Ric Grenell Wants To Be Secretary Of State In An Imaginary Trump Regime

Trump sent Republican operative and well-paid Victor Orban agent Richard Grenell as his ambassador to Germany in 2018, where he was met with disdain... and mostly ignored as a bomb-throwing far right partisan hack. In 2019, Der Spiegel published a profile of Grenell noting that basically everyone they talked to about him paints “an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism.” The profile claimed that Grenell was politically isolated in Berlin because of his alleged association with the far-right [neo-Nazi] AfD Party, causing the leaders of the mainstream German parties— including the Chancellor herself— to avoid contact with him; while Grenell had pressed German parliamentarians to invite him to their districts, most had declined. The sources claimed that Grenell knew little “about Germany and Europe, that he ignores most of the dossiers his colleagues at the embassy write for him, and that his knowledge of the subject matter is superficial.” Now Trump is toying with the idea of appointing him Secretary of State— or do Grenell claims.

Over the weekend, the NY Times did its own profile: He Threw Spaghetti For Trump. Now He’s After A Top Job. After Trump was soundly defeated in 2020— 81,283,501 (51.3%) to 74,223,975 (46.8%) and 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232— he drafted Grendel to help get his Stop The Steal campaign off the ground in Nevada, where Biden beat him 703,486 (50.1%) to 669,890 (47.7%). ElizabethWilliamson reported that “It was all a sham. Grenell told the team in the war room, two GOP operatives recalled, that the Nevada vote was not, in fact, stolen. The operatives, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal from Grenell, said he told the team that the goal was simply to ‘throw spaghetti at the wall’— the operatives described Grenell making a theatrical tossing gesture as he spoke— to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election battle in neighboring Arizona played out.”

She noted that “To his detractors, Grenell is a caustic opportunist of modest achievement who scaled the heights of an administration in which pit bull partisanship was prized. Susan Rice, President Biden’s former domestic policy adviser and a former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, has called him ‘one of the most nasty, dishonest people I’ve ever encountered.’ Brad Chase, Grenell’s former business partner, who fell out with him over his conversion to Trumpism, said he was a ‘soulless, shameless sellout.’ To his supporters, Grenell is a loyal, tireless messenger for Trump who transmits the former president’s demands with an efficient bellicosity that stifles naysayers.

“If you want to avoid war, you better have a son of a bitch as the secretary of state,” Grenell said in a March episode of “Self Centered,” a current events podcast. America needs a “tough” chief diplomat, he said, “who goes in to these tables and says: ‘Guys, if we don’t solve this here, if we don’t represent peace and figure out a tough way, I’ve got to take this file, go back to the United States and transfer it to the secretary of defense, who doesn’t negotiate. He’s going to bomb you.’”

Privately, Grenell has on occasion implied to former Trump administration colleagues that the secretary of state job has been promised to him, although two people in Trump’s inner circle say such certainty from any job seeker is premature.

One person close to Trump said the former president has raised questions about Grenell’s communications work for foreign clients, prompted by Grenell’s Balkans work and a request from him last year that Trump meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

“President Trump trusts him as a pair of safe hands in deconstructing the administrative state and confronting the deep state,” Stephen Bannon, the former Trump strategist and host of the “War Room” podcast, said in a brief interview. “There’s so much that’s got to be taken apart and jettisoned.”

Either way, several people close to the former president say that Grenell has a good chance of landing a top foreign policy job in a second Trump administration— if not as secretary of state, which requires Senate confirmation, then perhaps as national security adviser, which does not. They note that Grenell has spent the past three and a half years leveraging his Balkan contacts in business ventures, including with an important partner— Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law— and that he brings a bombastic bravado to American diplomacy held in high regard by the former president.

Concerns over conflicts of interest might seem ironic coming from Trump, who used the presidency to benefit his businesses. But the person close to Trump cited two conversations in which the former president said that he does not like his advisers traveling the world making money from their association with him.

Still, Trump talks to Grenell regularly, and a year and a half ago was heaping praise on his pugilistic loyalty. “Ric Grenell: a fighter,” Trump said in Arizona in October 2022. “We have a great, great man. A great fighter. He’s got a lot of future.”

Grenell has since been busy in the Balkans. He has made plans with Kushner for a luxury hotel, apartment complex and museum in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, on the site of the 1999 NATO bombing that destroyed the headquarters of the Yugoslav Army. He is also developing two other luxury tourist sites, one on an Albanian peninsula and the other on a Mediterranean island off the Albanian coast. [Someone should inform the paper of record that Albania has no Mediterranean coastline, just coastlines on the Adriatic Sea and the Ionian Sea. Grenell and Kushner made a deal to build some luxury properties on the Zvërnec Peninsula off the Bay of Vlora and on nearby Sazan Island.]

“I’m working on projects, private equity projects, that I get to make money on,” Grenell said in a television interview in Albania last year. “No one should ever apologize for wanting to make money.”

Grenell’s connections to the Balkans also flow through the right-wing outlet Newsmax, where he is an analyst and vice president for international development. Last year, Newsmax entered into a multiyear agreement with Telecom Serbia, the Serbian state carrier, to broadcast Newsmax content in Eastern Europe. Newsmax said in a statement that Grenell was not involved in the negotiations over the deal.

Grenell has also teamed up with an arms dealer and former Newsmax pundit, John Cardillo, to explore ammunition manufacturing opportunities in the Balkans, according to two people they told about their venture. Cardillo, whose company is called M42 Tactical, was recently sued for allegedly pocketing nearly $200,000 he was paid by a Ukrainian émigré, Michael Bogachek, to supply body armor to police in Ukraine that was never delivered.

Cardillo agreed to repay the money but has not, Bogachek’s lawyer said.  Cardillo declined to discuss his work with Grenell, saying only that “they were private equity deals in the private sector and had nothing whatsoever to do with any public interest.”

Grenell has worked hard to aid not only Trump but also his family. He helped Melania Trump secure $500,000 for two speeches on two consecutive days in 2022, including one for Fix California, an election integrity and voter engagement group Grenell founded in 2021. Last month, Grenell introduced the former first lady at a Log Cabin Republicans fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago. He has publicly lauded Trump’s daughter Ivanka as the first White House official to recognize Grenell’s status as America’s first [openly] gay cabinet member.

In an episode not previously reported, Grenell proposed last year an idea to underscore Trump’s complaints that the indictments sought by the special counsel, Jack Smith, were political. Grenell suggested that Trump join him on a visit to the former Kosovo president and prime minister, Hashim Thaci, in prison in The Hague, where he awaits trial on war crimes charges. Thaci was also indicted by Smith, who oversaw war crimes prosecutions in The Hague before he was named special counsel. Thaci has said politics underlie the charges against him.

Trump did not embrace Grenell’s idea. A person close to Thaci said he found the idea of Trump and a raucous media scrum in front of The Hague Penitentiary Institution amusing— but decided it would be best to focus on his own case.

Grenell has posted suggestions on social media that Thaci’s indictment was a Justice Department-led conspiracy.

…Grenell began the 2016 campaign as a fierce Trump critic: He called him “dangerous!” in a deleted tweet recovered by Politico and the cybersecurity firm Nisos. But after Trump won the nomination, Grenell became a high-profile booster, aided by his work as a paid commentator on Fox News. That same year, Grenell’s company was paid $103,750 by a foundation mostly funded by Hungary’s far-right government, and he wrote opinion essays, which he has said were unpaid, defending a Moldovan oligarch who was put under sanctions by the State Department for corruption.

By 2018, Trump had nominated him to be his U.S. ambassador to Germany. Within weeks of arriving in Berlin, Grenell drew condemnation from both sides of the Atlantic after telling Breitbart London that he wanted to empower European conservative leaders who challenged “the failed policies of the left.”

…He gave interviews about his dog, hosted gatherings in the embassy residence and at the 2019 Munich Security Conference appeared on a panel with Stuart Milk, the brother of the slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk, to call on some 70 countries to repeal laws that treat LGBTQ people as criminals.

“It’s not lip service,” said Miriam Richter, the Harvey Milk Foundation’s general counsel. “It’s something he feels very strongly about.” (Other LGBTQ groups have a much harsher view of his advocacy.)

In 2020, Trump named Grenell to temporarily replace the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who Trump had fired. Senate Democrats responded by requesting that the Justice Department investigate whether Grenell had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which generally requires that people disclose work in the U.S. on behalf of foreign governments. The letter cited Grenell’s work for Hungary and the Moldovan oligarch, and noted that he had not registered under FARA.

It is unclear what became of the request— the Justice Department declined to comment— but Grenell was never meant to be a permanent intelligence chief. He was replaced after three months by Representative John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican, who won confirmation after Democrats concluded that although he was as partisan as Grenell, he was far less toxic.

During his weeks in the post, Grenell fired top officials and oversaw a wave of document declassifications aimed at discrediting the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russia’s pro-Trump machinations in the 2016 campaign.

Trump was pleased.

“I think you’ll go down as the all-time great ‘acting’ ever, at any position,” Trump said at Grenell’s last cabinet meeting.

In late 2020, eager for a diplomatic coup in the final days before the presidential election, Trump dispatched Grenell on a mission that has flummoxed Western diplomats for a decade: To try to coax Serbia into recognizing Kosovo, a majority-Albanian former province, as an independent state. Grenell courted regional leaders, largely ignoring American and European Union diplomats who had worked on the issue for years.

Confident of a deal, Grenell proposed renaming an industrial reservoir bridging Kosovo and Serbia “Trump Lake” to memorialize his achievement. But negotiations failed after the war crimes tribunal in The Hague announced plans to indict Thaci, the Kosovo president. Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, increasingly fractious, still call the lake by two different names, neither of which is Trump.

But it isn’t only the Balkans and Germany he knows nothing about. Last week, Tinashe Chingarande reported that he’s also clueless on the Middle East. Last Tuesday, Grenell tried wooing Arab American community leaders, who are angry at Biden over Gaza, over to Trump’s side. It went about as badly as anyone might have predicted. “The meeting— which took place at chain Italian restaurant Maggiano’s in Troy, Michigan— featured about 40 Arab American leaders, Grenell, Trump’s son-in-law Michael Boulos, and Boulos’ father, Massad Boulos. According to two sources in attendance for the private dinner, Grenell came off as unsympathetic to the plight of Palestinians while actually angering some participants by reiterating a comment from Trump’s other son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who said in March that Israel should remove Palestinians from the valuable ‘waterfront property’ in Gaza. ‘This is either too naive or too stupid of him to say something like this. Even the Israeli press made fun of Kushner when he said that,’ this source said. ‘Frankly, the guy— I don’t want to say bad stuff— is clueless on the Middle East,’ this person added.”