Inside the MAGA Deep State

How Trumpy Diplomats are moving up the ranks

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As Marco Rubio revamps the State Department and seeks out loyalty among the ranks, an obscure nonprofit has become a funnel for MAGA-aligned career diplomats into senior policy positions. Membership to the conservative Benjamin Franklin Fellowship has been seen as a pledge of loyalty to President Trump, which has irked some in the diplomatic corps who pride themselves on being impervious to politics. I’ve heard from multiple career officials that they’re worried that the department is being “infected” with politics.

“It just came out of nowhere,” said one career diplomat. “It’s been making the rounds among all of the foreign service like, ‘What the fuck?’ It’s clearly partisan in nature. The signal is that if you sign up, then we’ll make you a senior person.”

The Benjamin Franklin Fellowship (BFF, as they call themselves) was founded in October 2024 by three former career officials in the final months of the Biden administration but has evolved into somewhat of an affinity group. Typically these affinity groups or employee organizations within the State Department are created for the civil service workforce to network and mentor based on their gender, identity, or race. (They originated as a way to highlight or enhance diversity within the State Department back when it was considered too white and male.) But the creation of this conservative nonprofit that also offers events, networking, and mentorship based on ideology has many suspicious that The Right is starting to organize its own Deep State, especially as career officials see their members moving up the ranks.

The Benjamin Franklin Fellowship’s eight guiding principles, as listed on its website, sound a lot like Trump’s America First doctrine.

Benjamin Franklin Fellowship website

Some career officials have become suspicious that the fellowship has become a loyalty test in Rubio’s State Department and point to Lew Olowski as a prime example of a fellow who jumped the ranks because of his status. After four years as a probationary officer, Olowski, who still in his 30s, was promoted to lead the State Department’s Human Resources division, bypassing the officials on the decades-long ladder of career civil service.

“He’s someone who has taken on a role beyond his grade and his rank within the department, hundreds of people would have been passed over for grades like his,” Joe Biden’s former State Department spokesperson Ned Price told me.

“My concern with this fellowship is that it really comes pretty close to being a sort of shadow