Kimberly Guilfoyle offered her influence inside the Trump administration to a donor who paid down roughly a hundred thousand dollars of her personal credit-card debt. On Tuesday, after the White House asked her to resign, she was gone from the ambassador’s post in Athens in about two hours. That is not a purge. That is a cleanup.
The reporting had been building for weeks. The State Department’s inspector general started looking. Three senior Democrats on the foreign-affairs and oversight committees asked for an investigation. The Greek opposition wanted their foreign ministry to summon her. Then the Wall Street Journal laid out what it had: she threatened a Greek official, she took gifts and services she should not have taken, and she texted a donor an offer, use my influence in the administration and my card bill gets paid. Her lawyers say the money was owed for speaking engagements she had already done. Fine. Either way, the ambassador of the United States had a hundred-thousand-dollar credit-card problem that somebody else solved, and the texts are sitting in a reporter’s file. She says she will defend her name. She is welcome to. She will not defend it from the embassy.
Here is what I want to know as a man who buys diesel by the hundred-gallon drum and waits on parts deliveries: who was working the file that actually pays my customers’ bills? Greece sits on the doorway that liquefied natural gas uses to get into Europe, and Greek shipowners carry one of the largest shares of the world’s sea freight. The container that brings a man’s alternator and the tanker that brings somebody’s heating oil ride on those ships. Freight is built into everything you pay for at the counter. An ambassador in that capital is supposed to sit down with the foreign ministry and the energy ministry and the port people and work out how American interests and that country’s interests line up, so the rates stay sane and the supplies keep moving. What was the ambassador doing instead, by her own government’s account? Collecting. Gifts. Access. A card bill. When the person in the seat is treating the seat like a side door into somebody’s wallet, the file does not get worked. You get the freight rate.
Now, I am just a man who fixes trucks for a living, but I know what a job is. You show up, you do the work the people counting on you need done, and you do not take money on the side for doing it. That is the standard in my shop. It ought to be the standard for a man representing the United States in a foreign capital, and it is not a standard anybody in that building applied here until the stories got embarrassing.
And I will say the part that keeps this column honest: this is not one party’s invention. Every administration in my adult lifetime has handed ambassador posts to donors and famous names and called it an honor. The Senate confirms them, in both parties’ Senates. The type of man who gets an embassy because he wrote a check did not walk in on Tuesday morning. What made this one end in two hours is that the press caught it before the calendar filled up. Trump said it himself, she was doing a good job, but they did not like what they were reading. Read that again. The problem was not the conduct. The problem was the reading. Marco Rubio praised her last week and then went quiet. The White House announced the exit at the press secretary’s first briefing and called her a wonderful asset to the team on the way out the door. That standard will not change because the building decided to change it.
Credit-card debt is the mechanism in this story, and every working reader knows what it does. You miss a payment, the rate goes up, the letters come, and you sit at the kitchen table and figure out which bill you can stretch. It eats the grocery money and the truck payment, and it does not care who you voted for. A woman who could not clear her own card bill texted a donor and had it cleared, in exchange for a promise about access to the United States government. That is what this seat was used for. That is what the seat is for, in the minds of the people who hand them out.
The post in Athens is open. The people who chose her have not changed how they choose. The next famous name with a fundraising record is already on a list somewhere, and the next posting that detonates will detonate on working people’s costs, because freight and heating oil do not pause for a resignation letter. Either somebody works that file, or nobody does. Both of those outcomes show up in what you pay at the pump.