After half-heartedly including some actual professionals in his first administration, Donald Trump is now served almost exclusively by sycophants and family members. The president has made clear that he cares about loyalty more than qualifications, but the astonishing incompetence and corruption of many of his appointees raise an obvious question: What does it take to get fired by Trump’s White House?

Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation yesterday as ambassador to Greece provides some clues. Guilfoyle has been accused of blatant corruption both before and during her time as an envoy. She denies these allegations, but her resignation—which the White House requested—isn’t really about corruption. The idea that Guilfoyle, and only Guilfoyle, crossed some sort of previously unseen corruption red line is laughable. If ethical and legal questions, including the now-moribund standard of “appearances of impropriety,” were grounds for dismissal in this administration, Trump would have already shed several other members of his team.

Rather, Guilfoyle was pushed out because she was an embarrassment. She overstepped her bounds, tried to trade on the president’s name, and then made the administration look bad when she got caught. Also, she is a woman, and in this administration, self-dealing is mostly a man’s game.

Indeed, by comparison with the charges leveled at others—including against the president himself, who seems utterly unconcerned with notions such as “emoluments”—Guilfoyle is decidedly a small-timer. This past spring, for example, the Financial Times reported that a broker for Pete Hegseth attempted to make a big investment in defense industries just before the Iran war, raising suspicions of insider trading. FBI Director Kash Patel has been accused of using government money as a slush fund to pay improper bonuses to his favorites within the Bureau. “Border Czar” Tom Homan was caught on audio in 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash (wrapped in a Cava food bag, always the sign of a deal on the up-and-up) from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives, and yet he remains in his job. Hegseth and Homan deny any wrongdoing; Patel and the FBI have offered no comment or explanation. And the journalist Dexter Filkins recently described Trump’s son-in-law and roving minister-without-portfolio Jared Kushner as representative of “a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth.”

[Read: Trump’s team of mercenaries]

Guilfoyle may have been a relative piker among giants in the grift game, but her real sin was the pathetic and humiliating nature of her behavior. (Even Homan managed not to seem quite so grubby when reportedly accepting a bag of greenbacks.) Her messages to a Trump donor asking for money to help pay her huge credit-card bills are cringe-inducing. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote to the Trump supporter Eric Deters when asking him to wire a cool $100,000 directly into her American Express account in July 2025, just before her confirmation hearings.

Worse, she continually told Deters to stop writing things down and just contact her on Signal. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she said. This was apparently Guilfoyle’s version of the infamous “Stringer Bell rule,” named for a character from the television series The Wire who dressed down one of his drug-dealing accomplices for being stupid enough to keep written notes on a criminal conspiracy. The problem is that she, too, violated that rule: She made her requests to Deters to stop writing things down in writing.

Deters, unsurprisingly, kept all the messages. Guilfoyle, he asserts, offered him access to the Trump administration. “I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” he claims she told him. When she didn’t deliver, he warned Guilfoyle and White House officials earlier this month that he would go public with their correspondence and then made good on that threat.

The newly minted ambassador, meanwhile, was flitting about southeastern Europe in the company of Greek tycoons. But again, rather than enjoy the perks of her job in discreet luxury, she bragged about her connections to these wealthy men and tried to present herself as some sort of made woman from the inner Trump orbit who had the juice to get things done.

According to The Wall Street Journal, she went to Davos in January 2026 and was excluded from a dinner being held for Eric Trump. She decided to pressure an American businessman to help her get in. “You know, I can deliver the world to you. Which you deserve,” she said. (This time, she was caught on audio, rather than by text message.) “I’m going to make you a lot of fucking money,” she told the American. She also raged about the impudence of the dinner’s Greek hostess. “You don’t have the fucking U.S., you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my fucking ass.”

Again, Trump Sr. has no problem with F-bombs; he deploys them regularly. He has no problem with money grabs while in public office; he has enriched himself while president and has explicitly or implicitly blessed similar efforts by other subordinates to profit from their positions. But he apparently draws a line when his son’s former fiancée does not show proper appreciation for the courtesy of being stashed in Athens—Athens!—and then lands in the newspapers looking like an aging waitress cadging tips from marks in a casino. Honey, just put it on the tray. Don’t tell my manager, and I’ll get you to the good poker table.

[David Frum: Trump’s last loyal constituency]

Guilfoyle was once so tight with the Trumps that she was given a prime-time slot to fawn over the president during the 2020 GOP convention. It was a disastrous, over-the-top performance, but Trump loved it, reportedly calling her “my Kimberly” and comparing her to the former Argentine first lady Eva Perón. Earlier this year, Trump said of his emissary to Greece: “Kimberly Guilfoyle has been my friend for a long time. I love calling her Kimber-lay. That’s my little pet name, right? But you are the greatest, and I heard they love you over there.”

But over the past several days, the president saw bad publicity about this demanding, middle-aged woman, thrown over by his son for a younger wife—as Trump himself has done to previous spouses—trying to profit off his presidency while making a fool of herself and encouraging more bad press about corruption just before the midterm elections. Guilfoyle had to go, and Trump jettisoned her quickly and coldly. “She wasn’t a member of my family,” the president said yesterday. “She, uh, I guess dated my son a long time ago.”

“Dated”? I guess? She was in line for years to become the president’s daughter-in-law, married to his first-born son. Now she’s just some dame one of his kids used to know.

Guilfoyle didn’t get it. All she had to do was stay out of trouble. But that was too hard for her, and now she’s learned that making money off this presidency means following some rules. Don’t be too obvious; don’t embarrass the boss; don’t get caught if you can help it. And especially, don’t be an older woman.

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The scenario is right out of a Stephen King novel: At a medical lab stashed away in a remote Siberian city, a pretty young technician was exposed to a deadly pathogen. She died, the lab went into lockdown, and soon rumors emerged that the Russian security services were on the scene. Now the world waits to see whether some monstrous microbe is going to make its way out of Russia’s forests.

What’s going on in Russia is bad, but—at least so far—not that bad. We know that someone working at a research institute that studies various forms of plague has died of pneumonia, which suggests that she mishandled a sample of pneumonic plague. That’s about it. Medical observers are rightly concerned: Pneumonic plague is nasty stuff. But it’s also not some unknown bug; a few hundred cases appear every year, and it is easily cured with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly enough. Counterintuitively, the pathogen’s deadliness limits the disease’s ability to spread: It kills its victims before they can infect too many other people. (ln this case, the remote location of the Russian facility might also help to contain any outbreak.)

Nevertheless, the situation in Siberia raises unsettling questions, and international experts, along with U.S. diplomats, are asking for more transparency. What kind of experiments are being conducted at this lab—the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East—and are they possibly related to biological warfare? Did the researcher die of a known variant of the pneumonic plague, or some new, deadlier strain? Why are the Russian authorities reportedly quarantining hundreds of people?

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

Don’t expect honest answers from the Russians about any of this. The main source of information about this incident has been Russia’s Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, known by an abbreviation, Rospotrebnadzor (“ras-pah-treb-nah-dzor”). The name is rather anodyne, but the many duties of this organization include supervision of some of Russia’s biological-research institutes. For years it was part of the Russian Ministry of Health, but in 2012 it was reassigned and now reports directly to the Russian central government, elevating its importance and its broader mandate to act as Russia’s main overseer of epidemiological research.

Not that Rospotrebnadzor has been all that helpful in making sense of the crisis in Irkutsk. Regarding the death of Darya Shipilova, the lab worker, for example, it said: “No micro-organisms associated with the employee’s professional duties were detected in samples taken from the patient,” a careful construction that says almost nothing. What were the employee’s professional duties? What organisms were detected? Shipilova died of something; what was it?

Rospotrebnadzor said in an official statement that the woman died of “pneumonia of unknown cause,” but the region’s governor, Igor Kobzev, might have let the cat out of the bag when he revealed that Anna Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor, traveled to Irkutsk last week. CNN reports that Kobzev posted on Telegram that she came to town for an “extraordinary meeting of the regional sanitary and anti-epidemic commission,” in connection with “a suspected case of a regional resident with a particularly dangerous infection.”

A U.S. State Department spokesperson over the weekend encouraged “Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly.” Good luck with that. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov closed the noninformation loop with this helpful advice: “The lead agency with expertise in this area is Rospotrebnadzor. People should rely on its official statements and disregard rumors, speculation, and so on.”

One innocent explanation is that the Irkutsk institute is trying to come up with better ways to prevent plague, and someone mishandled dangerous material—and the Russians, with their mania for secrecy, are making it all seem more ominous than necessary by clamping down on any further information. But maybe something more ominous is, in fact, going on. Dr. Ashish Jha, the former dean of Brown University’s school of public health and a former member of the Biden administration’s COVID-response team, pointed out in a thread on X on Sunday that “Russia is well known to have an active military biological weapons program.” He additionally noted reports (so far unconfirmed) that units of the Russian security services have been escorting vehicles to local hospitals.

Moscow has a long history with biological-weapons research going back to the Cold War. The United States unilaterally renounced research into biological-warfare agents back in 1969; the Soviets signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, but in reality they never abandoned such programs. The Russians claimed in 1992 to have ended those efforts, but they are currently expanding a sizable facility that had once been used for biological-warfare research. (The Russian Ministry of Defense, predictably, has no comment on these construction activities.)

If the Irkutsk incident turns out to be the result of an accident in a Russian biological-warfare lab, it won’t be the first time. Back in 1979, the Soviet Union tried desperately to cover up an outbreak of anthrax in a city near the Ural Mountains, Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg). They nearly got away with it.

In the fall of 1979 and early 1980, a Russian-language émigré newspaper based in what was then West Germany ran reports about some kind of germ-related disaster in the Urals after an explosion at a lab. Evidence that dribbled in from Sverdlovsk over time, including the fact that the Soviet minister of defense personally visited the city, suggested that something big had indeed gone down. Descriptions of the illness spreading through the area pointed to anthrax, and in the early ’80s, the Americans—this was during the Cold War, after all—loudly accused the Soviets of working on an anthrax weapon.

[Read: How DNA evidence confirmed a Soviet cover-up of an anthrax accident]

The Soviets pretended to be deeply offended at such an accusation, and explained that the deaths and illnesses were the result of people eating tainted meat—it was all just a simple case of food poisoning. (After all, what nation doesn’t blockade roads in a major city and send their military chief to check on some locals eating bad beef?) The Soviet explanation was hooey, of course; a defector who worked in Soviet bioweapons programs, Ken Alibek, later theorized that the lab in Sverdlovsk making the anthrax had neglected to replace a filter and had ended up venting spores into the area.

Thirteen years would pass after the outbreak before anyone in Moscow admitted the truth. In 1992, then–Russian President Boris Yeltsin told the Americans that Soviet biowarfare experts had indeed been doing anthrax research, and that these experts had repeatedly lied to him about the 1979 event. The official death toll from the Sverdlovsk accident stands at 68, but no one will ever know the true numbers: The KGB at the time immediately seized and destroyed important evidence, including medical records. One might think the Soviets were chastened by this experience, but one would be wrong: After the Sverdlovsk facility was closed, the Soviets built another one in Kazakhstan, where they reportedly worked on strains of anthrax even more virulent than the stuff released in Sverdlovsk.

If something terrible has happened in Irkutsk, don’t count on the Russians coming clean about it anytime soon. Russia is led by an aggressive dictator who has been making war in Europe for four years, and Moscow’s incomplete explanations about what’s happening in Siberia cannot be trusted. The possibility that the Russians are working on existentially dangerous biological weapons is one more challenge to American—and global—security.