The Donroe Doctrine in Iran

And if I'm him, I'd be like, "Fuck it, let's do it," right? The regime is teetering, it's hanging by a thread, it has no allies left in the region, what a Russian-China gonna do about it? Welcome to the Powers the Bee Daily, Pucks Podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. This Tuesday, January 13th, today I'm joined by Julia Yafi, with a look at mass demonstrations and state killings in Iran. And whether Donald Trump newly emboldened on the global stage after the arrest of Nicholas Maduro might take action and push for regime change in the Islamic Republic. We also discuss one of the state department's least favorite employees, their Trump-appointed HR director, having an insane meltdown at a work function in front of colleagues and why it has foreign service workers all over the world gossiping and giggling. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers the Bee. The Powers the Bee podcast is presented by United Health Group. Happy Tuesday, everybody and welcome to The Powers the Bee. I'm joined today by my colleague, Julia Yafi. We're gonna talk about a meltdown over the state department by Donald Trump's HR lead over there. He's kind of a curious character. Julia is done a lot of reporting on this eccentric monster energy drink, chugging evangelical maga chief of human resources. As you describe him, Julia we're also going to talk just a little bit about what's going on in Iran and how Donald Trump might react. But first Julia, I meant to text you yesterday, I took a video of my child and I every morning we, you know, I do the mornings, we get up, do the bottle and I'm trying to teach her her first word. It's probably not going to be this word. But it's Gorby. My dad worked with Peter Maxx in the early 90s, the pop artist and he didn't exhibit called 40 Gorbys back in the 90s. It was these big portraits of Gorbachev, I've got a print of it in our kitchen slash living room like this big red Gorbachev face and I walk by every day with Ren for a second of morning and I point at it and I say Gorby, Gorby. So I took a video, I'll send it to you. I will let you know if my daughter's first words are indeed Gorby, I thought you would appreciate that. That's incredible. I hope it is. Yeah, probably won't be. Okay, let's talk about Iran. Last week I had you on the show and we were talking about Venezuela and Neocondon as you termed him. Donald Trump's sudden thirst for foreign intervention has diplomats, journalists, world observers looking at Trump's foreign policy in a little bit of a different way, which brings us to Iran. Obviously, there are huge demonstrations in the country. There's long been economic unrest. The currency has plummeted. You obviously have people in the country who hate the regime. This has happened before in recent years. There hasn't been any kind of American intervention, but looking at Iran right now. Do you think Donald Trump would do anything to facilitate the downfall of the Islamist regime there of the Ayatollah? He has talked about, you know, if you shoot at the protesters, we'll shoot at you. Do you believe him? Well, his administration would like us to believe him, right? Marco Rubio, after the, let's say, rendition, capture of Nicolas Maduro said when Donald Trump says something, believe him, right? And he has explicitly threatened the Ayatollah's regime in Iran saying, if you hit the protesters, I'll hit you. And we are taping on Monday night in the East Coast. Over 500 protesters are confirmed dead. Something like 11,000 have been arrested. The videos coming out of Iran are both gruesome and inspiring by turns. And as I wrote last week and as you and I discussed last week, all Donald Trump has seen on the world stage in both terms is that when he deploys military, American military might abroad, it's surgical. It's fast. He gets, mostly gets what he wants or he gets the optics, which is, let's be honest, mostly what he wants and very little blowback, right? One of the unintended consequences that people have gotten used to warning about first after Vietnam, then after Iraq and Afghanistan, no forever wars have materialized. The US hasn't gotten bogged down more over. We've also seen that when America's ally Israel has struck Iran and Lebanon and other places in the Middle East also, they get results and very little blowback, no morass materializes to suck them in. And so the third point I want to make is Iran has been so weakened, right? His ball has been degraded and weakened. Hamas has been degraded and weakened. The Assad regime fell about a year ago, right, around this time last year. And there's really, there's really nothing, no one left propping Iran up. You know, Russia and China are pretty quiet. So we know that today Donald Trump is going to get briefed on his military options in Iran. And if I'm him, I'd be like, fuck it, let's do it. Right? The regime is teetering, it's hanging by a thread, it has no allies left in the region. What are Russia and China going to do about it? And I'm sure the Saudis and the Qataris and the other kind of sunny powers in the region are like, do it, do it, right? It would really make, and the Israelis have also been very publicly saying that they support the protesters. It would really make the picture much more simple, well, let's just put it this way. It would take out the last kind of thorn in America's side in the Middle East. But on the other hand, like what, what happens a day after who takes control in Iran? We don't know. That's what I was going to ask you, Julia, is, and I had to send like Tom Friedman here, just sort of, you know, drawing sweeping conclusions by anecdote, but there are a lot of Persians. But have you talked to a cab driver? I talked to cab drivers all the time. It's where I get most of my leads. Get this man in New York Times column. And yes, yes, Uber drivers, you know, they, they explain the world. Looking to Persians here in LA, just like friends and associates, it's just a handful. That is the question they have is, yes, they would like to see the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime go away. The question is, what fills the void? There isn't a ton of love for the son of the Shah, Reza Palavi, who's been cheerleading these protests. Obviously he would love to go back there and rule Iran, certainly doesn't seem like he would step in naturally if that happened. And then there's the other question of, especially when you've got these other Sunni powers in the region, who fills the void? So that seems to be a question, I think that hopefully it would come up in Donald Trump's intelligence briefing this week. But you know, I think Syria offers a counterpoint, right? People were scared that there would be a vacuum that terrorists that Jihadis would fill the void and a former Jihadi did take control and yet things seemed to be going okay in Syria so far. So the person I've been texting with the most, while this is happening, has been Fatima Jamalpur, whom I met on Booktour Fatima and her co-author Nilo Tabrizzi. I just want to give a big shout out to them. They were long-listed for the National Book Award, for their book, for the son after Long Nights, which was a book about the women's protest after Masa Amini was killed a couple years ago. It's a phenomenal book. They are phenomenal journalists, both Iranian and I've been texting with Fatima, who is living in exile and severed from her family. And she's just like, let's get together before I go back because I'm about to go back on the kind of co-tails of the revolution. So I'm really cheering for Fatima, for Nilo, and if you haven't read their book yet, go out and get it for the son after Long Nights, the story of Iran's women led uprising, long-listed for the 2025 National Book Award. Go get it. All right, we will. Go get it. Julia, let's take a quick break when we come back, we're going to talk about the embattled head of HR over at the State Department. I'm Emma Greed, host of Aspire with Emma Greed. A podcast where I sit down with people who don't just drink big, they build big. From culture-shaping voices like Mel Robbins to leaders redefining success like Tracy Ellis Ross. To gain change in entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, Aspire is about mindset ambition and doing the work that actually moves the needle. If you're ready to raise your standards and take charge about the life and career you're building, Aspire is where you start. Follow and listen to Aspire with me, Emma Greed, an Odyssey podcast available wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the powers that be everybody I'm talking to my colleague, Julia Yafi. She's also the author of Motherland, a feminist history of modern Russia, which you should also buy, speaking of bookplugs. Julia, let's talk about some of your reporting here at Pock from a few days ago, another great headline on a Julia Yafi story. The big Olowsky. That's lovely. That was not me. That was Pete Keely. I get so many text from people about our headlines and I have to say it's not me. Right. It's not me. It's not me. It's not me. It's them. Lou Olowsky, the State Department's wacky, polarizing head of HR, is said to have imploded at his farewell party when he learned he wasn't getting a coveted assignment. I recall doing a podcast about him with you from last year. He came in. He again, the head of HR, but apparently has wanted a more ambitious, larger portfolio at the State Department. Olowsky, as you reported last summer, quickly developed a reputation for his rambling Jesus imbued speeches, which combined everything from ill-fitting hip-hop quotes to invocations of dolphins, verbal abilities, and for his energy drink fueled rants in meetings with subordinates. Quote. A coked out raccoon is how one of them described him. I mean, this is a good example of the kind of people that slip in under the Trump umbrella. Probably more in the first term than this term, by the way, the kind of like weirdos on the fringes of right-wing politics that Trump opened the door for and now they're running the show. They're running the world. They're running HR at the place that runs the world. So Julie, what happened? Olowsky got a new job in the State Department at a new office and then all hell broke loose. What happened? So to your point, Olowsky joined the Foreign Service during Trump won. He was inspired by Trump won and joined the Foreign Service. He and his wife run an evangelical church in suburban Maryland and he's a big ol' weirdo. He got in trouble when they were posted in Beijing for giving coal to people at a Christmas party and people were like, what are you doing, dude? He got to be the head of HR during this administration, even though he was super junior and it went against all State Department regulations. So they had to kind of like reverse engineer his kind of bureaucratic standing so he could take the job and he alienated everybody. He was the face of the riffs, the reduction in force, notices them, so basically the layoffs. He was the face of hundreds and hundreds, I think like 1,300 FSOs got laid off last summer. He was the face of this crazy cable that went out in November where he said he was going to go back and re-examine the promotions for the last couple of years and undo basically and promote those people that he had gotten passed over because of Biden-era DEI policies. He apparently was behind the font thing if people remember the State Department issued a cable about how fonts like which fonts they were going to use because the Biden-era fonts, they said, were too woke because they helped people who were visually impaired, read God forbid. So we are dude with like weird access to grind, but in the process he's made so, so many enemies. And so fast forward to December, he was told he was getting to be, he was going to move over to head OFM, the office of foreign missions, which not only heads kind of all the embassies and consulates around the world, but liaises with other embassies in whatever place the embassy is. Powerful position and also that office has gobbled up some of the foreign aid missions that used to be USAID and so he wanted to this job because it would give him some more policy control. So, he's having a goodbye party at this at the HR office known as PERT. It gets rescheduled by the time they do have the goodbye party. He's told, oh, actually you're not getting that job. And then he realizes, oh my god, his belongings have been moved out of his office and put an encubicle on the hallway and he has an epic fucking meltdown to the point where a fellow, by the way, he's Ben Franklin fellow, so one of these right wing, this kind of right wing, federalist project type of thing that's supposed to remake the foreign service. So one of his fellow BFFs is like, should I call diplomatic security? He ends up leaving on his own. He's been on this weird leave ever since the State Department, when I called them for comments said, he's just on vacation, he's coming back, but they wouldn't say where or what job. But the best part of the story to me was just how absolutely happy foreign service officers and State Department people were by news of this meltdown and the fact that he is now on this kind of open ended leave. I mean, the memes, like, there was one of him in a gray track suit with the headphones, like, as if he's Maduro, there was a somebody put in, like, the description of the meltdown into AI to generate a rap song, because, you know, he was quoting hip-hop lyrics. Somebody put out a meme of downfall of that final scene with Hitler and the bunker, and it's him ranting about fonts, so, like, the amount of shot and Florida is off the charts. Stateies, especially those who were rift by him, are just so happy and are memeing the shit out of this meltdown. And people, by the way, and by the way, people are sending me these memes from, like, London, from Sri Lanka, from, I mean, the story of this meltdown has gone everywhere, everywhere there are foreign service officers, those foreign officers are memeing and sending around gossip about this, like, they are so happy. That's sort of what I was going to ask you is how powerful was he? I shouldn't, I guess, say, past tense with that confirmation, he's on leave, but, I mean, where on the chain of command up to Marco Rubio was this guy? Well, he's no longer ahead of HR, and he was basically given some very nebulous portfolio, like, special projects in a different bureau, and he understood that to be a demotion. That's why he flipped out. But as one former FSO put it to me, he didn't understand that he was just a pawn. He really thought he was truly powerful in his own way, and that MAGA would, and Trump would protect him, and that he was all powerful, as opposed to just being used to do Trump and Russell votes, specifically Russell votes, dirty work, and then they just get rid of him. That sounds like a lot of people in DC, honestly, I mean, it's certainly true in Trump world, where the JV are certainly promoted to varsity and think they're, you know, Tommy Toughnuts or whatever, but, you know, there's this like high school nerd thing going on in Washington and both parties where, look, I mean, it's all, go watch VEEP, you know, it's the Jonah thing, it's the Dan thing. If you are a, you know, low to medium level staffer, you then turn around and go to bars or go to functions and pretend like you're, you know, in secret meetings, in a skiff in the Oval Office or something like that. And not Googling or searching for Venezuela on Twitter. Yeah. Exactly. All right, Julia. Well, thank you for joining me. Thank you for explaining. Diego, please read about Lou Allowsky because you know what? He won't like it if you go read the story that Julia, that seems fun. Julia, thanks for joining me. Thanks, Peter. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of The Powers That Be. As a reminder, The Powers That Be is the official podcast of Puck. We'd like to thank Ben Landy, Liz Gough, and Alex Bigler for their editorial and production guidance. If you like what you hear, please share with a friend. It really helps us keep delivering the inside scoop that only Puck can offer. Follow us on Twitter @PuckNews. I'm Ben Landy. See you tomorrow. This has been a presentation of Odyssey. Please listen, rate, review, and follow all episodes wherever you get your podcasts. The Powers That Be Daily is executive produced by John Kelly, co-founder of Puck, Bob Tabidor, and Ben Landy, executive editor at Puck. [MUSIC]