Kimberly Guilfoyle Begged MAGA Allies to Save Her Job—to No Avail

After Kimberly Guilfoyle was fired on live television last week, she reportedly begged MAGA allies to rescue her, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, and U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack. None of them did.

The ex–ambassador to Greece was unceremoniously dumped from the Trump administration during then–White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first and last press briefing on October 13, following a Wall Street Journal report that Guilfoyle had engaged in pay-to-play schemes, including offering a MAGA donor special access to Trump administration officials in exchange for covering her $100,000 credit card bill. The donor, Eric Deters, has since filed a defamation lawsuit against her.

After Zacharia announced to the world that Guilfoyle had been asked to resign, Guilfoyle went off the deep end. She considered rescinding her resignation, and begged Hegseth and Barrack to speak to President Donald Trump on her behalf. Barrack reportedly tried, but obviously made no impact on the president’s decision. Guilfoyle also allegedly asked 95-year-old Murdoch—chairman emeritus of News Corp, which, among other things, owns Fox News and the Journal—to limit the Journal’s unfavorable coverage. He refused.

“Kimberly was spiraling, calling people and suggesting, ‘Maybe I don’t resign,’” an official familiar with the situation told PunchUp Wednesday. “I don’t think she was serious, but she was in her feelings last night. She was processing what had happened—but not very well.”

As fewer and fewer MAGA allies and conservative influencers agreed to take Guilfoyle’s calls, many scrubbed the internet of any evidence that they ever knew her. In Greece, where Guilfoyle remains ambassador until the end of the month, her authority has dissolved.

“The people in the embassy are no longer afraid of her. Nobody is listening to her or taking her orders anymore,” a source in Greece told the Daily Mail. “She is all alone in that house, screaming at her old staff that they are leakers, and waiting to get kicked out. It’s an insane situation.”

President Donald Trump on Monday attacked a federal judge who blocked his lawless construction on a public golf course in Washington, D.C.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump raged against District Judge Ana Reyes, who barred the National Parks Service from cutting down any more trees on the East Potomac Golf Links. The tree clearing is part of a plan to transform the public course into an exclusive, high-end one.

“The United States Department of Interior wants to take a terrible and very unsafe golf course, and make it into a great, safe, and prestigious golf course. They have an absolute right to do so. It’s as simple as that!” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s meltdown comes after Reyes refused the Department of Justice’s request that she recuse herself, over the fact that she yelled at a government attorney last week. A furious Reyes slammed the Trump administration for giving last-minute notice that it would resume cutting down trees during the previous holiday weekend. When Justice Department attorney Marissa Piropato argued the actions over the weekend were “not a renovation,” Reyes tore into her excuse as “preposterous,” “doublespeak,” and “completely beyond the pale.”

“The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday. “The tapes have been blocked from usage by the judge.”

The Trump administration’s determination to proceed with expensive demolition projects without receiving a whiff of congressional or legal approval would make anyone a little crazy.

CBS News editor in chief and anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss urged her newsroom to cover right-wing conspiracy theories regarding Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed. 

Semafor reported that Weiss was particularly focused on El-Sayed’s (nonexistent) ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and 9/11, and Talarico’s (also nonexistent) trip to a mental health facility. El-Sayed, an Egyptian American Muslim, has denounced the Muslim Brotherhood numerous times amid Islamophobic attacks from both the right wing and the Democratic establishment. 

Weiss “personally advocated” for a deeper dive into El-Sayed’s personal history, and she even faced internal pushback for her insistence that the newsroom inaccurately tie El-Sayed to the 9/11 terror attacks, as she published an August headline reading “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

“Anyone discussing this race needs to be very careful about putting the name of a man who would be America’s first Muslim senator next to ‘9/11’ on very thin grounds. It reads like a dog whistle,” Atlantic journalist Helen Lewis wrote at the time.  

As for Talarico, his whole “mental health” episode was thoroughly disproven as a smear campaign, even though Weiss thought it was worth spending time on. It’s notable that both Talarico and El-Sayed are progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, something that Weiss, her pro-Israel The Free Press blog, and CBS have covered with extreme bias. 

This is not the first time Weiss has experienced internal pushback for inserting herself into stories. She initially pulled the plug on former 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega’s CECOT megaprison story in El Salvador, and was “very, very hands-on” with a story covering Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. 

A Republican political operative tried to trap the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, into a viral “gotcha” moment. He ended up becoming the story instead.

On Saturday, a man posing as a young Michigan voter named Tommy at a town hall in Caro, Michigan, asked El-Sayed if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed, sensing the bigoted motive behind the question, immediately disavowed the question, and pressed Tommy on why he was asking him specifically that question.

Tommy was evasive, repeatedly saying that he had not heard El-Sayed disavow the organization, and El-Sayed pointed out that Tommy was assuming that El-Sayed had a “higher order allegiance” than the Constitution. El-Sayed asked Tommy if he would “disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country.” Tommy said he wouldn’t, and El-Sayed called him out for failing to understand the Constitution.

El-Sayed’s campaign quickly turned the exchange into a video clip, which subsequently went viral. As of Monday morning, the clip has 13 million views on X alone.

Not surprisingly, later reporting revealed that Tommy is actually Thomas Teepell, the operations director for Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley and the son of Timmy Teepell, who used to work for former Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal.

The whole Q&A appears to be part of a Republican influencer campaign to try to embarrass Abdul El-Sayed. Earlier this month, The Michigan Daily reported that the conservative PAC America Next offered College Republicans $200 to boo El-Sayed at a town hall in Flint and ask provocative questions.

The Teepells are involved in a similar campaign, with Thomas’s father’s organization, Breakthrough LLC, receiving $250,000 from Jindal’s dark money organization for influencer marketing against Abdul El-Sayed. The attempt has clearly backfired, as El-Sayed turned the exchange into a positive clip for his senatorial campaign.

Tech CEO Elon Musk reportedly approached President Trump on slowing down his Starlink communications service in Ukraine earlier this week, contradicting both Musk’s statement that it was Trump’s idea and Trump’s statement that he has no idea who did it.

The Telegraph, citing four anonymous sources, reports that Musk proposed slowing down Starshield, the military-grade version of Musk’s Starlink satellite communications system, and that Trump agreed. The move hindered Ukraine’s drone defenses of Russian attacks, and came while Trump is upset with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s decision to target Russian oil refineries and infrastructure after Trump lifted sanctions on Russian fuel. After Ukraine’s Starlink access was restricted, Russia launched a massive aerial attack on Wednesday that continued into the next morning.

Shortly afterward, Musk directed blame at the Trump administration, saying that “Starshield systems are owned and controlled” by the federal government and “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” An unnamed source told The Telegraph that after the “night of carnage” in Kyiv, Musk was reportedly scared that he would face a backlash from consumers in Europe.

“[Musk] tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it. The reality is that they were both in it,” the source said.

On Friday afternoon, Trump was asked by a reporter outside of the White House who was responsible for hindering Starlink, him or Musk. He claimed ignorance.

“Well, I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon, and from what I understand, it’s the same as it’s always been,” Trump said.