这位总统似乎并不关心腐败；他关心的是尴尬。汤姆·尼科尔斯（Tom Nichols）唐纳德·特朗普在第一届政府中漫不经心地任用了几位真正的专业人士后，如今其身边的效力者几乎全是由马屁精和家族成员组成。这位总统已经明确表示，比起资历，他更看重忠诚，然而他的许多任命人选那令人震惊的无能与腐败提出了一个显而易见的问题：要达到什么地步才会被特朗普的白宫解雇？
The president doesn’t seem to care about corruption; he cares about embarrassment. By Tom Nichols 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·吉尔福伊尔（Kimberly Guilfoyle）昨天辞去驻希腊大使职务，为我们提供了一些线索。吉尔福伊尔在担任特使之前和任职期间都被指控存在明目张胆的腐败。她对这些指控予以否认，但她的辞职——这是白宫要求的——其实并非因为腐败。认为只有吉尔福伊尔一个人踩到了某种此前从未见过的腐败红线，这种想法十分荒唐。如果道德和法律问题——包括那个如今已经名存实亡的“有失体统之嫌”的标准——是本届政府的解职理由，特朗普早就该把他的团队中好几位其他成员解雇了。
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.
相反，吉尔福伊尔被逼走是因为她令人感到尴尬。她越界了，企图利用总统的名字进行交易，而在被抓包后又让政府显得很糟糕。此外，她是一名女性，而在本届政府中，谋取私利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.
确实，与针对其他人的指控相比——包括针对总统本人，他似乎对诸如“特权”这类概念毫不在意——吉尔福伊显然是小人物。这过去一年春季，例如《金融时报》报道，Pete Hegseth 的经纪人试图在伊朗战争前对国防产业进行大额投资，引发对内幕交易的怀疑。FBI 局长卡什·帕特被指控利用政府资金作为垫支基金，向其在局内的亲信支付不当奖金。
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.
2024 年，“边境之王”汤姆·霍曼在一段音频中被捕获，他接受了 5 万美元现金（包裹在 Cava 食品袋中，这始终是交易正规的标志），从冒充商业高管的 FBI 卧底特工手中，但他仍保有职位。Hegseth 和霍曼否认任何不当行为；帕特和 FBI 方面未作评论或解释。近期记者德克萨斯·菲林克斯（Dexter Filkins）近期描述特朗普女婿、无固定职务的游走部长杰ared Kushner 时表示，他是“一种新型华盛顿人物的代表，其公职服务于获得巨大财富的目的”。
“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.”
吉尔福伊或许在巨人的掮客游戏中只是个小人物，但她的真正罪过在于她行为的可怜和羞辱性。即便霍曼在接受绿色现金的传闻中也未显得如此龌龊。她向一位特朗普捐款人发送的消息——请求对方帮忙支付巨额信用卡账单——令人难堪。她在 2025 年 7 月向特朗普支持者埃里克·德特斯（Eric Deters）写信时写道：“亲爱的，请帮我今天完成这件事，”随后要求他直接将 10 万美元汇入她的美国运通卡账户，就在她确认听证会前。
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，该角色因其毒品交易同伙愚蠢到在刑事阴谋中保留书面记录而对他进行了训斥。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‘生死与共’伙伴，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，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活动。但同样，她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，并试图将自己塑造成特朗普内圈中的一位“有实力”的女性，声称自己能够办成事情。
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.
根据《华尔街日报》报道，她在2026年1月前往达沃斯，并被排斥在为埃里克·特朗普（Eric Trump）举办的一场晚宴之外。她决定向一名美国商人施压，以帮她混进去。“你知道的，我能把整个世界送到你面前。这是你应得的，”她说道。（这一次，她是被录音录了下来，而不是通过短信。）“我要让你他妈的赚大钱，”她对这名美国商人说。
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.
她还对晚宴希腊女主人竟然如此放肆大发雷霆。“你不能让那个他妈的美国驻希腊大使不来，你知道的。她应该他妈的对我拍马屁才对。”同样，老特朗普对粗口毫无意见；他经常满嘴脏话。他在公职期间对捞钱也毫无意见；他在担任总统期间中饱私囊，并且明确或暗示地默许其他下属利用职务之便谋取类似利益。但显然，当他儿子的前未婚妻对被安置在雅典——雅典！
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.”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.
——这一礼遇表现得不够感恩，随后又登上报纸，看起来像个在赌场里向肥羊讨要小费的老年女服务员时，他划下了底线。亲爱的，放进托盘里就行了。别告诉我的经理，我会带你去那张高级扑克桌。
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家族关系极其密切，以至于在2020年共和党全国代表大会上，她获得了一个黄金时段来奉承这位总统。那是一场灾难性的、夸张的表演，但特朗普却很喜欢，据报道他曾称她为“我的金伯利”，并把她比作前阿根廷第一夫人伊娃·裴隆。今年早些时候，特朗普在谈到他派往希腊的特使时说：“金伯利·吉尔福伊尔很长时间以来一直是我的朋友。我喜欢叫她金伯-莱。那是我的小昵称，对吧？但你是最棒的，我听说那边的人都很喜欢你。”
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.”
但在过去几天里，总统看到了关于这位要求繁多、人到中年、被他儿子抛弃以迎娶年轻妻子（正如特朗普本人对前几任配偶所做的那样）、试图利用他的总统身份牟利同时又让自己出丑、并在期中选举前夕引发更多关于腐败的负面报道的女性的不利宣传。吉尔福伊尔不得不离开，特朗普迅速而冷酷地抛弃了她。“她不是我家庭的一员，”总统昨天说道。
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.
“她，呃，我猜很久以前和我儿子约会过。”“约会过？”我猜？她曾多年排队准备成为总统的儿媳，嫁给他的长子。现在她只是他的某个孩子曾经认识的寻常女子。
“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.
吉尔福伊尔没有明白这一点。她所需要做的就是远离麻烦。但这对他来说太难了，现在她明白了，从这个总统职位上赚钱意味着要遵守一些规则。不要太明目张胆；不要让老板难堪；如果能避免的话，不要被抓到。尤其是，不要做一个年长的女人。
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.