Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $60,000 fee, the 6 January hearings, and the difficulty of changing people’s minds

It was not, by any standards, a speech to echo through the ages.

When she took to the stage of the “Stop the Steal” rally on the morning of 6 January 2021, Kimberly Guilfoyle – former Fox News presenter and Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend – treated the still-gathering crowd at the Ellipse in DC to her usual spiel. A couple of minutes of yelling platitudes about then-President Trump, wrapped up with her now famous battle cry: “The best is yet to come!” Then she handed the microphone to Don Jr, exited stage left and that was it.

None of which would have been very memorable but for one intriguing detail that has emerged from the edges of the public congressional hearings into the events of 6 January: Kimberly Guilfoyle was apparently paid $60,000 for her brief contribution. The revelation came from Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren in an interview following the second in a series of bombshell public hearings into Trump’s multifaceted and increasingly desperate efforts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election.

Lofgren seemed to suggest Guilfoyle’s payment came out of the $250m Trump had quickly raised from small dollar donors by pushing the “big lie” that he had been cheated out of victory, something he almost certainly knew was untrue. As the committee had heard earlier, the fundraising campaign declared that it was aiming to fight the election result in the courts – but the money was discreetly directed into Trump’s political action committee. The hearings have been trying to demonstrate that the outgoing president was happy to grift his supporters with claims he knew to be false to fill his own treasure chest. (He has denied this.)

Maggie Haberman, a New York Times journalist who has followed Trump for decades, reported that people in his circle were “aghast” at claims money sent in by financially strapped supporters – often as little as $17 – ended up in Guilfoyle’s pocket, just for introducing her boyfriend. Later, CNN and the Washington Post reported that her fee actually came from an organisation called Turning Point Action, run by Charlie Kirk, via a donation from the heiress to the Publix grocery store chain. Neither they nor Guilfoyle made any immediate comment or explained why they may have thought Guilfoyle needed to be paid anything at all.

Even if the money didn’t come from Trump’s misleading fundraising, the allegation remains damaging – for a member of a family that routinely denounces “elites” and claims to stand for the financially left-behind to be accepting $60,000 for less than three minutes of “work” is bound to raise hackles. (The median average annual income in the US was $61,417 for men and $50,982 in 2020, according to the Census Bureau.) Video of Guilfoyle grinning and dancing backstage on 6 January suddenly made a new kind of sense: if the Democrats are right, she had plenty to be happy about that day.

The claim about her payment goes to two of the key questions about the hearings: will they change any minds, and will Trump face any criminal charges as a result of the wider accusations? (Lofgren was clear she was not suggesting any payment to Guilfoyle was unlawful.)

There’s been wall-to-wall TV coverage of the hearings so far, with one key exception – Fox News, probably the clearest conduit to Trump supporters around the country who have a hodge-podge of theories to clear their hero of any responsibility (it was a tourist trip, it was antifa in disguise, Trump tried to stop it, and so on).

The absence of Trump-supporting congressmen on the panel to try to sabotage the hearings – you can imagine the likes of Jim Jordan, excluded by the Democrats, shouting, “Hunter’s laptop! Hillary’s emails! Gas prices! Benghazi!” at every opportunity – is a double-edged sword. It allows the panel to clearly set out the threads of Trump’s multi-pronged conspiracy without interruption, but it allows critics to accuse it of being one-sided (even though the most damning witnesses are from Trump’s own inner circle).

So will it change any minds? It looks unlikely. Across the US, voters are still happily choosing and electing candidates who back the “big lie”, suggesting there’s no imminent chance of Trump fans having a sudden Damascene conversion. As for criminal charges, committee vice chair Liz Cheney has suggested there may be a formal recommendation at the end of the process. Attorney general Merrick Garland has said he and others at the Department of Justice (DoJ) are watching closely.

But does the DoJ have the stomach for criminally prosecuting a former (and perhaps future) president? Trump has already had a magic run of evading responsibility for his actions – cleared in two impeachment trials; off the hook despite a damning report by Robert Mueller; boasts about sexually assaulting women quickly forgotten.

It’s not impossible that this time might be different. But history so far suggests his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it is right on the money.

Yours,

Phil Thomas

Assistant editor (US)