Last year, Donald Trump pardoned Democratic Rep. Harry Cuellar, who was under indictment for federal bribery charges. All he expected in return was that Cuellar, out of gratitude, would immediately switch parties and become a Republican. To his shock, Cuellar never did. “Many considered this to be a tremendous act of disloyalty,” Trump fumed on Truth Social last night, “and certainly showed him to be an extremely ungrateful person.”

He then encouraged Texas voters to vote Cuellar out in November. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: It’s genuinely amazing how little Trump tries to hide his own mob-boss style. Happy Thursday.

Quid Pro Guilfoyle

by Andrew Egger

Some MAGA scandals take unpacking. Others, not so much. Yesterday, we got one of the latter. The Wall Street Journal headline: “‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account.” Sourced to her own smoking-gun text messages, the report is the latest example of this administration’s open, staggering corruption.

We haven’t heard much from Guilfoyle lately. Once a fixture of Trumpworld as the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., the family quietly put her out to pasture after Don Jr. moved on to his next paramour and now wife, Bettina Anderson Trump. In true royal-court fashion, as thanks for years of services rendered, she got a lavish parting gift: an ambassadorship to Greece.

But Guilfoyle, who had evidently become accustomed to a certain lifestyle, was soon living beyond her means. Which is how she found herself last summer wheedling Eric Deters, a penumbral MAGA figure and Trump donor, for a little quid pro quo cash.

The transaction was simple. Deters wanted someone in the family—so to speak—to help get a few requests in front of the right people. He wanted the administration to ask Pakistan to extradite the defendant in a lawsuit he was involved in, and he was hoping the IRS could make a little audit problem he was having go away.

Guilfoyle assured Deters she was his guy. “Every secretary of you know defense, transportation, treasury commerce IRS commissioner everyone gets right back to me,” she texted. “Oh yeah, I’m forgetting cash Patel.¹” Deters had promised her as much as $1 million if she was successful, but she was happy to badger him for a little advance: Days before her July confirmation hearing last year, she asked Deters to wire $100,000 to American Express to pay off her credit card balance.

Eventually, Deters began to lose patience. Was Guilfoyle going to deliver the promised access or not? “I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote her. “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker. I need results.”

“Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” Guilfoyle responded. “It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal.”²

Papering. It’s one thing to have a U.S. ambassador openly selling access to the government to cover her personal debts. It’s another thing to have her lecturing her briber on bribing best practices. And it’s yet another for her to be so fluent in those best practices that she is inventing slang to talk about them.

So far, Guilfoyle seems determined to brazen the story out, or at least to try. Through a lawyer, she engaged in the usual rote denials: Insisting without evidence or even specific argument that the texts were not “authentic,” that all money paid her by Deters had been to cover speaking and travel fees, and that she remains “committed to representing the American people with dedication and integrity.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who is in Greece—declined to comment this morning, instead treating reporters to a minute of silly bluster about how presumptuous it is to ask public figures to comment on stories they haven’t read yet. (Sure you haven’t, Jan.)

Will Trump keep Guilfoyle around? On the one hand, this is an open-and-shut case of staggering corruption—and it’s hard to imagine that this is the end of it. What’s more likely: that Guilfoyle only ever tried to sell access the one time, and got really unlucky with the dance partner she tried to sell it to? Or that the usual rules about seeing a roach in your kitchen apply?

In theory, Trump could get ahead of some headaches by cutting Guilfoyle loose now. But there’s a reason they gave her that ambassadorship in the first place: She was too close to the family for too long to put out on the streets safely. She knows where too many of the bodies are buried.

And after all, what’s $100,000 here or there? To you or me, that might sound like a hefty wad of cash. But on the scale of this administration’s graft, it’s chump change. Trump himself, recall, made more than $2 billion last year on his own various grifts and access-trading schemes. At her going rate, Guilfoyle would have had to shake down twenty thousand donors to get that kind of action.

That’s the grisly thing about any new story of corruption in this administration, of which this certainly won’t be the last. Every new outrage only serves to remind us how many the public has already, somehow, been willing to swallow.