Paolo Zampolli, a longtime friend of President Donald Trump, was fired Thursday from his role at the State Department following revelations of a "bizarre" feud with another MAGA appointee.

The news was first reported by ABC State Department reporter Shannon Kingston, whose post on X quoted a U.S. official as saying: "Paolo was notified today that his status as an envoy has been terminated and he is no longer a government employee."

According to Politico, the dismissal capped a monthslong conflict between two top Trump appointees — Zampolli, a special envoy at the State Department, and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, the department's second-ranking official. The dispute, laid out in emails obtained by the outlet, included accusations of leaks to the media and what Politico described as "bizarre" threats of defamation, with message threads at times encompassing more than a dozen administration officials.

The emails stretch over nearly a year and document disagreements over chains of command, with Landau repeatedly admonishing Zampolli to confine himself to his remit on cultural issues — exchanges that, per Politico, devolved into "bitter arguments and unproven allegations." The communications were notable not only for their "personal vitriol," but for the number of senior officials drawn into the threads; at one point, a foreign official was looped in as well. At stake was a question central to how the department operates: where the authority of a politically appointed envoy ends and the department's chain of command begins.

"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 a Nov. 14, 2025 email.

Zampolli's activities had ranged well beyond the cultural sphere. They included posting about a meeting with Romania's energy minister, working on nuclear energy issues in Hungary, attending World Bank and 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," Landau asserted.

The feud eventually escalated to the White House. 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 her to Trump at a party. During his first administration, Trump appointed Zampolli to the board of the Kennedy Center, and in his current administration he made Zampolli the U.S. special representative for global partnerships.

That long personal history with Trump was evident in how Zampolli described his own mandate. Although assigned to the State Department, he had publicly indicated that typical bureaucratic org charts did not apply to him. Last year, he posted on social media that he had "never had a boss in my life."

"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."

The exchange captured the tension at the heart of the feud — an envoy who said he answered to the White House, working within a department whose second-ranking official insisted on the limits of his remit.