Dana Budeanu and her former husband more than 20 years ago revolutionised the Romanian tabloid market with magazines like Ciao and Cancan. They copied the kind of stuff you get in Western papparazzi magazines but she gave the by-lines a very distinctive flavour.
She gave her readers permission to be cruel and sold what I call PSD chic, the glamour of the very rich in the so-called high society where politicians, businessmen, and sometimes the criminal underworld mix with television stars and journalists like her.
From there she grew to be a well-known influencer with strong opinions on politics.
Claud Cockburn famously parsed the popular novels of the interwar years in his book Bestseller! to explain the philosophy that underlay them. Reading Miss Budeanu, her philosophical position is a very interesting one.
It's pure Darwinism and I remember a high-performing and glamorous female psychopath moving in exactly the circles that Miss Budeanu moves in once saying to me that Darwinism really is a religion.
It is another word for psychopathy too.
Dana Budeanu is a very clever girl. She knows exactly how to sell the party she supports, the PSD. She doesn't pretend that it's clean or honourable or high-minded or concerned about the poor. On the contrary she just subverts the idea that being clean and honourable and high-minded are admirable qualities. It makes it much easier to defend her favourite politicians and make anyone who disagrees with her look like they are uncool.
So instead of attempting to defend the PSD leaders who are accused of making a deal to the detriment of Romania with Kimberly Guilfoyle over dinner in Bucharest earlier this year, she just takes a completely different tack: one of unabashed admiration for Kimberly herself and contempt for the fact that the Romanian politicians don't know how to play the game as well as she does.
Dana loves power and nobody has more power than the American state.
For her, Kimberly Guilfoyle isn't the absurd figure that she appears in snobbish Anglo-American eyes or the sexist joke that many Romanians think her, but an alpha predator.
"Look at Kimberly Guilfoyle. She walks into a room like a category-five hurricane, backed by the raw power of the Trump network. She doesn't come to negotiate; she comes to dictate terms. Our local Romanian politicians look like terrified, clueless schoolboys holding their little notebooks in front of her. They look like absolute amateurs trying to play chess with a tiger."
That is I'm sure true. It's a case of Greek meets Greeks in Greece, Romania and throughout the Balkans. It is very comic.
"The Trump school of power doesn't care about your diplomatic protocols or whether some fragile local coalition gets its feelings hurt. Kimberly knows exactly how the world works: you show up, you grab the energy deals by the throat, and you move on. Seeing little public commentators try to critique her style is pure comedy—she operates on a planet they will never even see through a telescope."
"Laws, regulations, taxes... you think these were made for the geniuses who move millions overnight? No, darling. They were built to keep the sheep inside the fence.When a truly smart boy bypasses your bureaucracy and skips out on paying tribute to a corrupt state, I don't see a criminal—I see an alpha who refused to be chained by mediocrity."
"You sit there with your calculator screaming about 'tax evasion' while these men are buying yachts in Monte Carlo. They didn’t get rich by filling out forms and waiting for permission. They saw a loophole, they took it, and they created an empire. That is called talent. The rules are just suggestions for those who don’t have the balls to break them."
"Nothing great in this world was ever achieved by being transparent and obeying the speed limit. The 'smart boys' of energy and real estate understand how the game is played. They create their own laws. While you are crying over a receipt, they are changing the financial map over an expensive lunch in Mykonos."
"There is an absolute art to being the wife of a rule-breaker. You must be as sharpas a diamond and twice as expensive. They don't buy clothes from the mall; they buy pieces that signal absolute dominance. A woman who knows how to style a six-figure wardrobe is a strategic asset to a powerful man. She is the visual proof that he has won the game of life."
To Western readers her views may seem shocking and the way her audience laps them up does shock me slightly, but in fact to a Romanian this is just how the world is.
They understand much better than foreigners. Things are not going to get any better.
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