On Thursday, Paolo Zampolli – a “longtime” friend of President Donald Trump – was fired from his role at the State Department following revelations of a “bizarre” fight with another MAGA appointee. The news was broken by ABC State Department reporter Shannon Kingston, who was told by a U.S. official, “Paolo was notified today that his status as an envoy has been terminated and he is no longer a government employee.”
As Politico explains, “Two top appointees of President Donald Trump, including the deputy secretary of State, have been embroiled in a monthslong fight that includes accusations of leaks to the media and ‘bizarre’ threats of defamation — all over emails that at times included more than a dozen administration officials. The conflict centers on Paolo Zampolli, a personal friend of Trump’s and a special envoy at the State Department, and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, according to the messages obtained by POLITICO. The emails stretch over almost a year and show Zampolli and Landau disagreeing over chains of command as Landau admonishes Zampolli to stick to his remit on cultural issues — but devolve into bitter arguments and unproven allegations.”
According to Politico, the communications were not only notable for their “personal vitriol,” but because so many top officials ended up in the threads, with a foreign official looped in at one point to boot. “I am hereby ordering you – once again – to immediately stop all work on ANY issues not directly tied to cultural diplomacy, including every one of the issues you mentioned in your recent emails,” Landau wrote to Zampolli in one email from Nov. 14, 2025. Zampolli had been engaged in actions far beyond cultural realms, including posts of meeting the energy minister of Romania, working on nuclear energy issues in Hungary, attending World Bank/International Monetary Fund meetings, meeting with the United Arab Emirates’ director of foreign direct investment and discussing with an Argentine official how to send that country’s astronauts to space. “You have no authority to engage in ANY issues of foreign policy outside of cultural diplomacy, including all the issues you have named,” asserted Landau. The fight devolved from there and was escalated to the White House, and an administration official familiar with the email exchanges told Politico that the sniping was “cartoonish and embarrassing.”
Zampolli, a former modeling agent, represented Melania Trump in New York City in the 1990s and introduced Melania to Trump at a party. Trump appointed Zampolli to the board of the Kennedy Center during his first administration and made Zampolli the U.S. special representative for global partnerships in the current administration. According to Politico, though "assigned to the State Department, Zampolli, who last year posted on social media that he’s ‘never had a boss in my life,’ has publicly indicated that typical bureaucratic org charts do not apply to him. ‘My number-one boss is the president of America,’ Zampolli told the Financial Times. ‘I get my instructions from the White House, Commerce and the Department of War … anything to advance the America First agenda.’”
