The Fox News host and former First Lady of San Francisco tells the Bay Area News Group: ‘I’m a patriot, and it would be an honor to serve the country.’
By Mercury News:
NEW YORK — Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former first lady of San Francisco and current Fox News host, is in conversations with the Trump administration about becoming White House press secretary, she said in an exclusive interview with the Bay Area News Group on Monday night.
Guilfoyle said the idea of her taking the job or another press role in the White House has been “raised by a number of people” in the Trump administration, although she declined to go into specifics. She noted that she’s regularly in touch with members of the administration in the course of her job.
“I’m a patriot, and it would be an honor to serve the country,” Guilfoyle said. “I think it’d be a fascinating job. It’s a challenging job, and you need someone really determined and focused, a great communicator in there with deep knowledge to be able to handle that position.”
The 48-year-old Guilfoyle is a former San Francisco and Los Angeles prosecutor who was married for four years to former San Francisco mayor and current Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. The two separated in 2005 when she moved to New York to start a career in television. She’s now one of the co-hosts of the Fox News show “The Five.”
She was originally considered for press secretary during the presidential transition, but the job went to Sean Spicer, the former spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
Now, with rumors boiling in Washington, D.C., about a broad shakeup to Trump’s press team following a drumbeat of controversies, Guilfoyle’s name has resurfaced. The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump had suggested Guilfoyle for the press secretary job in conversations with political allies.
“I think it’d be a fascinating job.”
— Kimberly Guilfoyle on joining President Trump’s communications team
If she joined the administration, Guilfoyle could come aboard amid other changes at the press office. In an interview with Fox News released over the weekend, Trump floated the possibility of canceling the daily press briefings and just releasing written statements, or holding a personal news conference every couple of weeks.
On her show last week, Guilfoyle — while not mentioning anything about herself — said she thought “there is room for improvement with the roll-out” by the press team, citing the furors over the travel ban and the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
“If you want to be successful and do communications with President Trump, you have to be someone who he actually wants to spend a little bit of time with,” she said on the air. “You’ve got to insist on getting in front of POTUS, talk to him, and have like five, six minutes with him before you go out there and take the podium, and otherwise you’re driving blind.”
“It has to be somebody with a very close relationship, where there’s trust there, there’s inherent loyalty, someone who’s been there from the beginning,” she added.
As part of an interview in her office at Fox News headquarters that she agreed to several weeks ago, Guilfoyle said she thought she had that kind of relationship with Trump. She’s said she’s known Trump and his family for more than a decade — they first met at charity events when she moved to New York around 2004 to start a TV career.
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