, like, politicians making out-of-control promises, buying votes with entitlements that they can’t support” had the advantage of being accurate.
I’m not going to give Guilfoyle too much grief about how she chooses to dress, but I think Wesley J. Smith has a point; when you meet with his Beatitude Theophilos III, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, in Athens, there is such a thing as too much cleavage. The same applies to a meeting with Archbishop Elpidophoros of America. (Guilfoyle has dressed more modestly with other religious figures.)
In fact, showing off a little too much skin is a recurring pattern in her official photos with other officials. (Never have I been so certain that readers will click through to see the photos at the links. Note that these are not nosy paparazzi photos; these are the official photos of the meetings, distributed by the U.S. government.)
Nor will I begrudge her for enjoying the nightlife of the capital city:
Recently, she turned up at an Athens nightclub for the 1:30 a.m. premiere show of her friend, one of the country’s most famous pop singers, Konstantinos Argiros, in a prime seat between her own personal stylist and a Greek businesswoman from a powerful shipping family. She got home in the very small hours of the morning.
“Oh, I wasn’t late, it was like before 3,” Ms. Guilfoyle, the former fiancée of President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., as well as the former wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, said in a recent interview at Jefferson House, her sprawling, Mediterranean-style official residence in Athens.
(Let the record show that Konstantinos Argiros looks like he belongs on the cover of a paperback Harlequin romance.) But if you’re thinking that letting other people buy you things is a good way to trigger a State Department inspector general investigation . . . you are correct. The Daily Mail reports, “Three sources say the IG is looking into allegations surrounding Guilfoyle’s potential substance abuse, use of private planes and helicopters, close relationship with an energy and construction company, improper gift acceptance and more.” Improper gift acceptance? Apparently, Guilfoyle never read Virgil, nor does she remember the Michael Bay action film, The Rock.)
No, the preeminent reason Guilfoyle should not be U.S. ambassador is that she’s quite openly offering her influence within the administration to people in exchange for paying her bills.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Guilfoyle offered a Kentucky businessman to use her sway with the administration on some personal tax and legal issues, in exchange for $100,000 to pay her American Express bill:
For months, Guilfoyle had been chatting with Eric Deters, a former congressional candidate in Kentucky who was seeking her help in getting the attention of the new Trump administration on some personal tax and legal issues — and had promised payments of as much as $1 million if she was successful. As Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée, Guilfoyle offered to use her sway, according to Deters and messages reviewed by the Journal. . . .
But her confirmation was coming up, and she needed her card balance paid down before then, she said.
“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she texted Deters, adding a prayer hands emoji and a PDF with bill payment instructions from American Express. “You could just send it here,” she wrote on July 3, 2025, just days before her July 9 confirmation hearing.
Deters didn’t ultimately make the payment, telling Guilfoyle it would cost him his marriage. But the back and forth, part of a tranche of hundreds of messages, emails and letters reviewed by the Journal, raises new questions about the activities of one of America’s most high-profile ambassadors.
This comes about a week after the Journal reported that a lobbyist for a large Greek construction conglomerate was traveling with Guilfoyle so much, he was getting mistaken for her chief of staff:
The Bulgarian government, she told people, should deal with a Greek construction firm called Aktor Group, a newcomer to the gas business that had teamed up with a Greek state-backed energy company to bring in liquefied natural gas from the U.S. “There is no doubt that this is kind of an official position of the U.S. government,” said a person familiar with the talks.
Sitting beside the 57-year-old ambassador in an audience with the Bulgarian president was a 39-year-old named Christos Marafatsos. He has attended so many of her meetings that some foreign officials mistook him for her chief of staff. In fact, he is a top lobbyist for Aktor, whose CEO had flown Guilfoyle to the country on a private jet.
But she has puzzled government officials across the region with her persistent promotion of a specific Greek company — and her extensive efforts to involve Marafatsos, a neophyte in both diplomacy and energy. . . .
Several people who have met with Marafatsos and the ambassador — including government officials — said he made no mention of his ties to Aktor. . . .
A $6 billion deal Guilfoyle helped Aktor secure in Albania would, if completed, have the country buy gas from the company through 2050.
Why is the U.S. ambassador to Greece trying to persuade the Bulgarian president that his government ought to use a Greek construction group? Why is she helping Aktor secure a deal in Albania? What interest does the United States have in the good fortunes of the Aktor Group?
Earlier this autumn, the U.S. State Department removed the flags of the 190 or so countries with which the United States maintains diplomatic relations from the State Department’s main atrium, replacing them with 190 or so American flags. That seemed dumb; no matter how “America First!” your philosophy is, I don’t understand why you would feel threatened by the presence of foreign flags in the atrium of the federal building of the department specifically assigned to maintaining our relationships with them.
The flag replacement decision felt like someone had heard, and completely misinterpreted, the famous anecdote about Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz:
He’d have all new ambassadors in to his office, one at a time, as they went out for a five, maybe 10-minute chat.
And he’d say, “OK, Mr. Ambassador or Madame Ambassador, you’ve passed all the tests. You’ve been confirmed by the Senate and you’ve passed your security investigation. You’ve done all the things to get the position of ambassador, but you have to pass my test. I have one more for you.” And he’d take them over in the Secretary’s office to where there was this massive globe, and he’d say, “I’m going to spin the globe and I want you to put your hand on your country.”
Shultz would tell this story, and he said, “Every single one of them failed. But I let them go anyway.” Because whenever he spun the globe and he’d say, “I want you to put your hand on your country,” they’d always put their hand on the country that they were going out to. His point was your country is the United States.
Yes, it is important that our ambassadors do not “go native.” (President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, agreed with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who publicly disputed the U.S. government’s stance that the 2006 Mexican election was free, fair, and clean.) But no ambassador is going to get confused about who he represents to whom by seeing the flag of the country he’s posted to in the lobby of the State Department.
This is somewhat moot for a lot of countries, as President Trump has not yet nominated an ambassador to Algeria, Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Burma, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, Kosovo, Laos, Macedonia, Maldives, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, or the United Arab Emirates.
(I’m not going to give the president any grief for not yet nominating ambassadors to Afghanistan, Cuba, Libya, Venezuela, or Yemen, as those can be some pretty dangerous places. But whenever I mention countries lacking a Trump-appointed ambassador, some reader or social media user insists it’s all the Senate’s fault. But A) these are posts where the president hasn’t nominated anyone yet, so the confirmation process can’t get started, and B) we’re nearly two years into Trump’s second term.)
But if it is important to this administration that our ambassadors represent American interests, and not foreign ones . . . shouldn’t somebody have a problem with Kimberly Guilfoyle meeting with foreign governments and encouraging them to hire Aktor Group for their infrastructure projects? And if she’s going to have an Aktor Group lobbyist sitting next to her in those meetings, shouldn’t she disclose all this?
Remember the rallying cry, “drain the swamp”? Good times, good times . . .
ADDENDUM: Our John Puri, with the hard numbers on this year’s $2 trillion deficit:
It’s true, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have cut spending in some visible areas. Outlays are down in the Environmental Protection Agency, the Commerce Department, and food stamps. But these categories were small parts of the budget to begin with, and their reductions were swamped by growing entitlements. Spending on Social Security rose by $86 billion, or 5 percent, because of “increases in average benefits and in the number of beneficiaries.” Medicare and Medicaid each grew by 8 percent, or $132 billion combined, because of increased enrollment and higher health-care costs.
Net interest costs also continued spiraling upward. As debt accumulated and interest rates jumped, servicing expenditures automatically rose by $115 billion last year, or 11 percent — the greatest increase of any single category.
Republicans should eliminate waste wherever they find it, but unless they’re willing to confront the ticking time bomb of entitlements, our deficit and debt will only get worse and worse. They need to follow the lead of that principled, brave Republican leader . . . (checks notes). . . .
Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton suggested he would support cuts to federal benefits programs during a private fundraiser with Washington lobbyists last month, according to an audio recording obtained by The Texas Tribune, the fourth leaked clip from the Sept. 24 event.
My God, I’ve misjudged this man! He may be a shameless, philandering human slug, but he’s a shameless, philandering human slug who’s brave enough to talk about cutting federal benefits! Do you realize how rare that is? Texans, hold your nose! Vote for this guy over the dead-eyed, reanimated Howdy Doody doll who has missed a few weeks of campaigning because he apparently caught the Russian plague!