(WASHINGTON) — As the Trump administration pushes its “America First” agenda, cutting foreign aid agencies and challenging longtime allies, President Donald Trump has tapped a roster of ambassadors with more personal and financial ties than any recent president, former diplomats and foreign policy experts told ABC News.
Trump has, in just over 100 days in office, selected family members, wealthy members of his clubs, and high-profile media backers to carry out his “America First” mission at key outposts across the globe. Nearly all have lengthy records of publicly and vocally supporting the president, while only a handful have diplomatic backgrounds or experience in foreign services.
Trump’s diplomatic nominees have also collectively poured tens of millions of dollars into his political operations, with the so-called “donor to ambassadorship pipeline” — where major political fundraisers secure plush ambassadorial appointments — becoming more pronounced under the second Trump presidency.
“It’s the sale of diplomatic posts in return for campaign money, and both sides have been playing that,” said Anthony Gardner, a former ambassador to the European Union under the Biden administration. “Indeed, it’s been happening across the aisle for a long time, for decades even, and it’s gotten much more pronounced in this term, the second Trump term, than ever before.”
At least 38 of the 50 individuals announced or confirmed to diplomatic positions so far have either donated to or helped fundraise for Trump-connected political entities, directing at least $46 million to his presidential campaigns, various pro-Trump super PACs, or to Trump’s record-breaking second inaugural committee, disclosure records show. Those figures do not account for additional contributions bundled by those individuals.
By comparison, according to government ethics advocacy group Campaign Legal Center’s analysis from 2023, former President Joe Biden’s ambassador appointees together gave a total of $22 million to various Democratic candidates and groups, including to the Biden campaign, in the ten years prior to their nomination.
Trump has also tapped several members of his extended family for diplomatic roles, nominating Charles Kushner, his eldest daughter’s father-in-law, as ambassador to France, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, his eldest son’s ex-fiancée, as ambassador to Greece.
ABC News has reached out to the White House for comment.
Ed McMullen, a prolific Republican bundler and Trump’s former ambassador to Switzerland, says that a close personal relationship with the president can be a key strength as an ambassador, noting Guilfoyle as an example.
“Since the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin serving as our first ambassadors were close to the president,” McMullen said. “There are supporters, they’re donors, they’re hard-working advocates, they’re friends. This is the case with every ambassador.”
“When you’re in Europe or anywhere in the world, and you’re an ambassador representing the president of the United States and you can pick up the phone and call him and have a one-on-one relationship with the president, the president and the government of the country you’re hosted in will be extremely appreciative of that timely efficacy that occurs from that,” McMullen said, recounting his experience as an ambassador under the first Trump presidency.
“That’s the whole purpose of having political appointees and not career people in critical countries with allies and friends,” he said.
But Campaign Legal Center’s Senior of Direct of Ethics Kedric Payne told ABC News that if nominees have no prior diplomatic experience beyond their personal relationship with the president, it can leave the impression that “qualifications don’t matter as much as who you know.”
“When you have something as critical as foreign policy based on who you know, it does diminish trust in government that these decisions are not based on the greater public interest,” Payne said.
Trump’s diplomatic nominees, like his cabinet picks, also include a high number of high-worth individuals. For the G7 alliance of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K., Trump has assembled one of the wealthiest group of ambassadors to hold those spots, with three billionaires out of the five nominees that have been named so far.
The three billionaires — Kushner, GOP megadonor and financier Warren Stephens, and Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta — together disclosed assets that could be worth a combined value of more than $8 billion. Kushner — who disclosed the extent of his private wealth for the first time — reported owning assets potentially worth more than $3.6 billion, boasting a vast real estate portfolio across the United States, and reporting earnings as high as half a billion dollars in income last year.
The two other G7 ambassadors — George Glass and Pete Hoekstra — are returning diplomats from Trump’s first term.
Others who Trump has tapped as ambassadors this time around include Herschel Walker, the former NFL star who unsuccessfully ran for Georgia Senate in 2022; Bill White, Trump’s longtime friend and Palm Beach neighbor who rallied conservative LGBTQ votes in support of Trump during the last presidential election; and Leandro Rizzuto, a Conair heir who was picked as an ambassador during Trump’s first term but failed to get confirmed by the Senate.
Among the campaign surrogates and allies who have received ambassadorships are Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Michigan, who helped bring together Muslim voters in Michigan for Trump; CatholicVote.org co-founder Brian Burch, a vocal critic of late Pope Francis; and ex-border patrol union leader Bradon Judd, who often spoke about immigration and border security at Trump rallies.
Several of those nominees have already faced a tough confirmation process as critics have questioned their qualifications.
Last week, Kushner, who pleaded guilty to 18 charges related to illegal campaign contributions and tax evasion in 2004 and was pardoned by Trump a month before he left the White House in his first term, was pressed by Senate Democrats about his past legal woes during his confirmation hearing.
During the hearing, Kushner acknowledged that his past run-in with the law was “a very, very, very serious mistake” but maintained his experience has helped him make better judgments and has made him “more qualified” for the ambassador role.
Other ambassador nominees who have faced legal troubles include White, the ambassador nominee to Belgium and former head of New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, who paid a $1 million settlement for his alleged role in an alleged illegal pay-to-play state pension fund scheme in New York, for which he denied wrongdoing.
Trump’s former inaugural committee chair Tom Barrack, who was charged for alleged illegal foreign lobbying on behalf of the United Arab Emirates in 2021, was acquitted when a jury found him not guilty on all his charges. Barrack has been nominated to serve as Trump’s ambassador to Turkey, a key diplomatic position that until recently was held mostly by career diplomats, and he touted his experience dealing with “business, governmental, legal and cultural issues in Europe, the Middle East and Asia” in his Certificate of Competency submitted through the State Department.
Walker, who lost his Senate race to incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in the runoff election, faced allegations of violent behavior and forcing multiple women to have abortions — allegations he denied.
For Rizzuto, his nomination to become the ambassador to the Organization of American States is the second time he’s vying for an ambassadorship, after facing bipartisan opposition during Trump’s first term for his ambassador nomination to Barbados, largely due to his now-deleted social media posts about Trump’s political rivals during the 2016 election in which he called Mitt Romney a “Dumb A–” and Hillary Clinton a “terrorist with amnesia,” while accusing Sen. Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi of being a leader in the North American Union movement, “whose goal is to destroy the sovereignty of the United States.”
Trump, during his first term, eventually appointed Rizzuto to head the U.S. consulate in Bermuda, which does not require Senate confirmation.
Amid diplomatic challenges that include the conflict in the Middle East and high stakes tariff negotiations, only a handful of ambassadors have been confirmed and sworn in so far — including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as the ambassador to Israel, former Georgia Sen. Davie Perdue as the ambassador to China, and Trump’s campaign surrogate and former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker as ambassador to NATO.
Huckabee, who is the father of Trump’s former press secretary and now Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has had a lucrative year in 2024, earning more than $6 million from his various private ventures, including millions from his television and radio host work and nearly half a million each from Substack subscriptions and dozens of speaking engagements, according to financial disclosures.
Numerous other ambassador nominees, including Walker and Guilfoyle, have yet to publicly release their financial disclosures through the Office of Government Ethics, nor have they released their Certificates of Competency through the State Department — both of which must be filed before Senate confirmation.
Payne, of the Campaign Legal Center, said that without those disclosures, it’s difficult to know a nominee’s financial interests and qualifications.
“It is not a problem that a person simply contributes to the president and becomes an ambassador,” Payne told ABC News. “The problem is when that person is not qualified for the position.”
Payne stressed that it’s too early to make overarching observations about the qualifications of Trump’s ambassador picks — but he said that, no matter who the president is, diplomats must be qualified for their role.
“What’s happening in the Trump administration now, where foreign policy is so critical and so delicate based on issues that are happening with tariffs and other administrative policies, it’s the worst time to have unqualified representatives of United States in these countries,” Payne said.
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
