By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, October 08, 2026
No rule of thumb is foolproof but this one will seldom
fail you: If you run across someone on social media with an image of Greek
antiquity as his avatar, his politics trend fascist.
Although the so-called “RETVRN bros” pay lip service to
the beauty of classical art and architecture, it’s not ancient Greek and Roman
culture per se that attracts them. It’s the tribal bragging rights that culture
supplies them. They don’t want to study the Parthenon; they want to point to
the Parthenon and say, “Let’s see those Indians produce something that
magnificent.” (Er.)
To right-wing postliberals forever fulminating against “importing
the third world,” antiquity symbolizes the innate superiority of white
Europeans and of premodern societies in which men ruled without competition
from women. There’s a reason “RETVRN bros” are indeed almost always bros.
So when the secretary of state in our very postliberal
administration visited Athens this week, he was almost obliged to deliver a
speech about ancient Greece and Western civilization with the
Acropolis itself as his backdrop.
Marco Rubio has spent a decade groping toward some sort
of syncretic merger of the Church of Trump and the Enlightenment liberalism of
the Founders. It’s a fool’s errand, but he keeps on plugging: My colleague John
McCormack flagged the then-senator’s attempt at “synthesis” all the way back in 2018, around the time Rubio
began publishing tortured op-eds arguing that nationalism is really just
Jeffersonian democracy by another name.
“President Trump is right to embrace the label
‘nationalist,’ because a true American nationalism isn’t about a national
identity based on race, religion or ethnicity,” Rubio wrote that year. “Instead, it is based on our identity as a
nation committed to the idea that all people are created equal, with a
God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That is not
what nationalism is, as any Indian-bashing “RETVRN bro” would tell you.
Transparently, Rubio was trying to nudge the scumbag movement to which he
belongs in a more virtuous direction by smuggling liberal ideals into
postliberalism.
But as tends to happen when you mix dog s—t with ice
cream, the final product ends up tasting more like one ingredient than the
other.
That was also the case yesterday in Greece, where Rubio
gave a defense of first-world culture at the very moment Americans were being
reminded—courtesy of the U.S. ambassador—how brazenly third-world the Trump
administration is.
RETVRN.
I found his speech insulting, but I confess to having read it in a
spirit of skepticism.
It wasn’t just the bad vibes of a Trump stooge enlisting
antiquity’s most celebrated ruins for a “RETVRN” diatribe that irked me. It was
knowing that it was probably written by (sigh, former Dispatch intern)
Nate Hochman, one of many “based” young right-wingers who seem more comfortable with white nationalists than a decent
person should be.
In a third-world government, those affiliations are no
bar to becoming chief speechwriter for the most powerful diplomat on Earth.
They might be a credential.
Rubio’s remarks can be summarized this way: If his
syncretic right-wing project was originally about trying to smuggle liberalism
into postliberalism, it’s now more the other way around.
One might think a speech delivered in the cradle of
Western civilization about antiquity’s influence on America would pay extended
tribute to liberalism, specifically democracy and the spirit of inquiry that
animated the ancient Greeks and Enlightenment thinkers. Rubio does acknowledge
both. (Greece “was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science,
our medicine. Our philosophy, ethics, and religion.”) But he’s keen to
emphasize that the truly important link between our two societies goes “far,
far deeper.”
That would be the concept of thumos, “the fire of
passion, strength, courage, pride,” which he calls “the heart of a great
civilization.” Again and again he luxuriates in how that spirit motivated the
Greeks to compete ruthlessly with each other. “They organized all of civic life
around contest, ambition, competition. … The classical Greek city was an arena
for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through
perpetual struggle—to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining
to inch ever closer to perfection. … They were filled with intense passion and
rivalry and faction and conflict.”
Greatness requires ruthlessness and factional
conflict. That’s a very nationalist-friendly lesson to draw about a
society whose greatness is typically attributed to its ability, through
democracy and reasoned deliberation, to restrain man’s primitive impulse toward
brute tribal dominance. And no wonder: Eventually Rubio shows his cards.
Under President
Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic
pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains,
to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance
of the technologies and industries of the future.
The whole point of the speech is to position ruthless
Trumpian nationalism—“the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” might makes
right—as the rightful civic heir to ancient Greece.
In fact, among Rubio’s various complaints about the
cultural bequests from antiquity that the modern West has taken for granted,
this one is central: “The word ‘nationalism’ became a dirty word. And so we
tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places,
we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.” The
reason “nationalism” became a dirty word isn’t because European leftists are
culturally myopic ingrates, though, as Rubio well knows. It’s because nationalists
murdered and subjugated millions in the 20th century, including the
people of the country in which he delivered his speech.
What he’s doing, and not subtly, is positioning
“nationalism” as synonymous with “Western civilization.” That’s the same sort
of ideological sleight of hand he pulled in 2018, but this time in reverse:
He’s trying to make liberals more amenable to postliberalism by alleging that
the West can’t exist without it.
Duty.
Where the speech becomes insulting is in how disconnected
it is from the ethos of the administration in which Rubio serves. For instance,
chances are very good that the president is preparing to interfere
with Americans’ ability to vote next month—yet here’s Marco Rubio using the
birthplace of Western democracy to argue that Trumpy fascism is the realization
of the Athenian dream.
Trump’s populist base is the most aggressively, even
proudly, anti-intellectual political movement in modern American history. As I
write this, at a moment when Pennsylvania is experiencing the worst measles outbreak in the United States in 30 years,
the man that movement put in charge of national health policy is resuming his
lifelong effort to discourage people from vaccinating their children. And the
president is a willing accomplice in the project.
Teeming with conspiracy theorists, grifters, demagogues,
and suckers, MAGA is closer in spirit to book-burners than book-writers. Our
secretary of state would have us believe that the government they’ve empowered
is the keeper of the Socratic flame.
And speaking of which. “It is from the Greeks that the
West inherited its sense of duty—an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s
cause, one’s country,” Rubio had the nerve to say at one point. “Our heroes,
the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty
precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound
by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the
proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.”
How a lieutenant to Donald Trump, of all people, would
dare to lecture others about the virtue of duty is beyond me. But he isn’t
wrong about its Greek origins: Socrates felt so bound by duty to comply with the death sentence he was
given under the laws of Athens that he declined opportunities to escape before
the punishment was carried out. The law might be unjust, he believed, but it
was still the law.
Imagine Rubio’s boss ever entertaining such a thought.
Rubio’s rhetorical slobbering over nationalism is his way
of trying to redefine the concept of duty, not unlike how he tried to redefine
nationalism in 2018. Those who care about the greatness of Western civilization
owe their highest duty not to law, he implies, but to thumos—to the sort
of will-to-power that, in his telling, led the Greeks of old to struggle for
supremacy over each other and their culture. If anything, the Great Man of
History has a duty not to let conventional notions of duty dissuade him
from taking up that struggle for dominance.
After everything we’ve seen since January 2025, and at a
moment when far-right parties are gaining traction in Germany, among other
places, it’s quite something to conclude that what the West desperately needs
right now is more Trumpian thumos.
Which brings us to Kimberly Guilfoyle.
‘Honey please.’
Guilfoyle is America’s ambassador to Greece and followed
the usual modern Republican path to that job. She was a Fox News host, went on
to ingratiate herself with the Trump family (she was engaged for a time to
Donald Trump Jr.), and was eventually rewarded with a position of
responsibility in our formerly serious country’s government.
Say this for her: She’s not the
most embarrassing person to have gone that route.
Yesterday, while her boss at the State Department was
explaining how the secret sauce of ancient Greece was social Darwinism, the Wall Street Journal published text messages that
appear to show her soliciting a $100,000 bribe from a Trump donor.
And not coyly. “Honey please I need you to get this done
for me today…. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American
Express,” she allegedly texted attorney Eric Deters last year, attaching
instructions on how to pay her six-figure credit card balance directly. Her
nomination was pending before the Senate at the time, and carrying significant
debt would have raised red flags about her potential vulnerability to foreign
influence operations.
Deters was reluctant but wanted her help with a tax
matter before the IRS and with getting the Department of Justice to extradite
someone he was suing who had fled to Pakistan. He claims Guilfoyle promised him
that “I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” if he picked up her
AmEx tab. On another occasion she boasted that “Every secretary of you know
defense, transportation, treasury commerce IRS commissioner everyone gets right
back to me,” adding, “Oh yeah, l’m forgetting cash [sic] Patel.”
In the end, Deters refused to pay, he told the paper,
believing that the $300,000 he had given her in speaking fees over the years
should have sufficed to earn him a favor. Instead he got nothing—not even
fulfillment of his request that she relay the lyrics of a song he’d written
called “Kentucky Outlaw” to Kid Rock. Such are the things of which bribes in a
kakistocracy are made.
What is there to say about any of this that isn’t
completely obvious?
One obvious thing is that it’s a rare case in which a
public official was smart enough to have consciousness of guilt about her crime
but not smart enough to avoid putting the evidence against her in
encrypted digital writing. “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all
these things,” she texted Deters at one point. At another, she wrote, “What a
nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”
She seems to have assumed that Deters would never reveal
the texts she had sent him, even if she stiffed him on the favor
he sought. Imagine her shock at seeing a Trump courtier behave dishonorably.
Another thing to say is that, if another Journal story published last month is
accurate, Guilfoyle really is—or sure seems to be—vulnerable to foreign
influence operations. The paper reported that a lobbyist from a Greek
construction firm linked to a state-backed energy company has sat in on so many
of her meetings with foreign officials that some attendees thought he was her
chief of staff. During a visit to Bulgaria this year, she allegedly told people
there that if they wanted natural gas from America, they should do business
with the lobbyist’s company. “There is no doubt that this is kind of an
official position of the U.S. government,” she’s said to have told them.
How many AmEx bills did he pay to earn that kind of
referral? And how many others whom we don’t (yet) know about have also covered
some of her debts? “We’re hearing that there are more Guilfoyle stories
coming,” The Bulwark’s Sam
Stein alleged yesterday.
A third thing is that this scandal might have more legs
than the average Trump scandal, especially with Americans beginning to pay
attention to political news as the November 3 election approaches. Guilfoyle
isn’t some faceless bureaucrat; her Fox News gig made her famous long ago. And
the allegations about her dealings with Deters are unusually straightforward
for a bribery story, which nowadays often involves esoterica like crypto
transactions, political donations, and other machinations designed to obscure
the transaction or create a degree of plausible deniability.
Not this time. Pay my credit card bill if you want a
favor is a solicitation a sixth-grader could grasp.
Twenty-one months of flagrant Trumpist graft have made corruption a sensitive issue as voters go about making
up their minds about the midterms, and now here’s a grenade landing right in
the White House’s lap. The president has no good options on how to deal with
Guilfoyle, either: Leaving her in the job after the Journal exposé would
amount to endorsing what she’s done, essentially taking ownership of the
scandal, but she’s assuredly learned too much about Trump family malfeasance
over the years for him to risk alienating her by firing her.
My guess is that he’ll do what he usually does and
lateral her over to some private-sector position, buying her silence with a
well-paid sinecure.
‘We can do that to any country we want.’
The last thing to say is the most obvious, though.
Guilfoyle isn’t the exception to the rule in how America’s third-world
government operates. She is the rule.
I won’t rehash the many examples this newsletter has
covered of rampant corruption in the Trump administration. Suffice it to say,
to all appearances, everyone is getting paid. The president is getting paid, his kids and in-laws are getting paid, people with access to him are getting paid, and—if he has
his way—the
people who smashed up the Capitol for him on January 6 will be getting
paid. My honest initial reaction to yesterday’s story about Deters was that
$100,000 seems like a pretty reasonable rate for pay-to-play access to the U.S.
government in 2026.
Do you know what Marco Rubio, alleged defender of Western
civilization and champion of first-world culture, said yesterday when he was
asked about Guilfoyle—bearing in mind that he surely had an inkling of what
she’s been accused of via the Journal’s requests for comment? Quote:
“Suffice it to say, our embassy is doing a great job. Our ambassador has been a
strong ambassador.”
Making the West great again by whitewashing naked bribery
by public officials: just like Plato and Aristotle drew it up. Forced to choose
between pursuing her interests and being restrained by a sense of duty,
Guilfoyle chose thumos. No wonder Rubio defended her.
Her most sterling postliberal credential to serve in
Trump’s government has nothing to do with money, though. In its story last
month about Guilfoyle and the Greek lobbyist, the Journal claimed that she got into an argument
with Greece’s energy minister earlier this year in front of officials from both
countries in which she casually threatened Greeks with … a coup. “Referring to
the impending collapse of the Romanian government,” the paper alleged,
“Guilfoyle told the group, ‘We can do that to any country we want. We can do
that here.’”
We can do anything we want. The president couldn’t
have said
it better himself.
Menacing the democratically elected government of the
nation that founded democracy is next-level postliberal villainy; the
fact that Guilfoyle kept her job after she did so tells you all you need to
know about how seriously Marco Rubio takes the West’s Greek cultural
inheritance. The concoction of dog s—t and ice cream that he’s spent 10 years
making is now pure dog s—t, and he’s not going to stop spooning it out.
