Pylimitics

Sometimes you find out something that’s true, and yet so far outside your own experience that you start to wonder if you were secretly transported to a different, weirder universe while you were asleep. That’s the way I’m feeling about, of all people, Kimberly Guilfoyle. I recall reading her name occasionally over the past couple of years. She was engaged to Donald Trump, Jr for a while, which is probably why she appeared in the media.

But more recently the Wall Street Journal has published a story about Guilfoyle asking a “donor” to send her $100,000 via her American Express account. It wasn’t entirely clear whether she’d already managed to run up a tab that big, or whether it was just a handy way to launder the money.

The donor, Eric Deters, used to own a pizza place, used to be a lawyer (suspended twice by the bar association), and used to be a politician (ran for Congress and for governor in Kentucky; lost both. Nevertheless, Deters apparently fails upwards, because the (ridiculous) amount of the request wasn’t apparently a problem; it was that Deters wife would absolutely veto it. “I can’t do this without getting a divorce,” Deters is quoted as replying.

But there’s more to the story. The Wall Street Journal story, I mean. First, Guilfoyle begged for the money days before her confirmation hearing. She had a hearing because she was nominated to be the US Ambassador to Greece. And she was confirmed.

But there’s more to Guilfoyle. Before being engaged to Trump, Jr., she was married to Gavin Newsome, the governor of California. She is, or was, a lawyer, and was an assistant district attorney in San Francisco. Then she got a job at Fox News as, I guess, just one of their talking heads.

Before that, she was a lingerie model. She “attempted to publish research” about some legal stuff, which I gather is a polite way to say her research was nonpunishable. She seems to have had a years-long fondness for accepting money figuratively slipped to her under the table in an unmarked envelope; $50,000 for a 2019 speech at the University of Florida, $15,000 per month, but secretly, from the 2020 Trump campaign. And she’s well-versed in scamming trade-craft, having tried to get Deters to stop putting things in writing.

What boggles me is that there are people like this, who do this stuff apparently without a care in the world. Oh, and she’s also evidently known for changing her face into “Mar-a-Lago face”, which is characterized by excessive makeup, fake tans, fake eyelashes, dark smoky eyes, and lip augmentation. And it’s certainly true that if you look at a current photo of her next to one from a few years ago, she has definitely changed.