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Kimberly Guilfoyle, the recently defenestrated and soon-to-be-former Ambassador to Greece, has that stench about her of third-string corruption, the type that is hated by the righteous and sneered at by the corrupt. In Trumpworld setting up your own bribery-faucet meme coin and making billions is a baller move. Begging a MAGA-adjacent huckster to settle your Amex bill on the strength of once being Don Jr’s fiancée is sad. “Steal a little and they throw ya in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king …” But we seem quite suddenly to be seeing MAGA world become quite leaky. That’s not what we’re used to — what we’re used to is mammoth kinds of Trump and MAGA corruption more or less in plain sight. But now various MAGA capos are accusing each other, or dropping dimes on each other, as the reality of a possible Blue Wave or more comes into view.
Another only-in-MAGA corruption story hit this afternoon. Or, I guess, alleged corruption story since it’s not altogether clear which player in the story is the crook or more of a crook.
Alina Habba, once a mere parking garage lawyer from New Jersey has ridden the MAGA wave to a marriage with a Turkish nepo-oligarch named Turhan Mildon, with a dash of cradle robbing mixed in. It appears Mildon, 29, may be a new character in the Trump Cinematic Universe (TCU). Wish them the best: they tied the knot last month in a $10 million wedding at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. Mildon and longtime Trump fixer Ric Grenell seem to have crossed paths in the Venezuala corruption feeding frenzy after the US decapitation strike that brought down the Maduro regime. I can’t make full sense of the details. But Mildon seems to have been tight in the Maduro world and needed to get in good fast with MAGA to hold on to his position and assets in the country. Luckily for him, he’d struck up a romance with Habba around this time and he was spreading money around MAGA world to further secure his position. Now Habba and Mildon are claiming that Mildon wrote a $6 million check to the Kennedy Center, then under the patronship of Ric Grenell. This seems to have been part of some broader business package deal to buy his way into MAGA world. The Axios piece that reports this refers to the check not being deposited. But at least the accusation seems to be that Grenell funneled it somewhere else and the Kennedy Center never got it.
I struggled to follow the ins and outs of the story. Here’s the Axios piece. And here’s the Times piece from Monday which goes even more in-depth. Precisely who is telling the truth here and who is the bigger crook — I have no idea. But that’s not really the point. The more salient issue is that we’re starting to see signs that as the 20 months of no-rules corruption wilding might be coming to an end, everyone is starting to turn on everyone else.
These interweaving stories remind us of the sheer breadth of Trump-era corruption. The Times piece linked above gives just the beginnings of a view into the scale of corruption emerging out of Trump’s semi- or de facto colonial administration of Venezuala. Even half-exiled players in the MAGA world like Guilfoyle could pull down hundreds of thousands or up to a million in bribes from a single favor seeker. It’s everywhere.
I’m not saying or pretending that the jig is up for Trump or that accountability is right around the corner. (We’ll get to that very important question in another post.) But there’s no question scrutiny is going to go up significantly next year, even if Democrats only claim control of the House. So there will definitely be a battening down of hatches going into next year. And the battlements will be erected around Trump and members of the Trump family, not just every random member of the MAGA world who tried to get rich off the Trump gravy train.
Trump is no fan of self-dealing and corruption, unless he’s involved or unless he gets a taste. There have always been some rules in Trump World. Don’t attract too much attention. Don’t be a women. Don’t make Trump think you’re making money off his name. That’s his gig. There’s no doubt that lots of people are going to get pardons over the next couple years. But not everyone. And Trump won’t appreciate people ginning up scandal and corruption attention that he didn’t get a piece of.
As I said, I’m not making any big claims here about future accountability for anyone. But the rules for Trump-era corruption are about the change. There probably won’t be as much room on the island in 2027 as there was in 2025 and 2026. And there’s going to be a lot of knives out and backbiting and back-stabbing and lots of people will want to get their enemies or maybe even their friends kicked off island because that’s better than it being them.
