Is There Anyone Connected to Trump Who Isn’t Trying to Grift Off His Presidency?

3 min readYou would think that just the law of large numbers would mean that, with all the jobs an incoming administration has to fill, they'd have found at least one person who wasn't in it for the grift. But I'm not going to stand on one leg waiting to meet that person. From The Wall Street Journal:Kimberly Guilfoyle was preparing for her congressional hearing to become U.S. ambassador to Greece when she reached out to a Trump donor with an urgent request: She needed $100,000 that she said she owed American Express—in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on Signal, according to messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Please.”"Avoiding paper trails" is standard operating procedure for this bunch.For months, Guilfoyle had been chatting with Eric Deters, a former congressional candidate in Kentucky who was seeking her help in getting the attention of the new Trump administration on some personal tax and legal issues—and had promised payments of as much as $1 million if she was successful. As Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée, Guilfoyle offered to use her sway, according to Deters and messages reviewed by the Journal. She forwarded Deters the messages she’d sent to the new Internal Revenue Service chief and updated him on her efforts to lobby the Justice Department on his behalf.But her confirmation was coming up, and she needed her card balance paid down before then, she said. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she texted Deters, adding a prayer hands emoji and a PDF with bill payment instructions from American Express. “You could just send it here,” she wrote on July 3, 2025, just days before her July 9 confirmation hearing. Deters didn’t ultimately make the payment, telling Guilfoyle it would cost him his marriage.Oh, dear.These people are just freaking weird.As a morning AM radio host in Ohio, Deters lent his voice to the Trump movement, boosting the 2016 outsider’s campaign. He liked to say he was “Trump today, Trump tomorrow, Trump forever.” A lawyer nicknamed “the Courtroom Bulldog” in local media, Deters has faced his own legal issues. In 2020, he was banned from entering a courthouse in Ohio’s Hamilton County after threatening on social media to burn it down. The Kentucky Bar Association twice suspended him, citing aggressive litigation strategies, false statements in court proceedings and filing frivolous claims.When the Kentucky Supreme Court was considering whether to reinstate him to the bar, Deters denounced members of the association as “jokes of human excrement.” The chief justice wrote in 2021, in a ruling not to reinstate him, “Deters’ practice of law is not governed by constitution, rule of law or procedure. It is anarchy.” “These rules that are written by Big Law to hurt people like me—screw them,” Deters told the Journal, saying he retired as a lawyer. “I am a legal outlaw.”Both Deters and Guilfoyle come across throughout the rest of the piece like county commissioners carving up the road repair budget and hiring their idiot nephew for one of the crews. For the moment, remember, Guilfoyle is still the ambassador to Greece, so I will lean on the ancient warning: beware of Greece when bearing grifts.