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Kimberly Guilfoyle Is a Master of Mafia Diplomacy

The US Ambassador to Greece is making suspicious deals for her buddies.

Kimberly Guilfoyle speaks during the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Kimberly Guilfoyle has too long been treated merely as a shadow of the men in her life—but she’s actually a formidable villain in her own right. From 2001 to 2007, she was married to Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco. From 2018 to 2024, she was affianced to Donald Trump Jr., which when he started being photographed in the company of another woman, the Palm Beach jet-setter Bettina Anderson, whom he married this year.

Guilfoyle received a remarkable consolation prize from the breakup: Trump appointed her to the role of US ambassador to Greece, which she has leveraged into being a large-scale impresario of diplomatic corruption. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump, who retains a warm regard for Guilfoyle and who didn’t attend his son’s wedding to Anderson, said he nominated her for the ambassadorship because “I had to get her out of here.”

Despite the fact that she never married Trump Jr., Guilfoyle still enjoys an auxiliary status to the Trump family. In his 1982 study The Kennedy Imprisonment, the historian Gary Wills created the useful category of “honorary Kennedy” to describe all the fixers, cronies, and media assets who acted as agents of the Kennedy family: figures such as Ben Bradlee, Ted Sorensen, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It’s safe to call Guilfoyle an honorary Trump.

Out on her own now, Guilfoyle is very much “made” in the Trump mafia, and in that capacity she has flourished. Her role in shaping US foreign policy is larger than the title of ambassador to Greece would indicate.

Earlier this year, Trump purged the State Department, which has left more than a hundred ambassadorships unfilled. He has also given prominent diplomatic posts to family members such as Jared Kushner (who is acting as a diplomat without portfolio in both Europe and the Middle East) and his father, Charles Kushner (who is ambassador to France). Both Jared Kushner and the real estate mogul Steve Witkoff (another honorary Trump) seem to have leveraged their diplomatic posts into money-making operations, making lucrative deals while conducting public business. In this environment, governments throughout the Balkans and Europe know that if they want to win the favor of the Trump administration, they need to get in the good graces of Guilfoyle.

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