This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Many a heavy-handed metaphor has been constructed on the claim that Washington, D.C., is built on a swamp. This hoary cliché is also, for the most part, untrue—but the neighborhood Foggy Bottom, home to the State Department, really is former marshland.
This is perhaps fitting. Stories of decadence, deviousness, and ineptitude within the current Trump administration are a dime a dozen, even at current inflation rates. The Justice Department acts as a private law firm for the president; the Department of Health and Human Services seems dedicated to undermining both; the Hegseth Pentagon is breaking globes, both physically and metaphorically. Yet the State Department has escaped some of the taint that has attached to other departments and agencies. This may be because the exploits elsewhere are so blatant, and because Secretary of State Marco Rubio has a reputation as one of the more serious figures in the administration.
Whatever the reasons, the State Department may deserve more opprobrium than it has received. One of the guiding philosophies of the second Trump presidency, imported from Project 2025, is that personnel is policy: The success of an administration depends on who staffs it. State shows how this can go very wrong.
Perhaps holding Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ousted ambassador to Greece who was allegedly selling access, against the department would be unfair. After all, she was a political choice, likely selected as a thank-you from the president whose campaign she assisted, and to whose son she was previously engaged.
But other appointments cannot be so easily explained away. One example is Darren Beattie, whose title is senior adviser for Western Hemisphere affairs. He has particular interest in policy toward Brazil, where the administration has worked to assist the right-wing movement associated with the Bolsonaro family; he is also president of the U.S. Institute of Peace, on which Trump has scrawled his own name. Beattie’s career shows the difference between the first and second Trump administrations: When his speech to white nationalists was revealed during the first, he was fired. In the second, he was welcomed back and given a plum role.
One of his colleagues now is Nate Hochman. Once seen as a rising star of mainstream conservatism, Hochman went from National Review to the 2024 presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis, from which he was fired for sharing a video featuring Nazi imagery. After a pit stop working for Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who has regularly made ethnonationalist comments (yes, he’s also the guy with the Jack Smith gaffe), he landed at the State Department, where he is reportedly Rubio’s chief speechwriter. This might explain why the secretary’s recent speech in Athens was so obsessed with supposed threats to the West.
The overlapping politics does not appear to be coincidental. Jeremy Carl, who has warned that “white culture” is imperiled, missed out on a chance to join Beattie and Hochman only when his Senate hearing in February completely derailed over offensive old tweets and his inability to explain his own views. The department now has an “Office of Remigration,” using a white-nationalist shibboleth for ethnic cleansing.
Some of the State Department’s hires are questionable less for ideological than for personality reasons. Britt McHenry, a former ESPN personality who then deployed culture-war takes to become a mid-tier MAGA figure, joined the State Department last month as a press adviser, but her time there was short: She was resigned this past Friday after throwing a drink at a fan during a Washington Wizards game.
Another recent departure is Paolo Zampolli, an old Trump hanger-on most famous for introducing the president and first lady. Zampolli snagged a State Department appointment as special envoy for global partnerships, focused on cultural affairs, but then quickly began meddling in issues that were not in his remit. (Not that he was aware what his remit was: “I didn’t even read the notification” to Congress about his role. “I don’t know about the notification,” he told Politico, saying he took direction from Trump.) Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau’s attempts to control Zampolli produced what Politico described as “a monthslong fight” conducted via “emails that at times included more than a dozen administration officials.” Shortly after that scoop, Zampolli was fired.
Zampolli isn’t the only one inattentive to cultural diplomacy. Officials have been rampaging against a painting in the embassy in the Dominican Republic by the artist Kehinde Wiley, who is best known (perhaps not incidentally) for painting President Obama’s official portrait. Trump officials have referred to it as “very woke,” “aesthetically terrifying,” and a lesbian picnic. (The piece is much less titillating than this might suggest: It depicts four people posing over one of Wiley’s trademark floral patterns.)
Are any top officials at the State Department above this chaos? Yes, but maybe not for long. My colleague Vivian Salama reported earlier this year on the deserted halls of the department, and The Washington Sun last week reported that leaders are working to promote political loyalists but squeeze out senior foreign-service officers, the most experienced members of the nonpolitical career staff trained in foreign relations. “The State Department is trying to get people to quit,” one officer told the Sun. Sometime soon, we might get a chance to learn what happens when diplomacy is fully in the hands of the least diplomatic people imaginable.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Redistricting isn’t going as Republicans planned.
- The real threat of election interference
- A cynical ploy to block California’s wealth tax
Today’s News
- An ICE officer was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after allegedly intentionally striking a Mexican construction worker with an SUV in Houston earlier this month. The worker, who was running away from officers, suffered a broken leg. ICE has denied that the collision was intentional, but local prosecutors say that surveillance footage contradicts the agency’s account.
- Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, suspended deposits and withdrawals after hackers stole an estimated $6.3 billion in digital assets, in what could be the largest crypto heist in history. The company said it would cover customers’ losses and had frozen about $3 billion in stolen assets. A crypto research firm attributed the attack to North Korean hackers.
- The Justice Department issued at least three dozen subpoenas and document-preservation requests in Alaska’s Senate race, as Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy launched a separate investigation into allegations that the Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign sought to recruit a candidate with the same name as incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan to siphon votes. Peltola denied knowledge of the alleged scheme.
Dispatches
- Ordinary Extraordinary: We’ve become less familiar with certain gestures—writing longhand, striking a match—but we can still rediscover them, Ian Bogost writes.
- The Books Briefing: Lincoln in the Bardo is a bold novel that has rightfully inspired inventive adaptations, Boris Kachka writes.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
More From The Atlantic
- Doctors say a rare kind of measles is on the rise.
- The currency of the journal article is collapsing.
- Israel’s latest last chance to save itself
- What horror films have to say about God
Evening Read
Just Noting That Your Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions
By Tove Danovich
Here’s a tip if you ever want to ruin a Halloween party. Seek out the most squeamish-seeming adult or child you can find in the act of consuming candy corn. Then tell them they just filled their mouth with bug secretions.
If this fact alarms you—or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared—I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs.
Culture Break
Reminisce. The late actor Patrick Stewart exemplified the wisdom and sophistication of his most famous character, Jean-Luc Picard, Emma Sarappo writes.
Explore. Self-help has long promised that with enough grit and determination, we can change our lives. But two of the genre’s leading figures have now come to realize that much of life is beyond our control, Gal Beckerman writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The post The State Department Is in Disarray appeared first on The Atlantic.
