Dating Donald Trump Jr. has been good for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s bank account — though all the money in the world wouldn’t be enough for me some people to cohabitate with the former president’s oft-amped up adult son/steak pitchman. In April 2020, Huff Post revealed that both Guilfoyle and Lara Trump (Eric’s wife) were being secretly paid $180,000 apiece through the Trump campaign. Presumably to continue making fools of themselves by doing things like this:
Perhaps the best is not yet to come for Kimberly Guilfoyle.pic.twitter.com/3uQiYjQdQ8
— The Recount (@therecount) January 12, 2022
But the Trump gravy train reportedly didn’t end with that significant other salary. As Deadline reports, Guilfoyle was paid a whopping $60,000 to introduce her future father-in-law at the Stop the Steal rally on the morning of January 6, 2021 — the event which preceded the attacks on the Capitol — and people close to the disgraced former president don’t seem to be happy about it.
“I want to say two things about that,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told CNN. “People in Trump world are sharing that clip, they are aghast that this is the amount of money she got for a speech to introduce her boyfriend. They couldn’t really get over — I had one former adviser say to me, essentially, these were folks raising money in small amounts from retirees telling them this was going to some legal fight that didn’t really happen, and instead Kimberly Guilfoyle is getting paid.”
California congresswoman Zoe Lofgren shared the details of this financial windfall while chatting with Jake Tapper on CNN. The Democratic lawmaker estimates that Guilfoyle’s mini-speech lasted about two-and-a-half minutes, meaning that she was paid $400 per second for her work that infamous morning. “I’m not saying it is a crime,” Lofgren told Tapper, “but it’s a grift.”
The information was part of a discussion about Trump’s fundraising in the wake of the 2020 election. The lame duck president reportedly received about $250 million in donations from supporters under the guise that the money was being used to help Trump prove there was voter fraud. (Spoiler alert: There wasn’t.) In reality, much of that money was shoveled directly into the Save America PAC, which helped pay for events like the January 6 rally — and Guilfoyle’s ridiculously high speaking fee.
“People were conned by the former president,” Lofgren said. “They were conned into believing that the election had been stolen and that they should go to the Capitol once the president asked them to. I think the average donation from those … false email requests was something like $17. These weren’t rich people. They were conned by the president. The big lie was also a big ripoff.”
(Via Deadline)