What happened
Shortly before her confirmation as President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle “reached out to a Trump donor with an urgent request” for $100,000, “in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail,” The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Guilfoyle (pictured above), a “MAGA icon” and former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., “offered to use her sway” with top administration officials to help the donor, Eric Deters, with “personal tax and legal issues,” the Journal said, citing Deters and their Signal chats.

Who said what
“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” Guilfoyle told Deters on Signal in July 2025. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express.” When Deters texted an image of a letter that said he’d paid her “$300,000 over the years” and “not received one favor,” she admonished him to “stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous.” 

Deters didn’t make the $100,000 payment to Guilfoyle, but their text history “raises new questions about the activities of one of America’s most high-profile ambassadors,” the Journal said. Guilfoyle is already “under fire from Democrats” over her “promotion of a Greek company whose lobbyist traveled with her to meetings with governments across the Balkans.” 

What next?
Guilfoyle, through her lawyer, “disputed the authenticity of the messages,” the Journal said. But they “declined to provide specifics.”

What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday said it would be a “great idea” to carve out “a sort of Camp David retreat” at his golf club in West Palm Beach, publicly embracing a proposal already under consideration by Florida officials. The plan, submitted by Trump’s lawyer Harvey Oyer to Palm Beach County last month, “calls for a parcel of the private club to be designated a permanent, official sanctuary for foreign leaders and future U.S. presidents,” The Washington Post said. 

Who said what
“Just as Camp David, Windsor Castle or the Élysée Palace are known worldwide, so too will the Presidential Golf Course in Palm Beach County,” Oyer said in a letter to the county. He described it as a “gift” from Trump to future presidents. 

Under the proposal, the club would “pay to build a new presidential lodging” and work with the government to “provide free access to the federal government,” The Associated Press said. It would “comingle the presidency with Trump’s business ventures beyond his time in office.” The Trump family company would continue to operate the club and “would probably benefit from more business if it becomes a site of long-lasting presidential importance,” the Post said.

What next?
Palm Beach County, which leases the land to Trump, is in “contact with the General Services Administration” and has “begun plans to identify a parcel for the project,” said The Washington Sun. 

The killing of a woman in Okinawa has sparked an outcry across Japan and inflamed long-simmering tensions over the U.S. military’s presence on the island. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi urged U.S. authorities to “enforce stricter discipline” of their troops in light of the “brutal and heinous” killing. 

Devin Ballard, a 20-year-old U.S. Marine, was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of strangling Anna Yagi, 39, whose body was found at a hotel in Naha, Okinawa’s largest city. He denied the allegations. Ballard will remain in Japanese custody and, if convicted, could face life in prison or the death penalty. 

The incident, and the protests it sparked, are grimly familiar. Crimes involving U.S. troops stationed on Okinawa have been a constant source of tension between Tokyo and Washington. Most of the 54,000 troops in Japan, and 70% of their military facilities, are based on the island.

In 1995, when three American servicemen raped a 12-year-old girl, tens of thousands of people protested for months, intensifying “anti-U.S. sentiment” in Okinawa, said The Guardian. And when a teenage girl was raped by a serviceman in 2024 — one of four sexual crimes linked to military personnel that year — the “anger erupted again.”

For decades, the people of Okinawa “have “expressed countless times their opposition to and anger at the U.S. military presence,” said Kozue Akibayashi, a professor of global studies at Kyoto’s Doshisha University, to Al Jazeera. But Tokyo has “chosen the U.S.-Japan alliance over the safety and lives and voices” of its people.