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With global focus recently directed towards efforts to conclude the Ukraine war, one blonde woman consistently garnered attention for her prominent presence.
Playing a key role in both Alaska and Washington, she was seen greeting Vladimir Putin with a handshake on Friday, and once more before his departure to Russia from Elmendorf Airforce Base close to Anchorage.
Three days later, she was greeting the seven European leaders who came to the White House, stepping smartly out to each of their cars.
Then on Monday, she was captured in images guiding President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as they entered significant discussions in the Oval Office.
If some of the world leaders she met struggled to put a name to a face, then that’s probably because they don’t watch as much Fox News as their host.
For Monica Crowley, the new US Chief of Protocol, is a veteran of Trump’s favorite TV news provider.
As a prominent conservative author and commentator on the news channel since 1996, Crowley is part of the Fox News army that has invaded the president’s second White House term.
In fact, astonishingly, there are 21 Fox News stars and contributors in this second administration. They include Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Crowley welcomed each of the seven European leaders who came to the White House on Monday, stepping smartly out to their cars to greet each of them
She was also photographed leading President Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky into crucial talks in the Oval Office
Some online critics scoffed that, with her white-blonde hair and bold tan, Crowley looked like ‘Trump’s clone’ at her swearing-in on May 30. But in the past few days, she has been catapulted into a prominent place – in public if not necessarily behind closed doors – in US foreign policy.
Crowley may not be in the Cabinet, but her post carries the rank of ambassador. Insiders say she’s a Trump loyalist in a front-of-house role that the president, as a great believer in the importance of first impressions, sees as key.
According to the US State Department, the Office of the Chief of Protocol ‘seeks to advance the foreign policy goals of the United States by creating an environment for successful diplomacy’ and ‘extends the first hand that welcomes presidents, prime ministers, ruling monarchs, and other leaders to our country’.
As Chief of Protocol, Crowley, 56, reports to the Secretary of State and her duties include organizing state events, accompanying the president on foreign trips and handling accreditation of foreign diplomats.
The post has, in the past, often been held by women, sometimes the wives of prominent Washington figures.
Crowley, who was born on a US Army base in Arizona but raised in New Jersey, is rather more of a foreign policy wonk than a glorified meeter and greeter.
Although she has had a controversial history that has included a plagiarism scandal and criticism for pushing conspiracy theories, Crowley should be able to hold her own in the company of world leaders.
Trump had also nominated her as an assistant secretary of state and an ambassador role.
Although she has had a controversial history that has included a plagiarism scandal and criticism for pushing conspiracy theories, Crowley should be able to hold her own in the company of world leaders
In the past few days she has been catapulted into a prominent place – in public if not necessarily behind closed doors – in US foreign policy
Center stage in both Alaska and Washington, she was seen shaking Vladimir Putin’s hand as she welcomed him on Friday and again before he flew back to Russia from Elmendorf Airforce Base near Anchorage
She took her undergraduate degree at Colgate University in New York state (where she described herself as ‘pretty much the only conservative student on campus’) and earned a PhD in international relations from Ivy League Columbia University.
As a student, she started writing letters to ex-President Nixon who hired her in 1990 as a foreign policy research assistant working in his New Jersey office. She later wrote two books about him.
Crowley also wrote for various publications across the political spectrum and still has her own nationally syndicated radio show, but her convictions edged her ever closer to Fox News.
She joined the news channel nearly 30 years ago, where she was a foreign affairs and political analyst, but also occasionally appeared on Sean Hannity’s show.
Apart from a few years from 2004 and 2007 when she moved to MSNBC (a switch which, given the channel’s leftward drift since then, would sound impossible today), she became a Fox fixture, sometimes appearing as a guest host on The O’Reilly Factor.
It’s hardly surprising that she’s now part of the White House as she’s been saying all the right things about Trump for years. On election night in 2016, she described his shock victory as ‘a revolt of the unprotected class against the protected elite class.’
And she’s certainly no slouch when it comes to accentuating the positives about the polarizing presidents. In 2012, she became tearful when she talked about working for the disgraced Nixon – who became the only US president to resign from office after his involvement in the Watergate Scandal.
She described Tricky Dick as ‘brilliant and visionary’ and condemned his critics for ‘turning him into a caricature.’ All music, surely, to the ears of a future president who has been treated much the same way.
And much like her new boss, Crowley has, over the years, shown herself prone to half-baked conspiracy theories.
Between 2009 and 2015, she repeatedly spread online a false rumor that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim who was trying to conform the US to Sharia law.
She attacked him when he defended the building of an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site in Manhattan in 2010 and questioned his loyalty to America.
She described another key Obama conspiracy, that he wasn’t born in the US, as a ‘legitimate’ concern.
The so-called ‘birther’ theory was pushed heavily by Trump himself – before he ran for the presidency and admitted his White House predecessor was in fact born in America.
Trump actually wanted Crowley in his first administration.
As a student, she started writing letters to ex-President Nixon who hired her in 1990 as a foreign policy research assistant working in his New Jersey office
Pictured: Crowley shakes hands with Senator James Risch in 2006
In December 2016, Trump announced he had intended to appoint her a deputy national security adviser for the National Security Council, but the plan was derailed the following month after she was accused of plagiarism.
First, CNN revealed that she had plagiarized more than 50 passages in her 2012 book ‘What The (Bleep) Just Happened?’ copying from various sources including Wikipedia and even the website of a podiatrist.
Days later, she was accused of copying numerous passages in her PhD dissertation, lifting more than a dozen sections of text with little or no changes from other scholarly works without proper attribution.
The dissertation for Columbia University which was, ironically, titled ‘Clearer Than Truth’, was about the history of US policy on China. A university investigation concluded Crowley had committed ‘localized instances of plagiarism,’ but it did not amount to ‘research misconduct.’
A Trump spokesman dismissed the allegations as politically motivated, but Crowley had also been accused of plagiarism in 1999 when a reader spotted similarities between a Wall Street Journal column she’d written (in defense of Richard Nixon) and a 1988 article by British conservative writer Paul Johnson.
The Journal said it would never have published her article had it ‘known of the parallels.’
Crowley withdrew from consideration for the National Security Council role but insisted the plagiarism accusations were a ‘despicable… hit job’ that had been ‘debunked’ – although there was no evidence that they had.
At the tail end of the first Trump administration in 2019, Crowley belatedly got on board, taking a job as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
And now, we will no doubt be seeing a lot more of her.
Crowley will also be in charge of the White House end of America’s 250th birthday celebrations, the FIFA World Cup (in North America) in 2026 and the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028.
That’s a lot of protocol to manage for a president who’s not famous for his etiquette.
