MaddowBlog
The White House has been willing to part with beleaguered officials, but men appear to have fared far better than women.
As the scandals surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle grew more serious, a foundational question proved unavoidable: Would the normal rules of American politics force her from her job?
The public didn’t have to wait too long for an answer.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s latest reporting, shortly after the newspaper reported that Guilfoyle had solicited $100,000 from a Trump donor in the run-up to her confirmation hearing last year, she “reached out to White House officials to say the text messages were AI generated.”
Evidently, that fanciful story proved unpersuasive. Just six days after that Journal report was published, the White House announced that Donald Trump expected the ambassador’s resignation. Naturally, Guilfoyle granted the president’s request and said she was stepping down.
“I didn’t like what I read,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday afternoon when asked about the outgoing ambassador. He soon after pretended to barely know Guilfoyle, adding, “She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago.”
Guilfoyle is hardly the only official to be ousted after proving inconvenient to the administration. She joins a list that also includes former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The pattern offers a timely reminder: The Trump administration is willing to part with officials who find themselves under a cloud of scandal, but men tend to fare far better than women.
The point isn’t that Guilfoyle, Bondi, Noem, Chavez-DeRemer and Gabbard were somehow treated unfairly. On the contrary, they all deserved to be removed from office.
But when then-White House national security adviser Mike Waltz ran into trouble, he received a golden parachute and became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. When the administration grew wary of then-IRS chief Billy Long, it also rewarded him with an ambassadorship. (Yes, Noem was technically named a “special envoy” for the Shield of the Americas, but the entity barely seems to exist in any meaningful sense.)
In the meantime, other prominent figures such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick careen from one brutal headline to the next, all while receiving little more than pats on the back from the president.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
