Looks like there’s some rumbling in the First Family In Exile:
It’s DONALD TRUMP’S most frequent complaint: people profiting off his name. The latest offender? His son’s girlfriend, MAGA’s own Eva Perón, KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE. Aides told Playbook that Trump has been openly griping that Guilfoyle joined ERIC GREITENS’ campaign for Senate in Missouri as national campaign chair, and he’s becoming increasingly short with Guilfoyle.
“Trump thinks Greitens is problematic, and that Kim is annoying,” said one Trump adviser. “He said, ‘Why the f— is she working for him?’”
Another adviser said Trump would not endorse Greitens if the primary were today, citing the scandal that forced him to resign as governor three years ago: allegations that he tied up, sexually assaulted and blackmailed a St. Louis hairdresser with whom he had an affair in 2015. A March poll conducted by Trump’s former pollster TONY FABRIZIO shows Greitens with a 40-point lead over the next closest contender.
Trump has been huddling with other candidates in the competitive race to replace GOP Sen. ROY BLUNT, including Rep. BILLY LONG (R-Mo.), who paid homage to him at Mar-a-Lago this spring, and Missouri A.G. ERIC SCHMITT, who visited Trump twice, once at Mar-a-Lago and another time at Bedminster this year. One Trump adviser said Greitens has the disadvantage of being associated with MIKE PENCE because his former chief of staff, NICK AYERS, ran his gubernatorial campaign.
Multiple advisers said Trump has been concerned that attaching Guilfoyle’s name to Greitens will look like an implicit endorsement from him. The first warning it would not came in a Washington Examiner story in April by David Drucker about Guilfoyle’s new gig. It said her affiliation with Greitens would not even mean an endorsement from her boyfriend DONALD TRUMP JR., let alone his father.
Since then, there’ve been signs that Guilfoyle is on the outs: She’d been nudging Trump’s team to join the Make America Great Again Action super PAC before finally being added to its roster late last month as national finance chair. NYT’s Maggie Haberman reported this week that both RUDY GIULIANI and his son ANDREW have also been pressuring Trump to support Greitens.
Guilfoyle wrote in a text that the notion that she and Trump are at odds is false.
Guilfoyle IS annoying, that’s for sure. But I think the real news buried in this little family saga is that one of the reasons Trump doesn’t like Greitans (it can’t really be the sex scandal — I mean …) is because he’s loosely affiliated with Mike Pence. This grudge is strong.
By the way, Junior will dump Kim in a heartbeat if daddy tells him to. I’m not sure she would care. Greitans is more her type of guy anyway. Recall:
Her 2018 dismissal from Fox News, reportedly over sexual harassment allegations, make her a pretty lousy bridge between women and the president, who has himself been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and rape, all of which he has forcefully denied. But new details about her alleged firing reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer on Thursday would seem to disqualify her entirely.
According to Mayer, Guilfoyle was abruptly booted from Fox News’ The Five well before her contract was up after her former assistant filed a complaint alleging she “was frequently required to work at Guilfoyle’s New York apartment while the Fox host displayed herself naked, and was shown photographs of the genitalia of men with whom Guilfoyle had had sexual relations”
The draft complaint also alleged that Guilfoyle spoke incessantly and luridly about her sex life, and on one occasion demanded a massage of her bare thighs; other times, she said, Guilfoyle told her to submit to a Fox employee’s demands for sexual favors, encouraged her to sleep with wealthy and powerful men, asked her to critique her naked body, demanded that she share a room with her on business trips, required her to sleep over at her apartment, and exposed herself to her, making her feel deeply uncomfortable.
When the network began looking into the allegations in 2017 as part of its broader internal inquiry into sexual misconduct, Mayer reported, Guilfoyle offered her assistant money to keep quiet and threatened her with retaliation if she spoke up. The former assistant, who was not identified in the New Yorker’s report, was eventually paid more than $4 million by Fox News over the matter, and Guilfoyle was sacked.
It’s hard to see how hiring this woman benefits Greitans but any affiliation with Trump, is better than nothing, I guess, even if they all remind people every day that they are sexual assaulters. In fact, I guess that’s a selling point among the MAGAs.