Abigail Hauslohner
speaker
64 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 25 Aug
Abigail Hauslohner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They're sort of the tip of the spear in foreign policy.
Well, Trump came in and sort of immediately went to war with the State Department.
He put
his friend Elon Musk, in charge of shutting down USAID, the foreign assistance wing of the government that worked closely with the State Department.
And, you know, since then, he's basically slashed thousands of jobs at the State Department.
And
In their place, the department is now sort of a shell of itself where career foreign service officers describe kind of this culture of fear and silence where the decision making is done in increasingly tight circles of political appointees and special envoys trusted by Trump.
If you talk to any former diplomat, especially those who have negotiated with Iran on behalf of the United States, you know, everybody says across the board, and actually you hear Trump say this too, they are master negotiators, okay?
And Trump dispatched Steve Witkoff, his old business partner and donor, golf buddy, who he made special envoy for peace negotiations, and Jared Kushner to do the negotiations for a lot of that.
And not present for much of it have been career Iran experts from the State Department.
You know, there was one former ambassador who was most recently the U.S.
ambassador to Jordan under Biden, who put it really bluntly to us, just said the Iranians, you know, they come prepared.
They have their experts in the room.
They've been doing this a long time.
And the Americans just didn't show up with the same experience.
And she said the U.S.
got taken to the cleaners.
No, is the short answer.
A lot of the folks we talked to for this story are really pessimistic.
And that's because obviously so many foreign service officers have been fired or have opted to leave, take jobs in the private sector.
Showing 41–60 of 64 · page 3 of 4
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