Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Jacob Heilbrunn
The recruitment of Joey R. Hood is a kind of case study of the ability of ambitious government civil servants to reinvent themselves in the image of Trump.
The Ben Franklin Fellowship is an organization of US diplomats and foreign policy professionals that was founded in early 2024 and recently described by Politico as “the not-so-secret society whose members run State.” The group’s chairman, Phillip Linderman, has writtenthat “The ‘resistance’ State exhibited during both Trump administrations makes it abundantly clear that the globalist-woke bureaucracy has its own agenda.” Its members include Chris Landau, the deputy secretary of state. At the recent National Conservatism Conference in Washington, the fellowship had a small booth displaying literature about its mission to reform the State Department and its aspiration to recruit foreign policy conservatives.
One of the most notable products of that recruitment drive is Joey R. Hood, the American ambassador to Tunisia (he has discussed his experience in an interview with the Center for the National Interest). In March, President Donald Trump nominated Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi to replace Hood, but he has not yet been confirmed by the Senate. Hood, who was appointed ambassador during the Biden administration, is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service.
“Life in diplomacy is a calling, not a job or a hobby,” he declared in a video that he made for the State Department a year ago. In it, he emphasized the need to promote democracy and protect rights equally. Now, as the Trump administration upends the State Department, Hood has once more issued a public statement. This time, it is not to advocate for America’s interests abroad but something closer to home—his own career.
Under the leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the State Department has terminated programs aimed at promoting democracy or minority rights and dispensed with over 1,000 workers through firings or buyouts. This past March, Trump issued an executive order to eliminate DEI programs. They have been replaced by the concept of “fidelity” to the Trump administration’s aims and decrees.
That concept appears to have been embraced by Hood, if a recent and lengthy letter that he wrote to the Franklin Fellowship is anything to go by. It was apparently suggested to Hood that he explain his volte-face—namely, why a former Biden administration ambassador was intent on joining a MAGA-oriented organization. Issued on “X” by the organization’s official account, the letter is described as representing a seminal document: “Understanding DEIA’s damage inside State: Ambassador Joey Hood joins The Ben Franklin Fellowship; he renounces his DEIA past and affirms our meritocracy standard. Read his full letter.”
But it reads less like a renunciation than a careful attempt to depict its author as wary all along of DEI. One former senior State Department colleague describes Hood as a former apostle of DEI who will “say or do anything” to advance his career. He is remarkable not for his foreign policy views, but as a kind of case study of the ability of ambitious government civil servants to reinvent themselves in the image of Trump.
In February 2021, Hood spoke at an empowerME meeting of the Atlantic Council, where he “underscored the importance of harnessing the talent of working-age women as part of the region’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery. He highlighted two of the State Department’s projects with the American University in Beirut: the Middle East Partnership Initiative’s Knowledge is Power Index and the Support and Accelerate Women’s Inclusion in the Workforce project.”
Then there were his remarks after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. In May 2021, Hood declared that the response to Floyd’s death had transformed the State Department’s hitherto halting efforts to promote diversity. As CNN reported, “Floyd’s death ‘changed the dynamic,’ said Joey Hood, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. Hood said that ‘instead of 12 people showing up’ to meetings, suddenly ‘it was hundreds.’ Diversity and gender balance aren’t an issue when newly minted foreign service officers file into their A100 orientation class or at lower levels of the department, which reaps the benefits.” Hood recounted to CNN an incident in Yemen that he said underscored “what we’re capable of when we bring a rich diversity to our diplomacy.”
In his letter, however, Hood does not talk about his previous efforts to improve the lives of women in the Third World or the jolting effect of the Floyd murder on the State Department. Instead, he invokes Trumpian language to present himself not as a proponent of diversity efforts but a potential victim of them as far back as 1998, when he first applied for a State Department fellowship named after the distinguished foreign service official Thomas Pickering. His “younger self,” we are told, “had no idea how discriminatory the implementation of and perceptions surrounding some of the fellowships could become.” He observes that his efforts to promote justice and equality brought home the importance of “standing by those facing any form of discrimination, including anti-American bias or discrimination against people in the demographic majority, including men or Christians.”
Hood suggests that a moment of liberation has arrived. In his letter, he lauds Trump’s March DEI order as a great thing: “We remove obstacles for every American to have a chance to succeed and we make our country all the better for it.” Whether he will be able to persuade the Trump administration as easily as the Franklin Fellowship of the merits of his sudden conversion is an open question.
About the Author: Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, which The New York Times included on its 100 notable books of the year in 2008, and America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.
Image: Brian Jason / Shutterstock.com
