在最初的政府中，唐纳德·特朗普只是敷衍地加入了一些真正的专业人士，如今他的政府几乎完全由阿谀奉承者和家庭成员组成。总统已经明确表示，他更看重忠诚而非资历，但他许多任命官员惊人的无能和腐败提出了一个显而易见的问题：要被特朗普白宫解雇需要什么条件？
After half-heartedly including some actual professionals in his first administration, Donald Trump is now served almost exclusively by sycophants and family members. The president has made clear that he cares about loyalty more than qualifications, but the astonishing incompetence and corruption of many of his appointees raises an obvious question: What does it take to get fired by Trump’s White House?
金伯利·吉尔福耶尔昨天辞去希腊大使一职，提供了一些线索。吉尔福耶尔在担任特使之前和期间都被指控存在公然腐败行为。她否认这些指控，但她的辞职——正是白宫提出的——实际上并不是关于腐败的。认为只有吉尔福耶尔触碰了此前未见的腐败红线这一想法是可笑的。如果道德和法律问题，包括如今已名存实亡的“不当行为表象”标准，在此政府中构成解雇依据，特朗普早就已经甩掉团队中的几名其他成员了。
Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation yesterday as ambassador to Greece provides some clues. Guilfoyle has been accused of blatant corruption both before and during her time as an envoy. She denies these allegations, but her resignation—which the White House requested—isn’t really about corruption. The idea that Guilfoyle, and only Guilfoyle, crossed some sort of previously unseen corruption red line is laughable. If ethical and legal questions, including the now-moribund standard of “appearances of impropriety,” were grounds for dismissal in this administration, Trump would have already shed several other members of his team.
实际上，吉尔福耶尔被迫离职是因为她让人难堪。她越权行事，试图利用总统的名义谋利，随后在被揭露后让政府形象受损。此外，她是女性，而在该政府中，自私自利的行为基本上是男人的游戏。
Rather, Guilfoyle was pushed out because she was an embarrassment. She overstepped her bounds, tried to trade on the president’s name, and then made the administration look bad when she got caught. Also, she is a woman, and in this administration, self-dealing is mostly a man’s game.
事实上，与其他被指控的人相比——包括那位对“利益冲突”等概念完全漠不关心的总统本人——吉尔福伊尔确实只是个小人物罢了。例如，去年春天《金融时报》报道称：皮特·赫格塞斯的经纪人曾在伊朗战争前夕试图在国防产业进行大规模投资，这引发了内幕交易的怀疑。联邦调查局局长卡什·帕特尔被指控利用政府资金设立秘密基金，向局内的亲信发放不当奖金；“边境事务主管”汤姆·霍曼在2024年被录音显示，他收受了伪装成企业高管的FBI特工送来的5万美元现金（这笔钱被装在Cava品牌的食品袋里——这通常是“合法交易”的象征），但他仍然保住了自己的职位。
Indeed, by comparison with the charges leveled at others—including against the president himself, who seems utterly unconcerned with notions such as “emoluments”—Guilfoyle is decidedly a small-timer. This past spring, for example, the Financial Times reported that a broker for Pete Hegseth attempted to make a big investment in defense industries just before the Iran war, raising suspicions of insider trading. FBI Director Kash Patel has been accused of using government money as a slush fund to pay improper bonuses to his favorites within the Bureau.
赫格塞斯和霍曼均否认有任何不当行为；而帕特尔及FBI方面则未对此事作出任何评论或解释。记者德克斯特·菲尔金斯则将特朗普的女婿、那位没有任何实际职责的“特派官员”贾里德·库什纳描述为“华盛顿政坛的新类型人物”——对他们来说，公职不过是一种获取巨额财富的手段罢了。虽然吉尔福伊尔在这些欺诈行为中或许只是个小角色，但她真正的过错在于她那些可悲且令人羞耻的行为。
“Border Czar” Tom Homan was caught on audio in 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash (wrapped in a Cava food bag, always the sign of a deal on the up-and-up) from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives, and yet he remains in his job. Hegseth and Homan deny any wrongdoing; Patel and the FBI have offered no comment or explanation. And the journalist Dexter Filkins recently described Trump’s son-in-law and roving minister-without-portfolio Jared Kushner as representative of “a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth.”
（就连霍曼在接受现金时，看起来也不至于如此卑鄙无耻……）她向特朗普的支持者埃里克·德特斯求助，要求他帮忙支付巨额信用卡欠款，这实在令人尴尬至极。2025年7月，在她的确认听证会前夕，她写道：“亲爱的，求你今天就帮我搞定这件事吧。”她请求埃里克将10万美元直接汇入她的美国运通信用卡账户。
Guilfoyle may have been a relative piker among giants in the grift game, but her real sin was the pathetic and humiliating nature of her behavior. (Even Homan managed not to seem quite so grubby when reportedly accepting a bag of greenbacks.) Her messages to a Trump donor asking for money to help pay her huge credit-card bills are cringe-inducing. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote to the Trump supporter Eric Deters when asking him to wire a cool $100,000 directly into her American Express account in July 2025, just before her confirmation hearings.
更糟的是，她不断告诉德特斯停止写东西，只需通过Signal联系她。“你会让我丢失大使职位，真是个噩梦，别再写东西了，”她说。这显然是吉尔福伊尔对臭名昭著的“Stringer Bell规则”的版本，该规则以电视剧《火线》中的一位角色命名，该角色曾斥责他的一个贩毒同伙，因为他愚蠢到竟然把犯罪阴谋的书面记录保存下来。问题在于，她自己也违反了这条规则：她以书面形式向德特斯提出停止写东西的要求。
Worse, she continually told Deters to stop writing things down and just contact her on Signal. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she said. This was apparently Guilfoyle’s version of the infamous “Stringer Bell rule,” named for a character from the television series The Wire who dressed down one of his drug-dealing accomplices for being stupid enough to keep written notes on a criminal conspiracy. The problem is that she, too, violated that rule: She made her requests to Deters to stop writing things down in writing.
德特斯毫不意外地保留了所有消息。他断言，吉尔福伊尔向他提供了进入特朗普政府的机会。“我会成为你的特朗普坐骑，生死与共，永远永远，”他声称她这样告诉他。当她未能兑现承诺时，他本月早些时候警告吉尔福伊尔和白宫官员，称他将公开他们的通信，随后他确实付诸了行动。
Deters, unsurprisingly, kept all the messages. Guilfoyle, he asserts, offered him access to the Trump administration. “I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” he claims she told him. When she didn’t deliver, he warned Guilfoyle and White House officials earlier this month that he would go public with their correspondence and then made good on that threat.
与此同时，这位新任大使正在希腊富豪的陪伴下，在东南欧四处奔波。但同样，她并没有低调享受工作带来的特权，而是炫耀自己与这些富豪的关系，试图将自己塑造成特朗普内圈中的一位“有实力”的女性，声称自己有能力办成事情。
The newly minted ambassador, meanwhile, was flitting about southeastern Europe in the company of Greek tycoons. But again, rather than enjoy the perks of her job in discreet luxury, she bragged about her connections to these wealthy men and tried to present herself as some sort of made woman from the inner Trump orbit who had the juice to get things done.
据《华尔街日报》报道，她于2026年1月前往达沃斯，并被禁止参加为埃里克·特朗普举办的晚宴。于是她决定向一位美国商人施压，希望他能帮她进入晚宴现场。她说：“你知道的，我可以把整个世界都交给你……这是你应得的。”（这次她的言论被录音记录了下来，而非通过短信传递的。）她还对晚宴的希腊女主人出言不逊：“你们连美国驻希腊的大使都不请来……她应该好好巴结我才是！”
According to The Wall Street Journal, she went to Davos in January 2026 and was excluded from a dinner being held for Eric Trump. She decided to pressure an American businessman to help her get in. “You know, I can deliver the world to you. Which you deserve,” she said. (This time, she was caught on audio, rather than by text message.) “I’m going to make you a lot of fucking money,” she told the American. She also raged about the impudence of the dinner’s Greek hostess. “You don’t have the fucking U.S., you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my fucking ass.”
值得一提的是，老特朗普对使用粗俗语言毫无意见；他在公开场合经常使用这类语言。他在担任公职期间从不避讳谋取私利，在担任总统期间为自己谋取了巨额财富，同时也默许或明确支持下属利用职权谋取私利的行为。然而，当他的前未婚妻对他在雅典提供的“特殊待遇”表示不满（竟然出现在报纸上，简直就像一个在赌场向顾客讨小费的年老女服务员一样……），他显然感到非常愤怒。他说：“亲爱的，把东西放到托盘上就行了……别告诉我经理，我会带你去最好的扑克桌。”
Again,Trump Sr. has no problem with F-bombs; he deploys them regularly. He has no problem with money grabs while in public office; he has enriched himself while president and has explicitly or implicitly blessed similar efforts by other subordinates to profit from their positions. But he apparently draws a line when his son’s former fiancée does not show proper appreciation for the courtesy of being stashed in Athens—Athens!—and then lands in the newspapers looking like an aging waitress cadging tips from marks in a casino. Honey, just put it on the tray. Don’t tell my manager, and I’ll get you to the good poker table.
吉尔福伊尔曾经与特朗普关系极为密切，因此在2020年的共和党全国代表大会上获得了在黄金时段向总统献殷勤的机会。她的表演虽然夸张、糟糕至极，但特朗普却非常喜欢她，甚至称她为“我的金伯利”，并将她比作阿根廷前第一夫人埃娃·庇隆。今年早些时候，特朗普这样评价他的这位驻希腊的代表：“金伯利·吉尔福伊尔是我多年的朋友了。我喜欢叫她‘金伯莱’——这是我的昵称，对吧？不过你才是最棒的……听说希腊的人们也很喜欢你。”
Guilfoyle was once so tight with the Trumps that she was given a prime-time slot to fawn over the president during the 2020 GOP convention. It was a disastrous, over-the-top performance, but Trump loved it, reportedly calling her “my Kimberly” and comparing her to the former Argentine first lady Eva Perón. Earlier this year, Trump said of his emissary to Greece: “Kimberly Guilfoyle has been my friend for a long time. I love calling her Kimber-lay. That’s my little pet name, right? But you are the greatest, and I heard they love you over there.”
然而，在过去几天里，关于这位强势的中年女性的负面新闻不断涌现：她被特朗普的儿子抛弃，换上了更年轻的妻子（这正是特朗普过去对待前妻们的方式）；她试图利用特朗普的总统职位谋取私利，结果却出尽洋相，还引发了更多关于腐败的负面报道（这些报道正好发生在中期选举前夕）。吉尔福伊尔终于被特朗普冷酷地抛弃了。特朗普昨天表示：“她根本不属于我的家人……嗯，她很久以前和我儿子有过一段恋情罢了。”
But over the past several days, the president saw bad publicity about this demanding, middle-aged woman, thrown over by his son for a younger wife—as Trump himself has done to previous spouses—trying to profit off his presidency while making a fool of herself and encouraging more bad press about corruption just before the midterm elections. Guilfoyle had to go, and Trump jettisoned her quickly and coldly. “She wasn’t a member of my family,” the president said yesterday. “She, uh, I guess dated my son a long time ago.”“Dated?”I guess? She was in line for years to become the president’s daughter-in-law, married to his first-born son. Now she’s just some dame one of his kids used to know.
吉尔福伊尔完全不明白自己的错误所在。她本只需远离麻烦、安分守己即可……但这对她来说实在太难做到了。她终于明白了：要想从特朗普的总统职位中获利，就必须遵守某些规则：不要过于张扬；不要让老板难堪；尽可能避免出丑；尤其是作为一位年长的女性，更不能犯任何错误。
Guilfoyle didn’t get it. All she had to do was stay out of trouble. But that was too hard for her, and now she’s learned that making money off this presidency means following some rules. Don’t be too obvious; don’t embarrass the boss; don’t get caught if you can help it. And especially, don’t be an older woman.