Iranians are revolting against the despotic regime that Barack Obama worked tirelessly to legitimize, and the former president’s foreign policy guru is struggling to contain his despair.
Ben Rhodes, architect of the much-maligned Iran nuclear deal, hasn’t posted anything on social media to express solidarity with the protesters who have been risking their lives since late December in one of the largest mass uprisings the country has ever seen. Instead, he has repeatedly denounced Donald Trump for vowing to protect the protesters from state-sanctioned violence.
When U.S. forces apprehended Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro—one of Iran’s closest allies in Latin America—Rhodes was deeply concerned that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be next to fall. The operation took place less than 24 hours after Trump expressed support for the protesters in Iran and promised to “come to their rescue” if the regime turned violent.
“The thing that worries me is this kind of behavior can become contagious, and maybe it already has been,” Rhodes said on Pod Save the World, his foreign policy podcast with former Obama bro Tommy Vietor. “It’s probably not, like, entirely a coincidence that Trump is threatening Iran at the same time that he’s doing this in Venezuela.”
Days later, Rhodes and Vietor made fun of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) for wearing a “Make Iran Great Again” hat and saying that Trump has not “turned his back on the people of Iran” the way Obama did during the green revolution in 2009. “Cool hat, dork,” Vietor quipped smugly.
Rhodes, whose hatred of Israel earned him the nickname “Hamas” in Obama’s White House, proceeded to play Debbie Downer by listing off reasons why toppling the Iranian regime was actually worse than the status quo. “The problem going forward is there’s no clear path to, like, what would come next,” he lamented. If his good friend Khamenei were to be deposed, Rhodes contended, his other friends in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) would take control and “Trump bombing them isn’t going to change that.”
The Obama bro, who used to write the president’s speeches, delivered a semi-coherent rant about the dangers of attacking the regime to hasten its downfall. “The question is whether or not, you know, Israel tries to take advantage of [the protests] by bombing Iran again, and see if that is like, you know, hitting a boxer who they think is about to go down,” he said. “Um, I don’t think that would be good because, actually, I think the more chaotic the collapse is of this regime, the more likely there’s a civil war and the IRGC are the people that … are running the place.”
Rhodes continued to ramble about why the Iranian people shouldn’t trust Trump and why, if they knew what was best for them, they would stop protesting and “negotiate” with their oppressors—just like he did in Obama’s second term. “Like, what is in place after, like, whatever this, like,” he said. “Um, can there be just some Iranian process to, like, negotiate, like, a pathway in a different direction? That will take time, but that’s better than the regime collapsing and there being a civil war, or it’s better than the supreme leader being ousted, but then the IRGC is in charge, right?”
On Thursday, Rhodes promoted a post from Bulwark journalist Tim Miller about how Vice President J.D. Vance was “the most appalling person in public life since segregation.” That remains his most recent entry on his X feed. Meanwhile, in Iran, protesters across the country continue to risk their lives for freedom, but Rhodes has made no effort to acknowledge their courage.
Rhodes was one of several prominent Iran apologists who condemned the Israeli and U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. Attacking Iran, he said, was an “utterly pointless, dangerous, and immoral act” that would escalate into full-blown war. (It did not.) Rhodes argued, without citing evidence, that the Middle East would be far more peaceful if Trump hadn’t pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal he crafted with Obama. “Donald Trump’s tearing up agreements contributed, I believe, directly to October 7, between Israel and Hamas,” he said on MSNBC the day after U.S. bombers struck Iranian targets.
The inflammatory rhetoric from Rhodes and his fellow Obama bros appears to have radicalized Ryan Routh, the deranged liberal who tried to assassinate Trump in September 2024. Routh echoed the Obama bro talking points in a handwritten note outlining his motivations, denouncing Trump as unfit to be president because “he ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled.”
Apart from his slavish devotion to the Iranian regime, Rhodes is best known for crying like a bitch when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Weeks later, he flew to Havana to attend Fidel Castro’s funeral alongside his grieving comrades from Iran.
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