5 Things You Need to Know About Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Pick for National Intelligence Director
Gabbard isn’t “anti-war,” obsesses over “radical Islam,” and has backed Assad, Netanyahu, and Modi.
When Donald Trump announced he was nominating Tulsi Gabbard to be his director of national intelligence the week after his election win, I took a deep breath. Not just because, like so many other Trump Cabinet picks (hello RFK Jr.! hello Pete Hegseth!), the former congresswoman is manifestly unqualified for such a significant role, but because in 2019, a document leaked out from the Gabbard presidential campaign containing a list of people to be targeted online.
Guess who was at the top of the list? Yeah, yours truly.
It probably isn’t great to be right at the top of an apparent ‘enemies’ list’ of a person who could soon be in charge of the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency).
Born in Samoa and raised in Hawaii, Gabbard is a combat veteran who deployed to Iraq and Kuwait before being elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 2012.
She styled herself as an anti-war progressive and, by 2016, had quit her post as vice-chair of the DNC to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. (She even remained on the board of the Sanders Institute until just a few years ago!)
Gabbard fooled many people on the left, but – as some of us previously argued – she was always on a self-promoting journey to the MAGA right. After a failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she loudly quit the Democratic Party in 2022 and began guest-hosting Tucker Carlson’s Fox show. By 2024, she had endorsed Donald Trump for president and joined the Republican Party.
Here are five things you need to know about former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence.
1. She Is a Hawk, Not a Dove
Many of her admirers on the left fell for the lie that Gabbard is “anti-war.” Mainstream media organizations have repeated this falsehood, too.
The truth is she was winning plaudits from pro-war conservatives almost a decade ago. In 2015, when she was still a rising Democratic Party star, the right-wing National Review described her “as one of the most hawkish Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee.” The magazine quoted Arthur Brooks, the then-president of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), calling her “strong on defense,” while the AEI’s vice president for foreign policy and defense, Danielle Pletka, a notorious Iraq War hawk, added: “I admire her.”
When it comes to fighting “terrorists,” Gabbard herself has never pretended to be anything other than a hawk.
“In short, when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” Gabbard told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.”
A year earlier, Gabbard had thrown her full support behind one of the most brutal wars of the 21st century: the Putin/Assad bombing of Syrian rebels in cities such as Idlib, Aleppo, and Homs.
For the record, “Russia’s bombing of these terrorists” killed thousands of innocent Syrian civilians.
Does that sound anti-war to you?
2. She Defended Bashar al-Assad
One of the reasons Gabbard’s nomination for the DNI position has caused such bipartisan controversy on Capitol Hill is because of her stance on Syria and, especially, her two meetings with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a secret visit to his country in 2017.
To be clear, her vocal opposition to calls for a regime-change war in Syria and the sending of US arms to extremist groups during her time in Congress was not just legitimate but admirable. Gabbard, however, crossed a line when she went to meet with Assad, without informing the US government, on a trip funded by activists accused by multiple media outlets of having close ties to the Syrian regime.
Gabbard has since presented the trip as an attempt at diplomacy while claiming to be a neutral figure. Yet, upon her return from her meetings with the Syrian dictator, Gabbard went on US media to parrot the Assad regime’s talking points. “There is no difference between 'moderate' rebels and al-Qaeda…they are all the same,” Gabbard told CNN, reducing the Syrian civil war to “a war between terrorists under the command of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and the Syrian government.” She also suggested chemical weapons attacks in Syria in 2017 and 2018 “may have been staged by opposition forces” and not the Syrian government. She even claimed Assad, in her meetings with him, had “agreed” to hold “fair and open elections” in Syria.
How did that work out?
One prominent Syrian-American activist who has “spoken with Gabbard or been in meetings with her several times,” told Politico earlier this month that he had been “struck by Gabbard’s lack of outrage at Assad’s atrocities.”
Assad, incidentally, isn’t the only brutal Middle East dictator Gabbard has cozied up to in the name of fighting – yes, you guessed it – “radical Islam.” In November 2015, she visited Cairo for a photo-op with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whose “great courage” she praised while calling on the US government to “take action to recognize President el-Sisi and his leadership” against Islamist terrorism.
3. She Is Obsessed with ‘Islamic Extremism’
In the latter years of the Obama administration, Gabbard began attacking her own party leader for his refusal to refer to the al-Qaeda and ISIS terror threats as “Islamic extremism.”
Her obsession with this issue led to her becoming a regular guest on Fox, where she criticized President Barack Obama again and again for not saying what Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic called her two “magic words”: Islamic extremism. In one appearance with Fox’s Neil Cavuto in 2015, she even lambasted the president for daring to suggest that “poverty, lack of access to jobs, lack of access to education” were drivers of radicalization, adding: “They are not fueled by materialistic motivation, it's actually a theological [issue], this radical Islamic ideology.” (The actual experts on radicalization disagree with the former congresswoman on this, as I have documented at length on multiple previous occasions).
Gabbard herself has denied the charge of Islamophobia and insists her problem is with Islamism, not with Muslims or Islam.
And yet, in September 2015, Gabbard joined with then-Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter to call for non-Muslim refugees from the Middle East to be given priority over Muslim refugees. Two months later, in November 2015, she was one of 47 House Democrats who voted with Republicans in favor of the SAFE Act, which would have effectively halted all refugees from Syria and Iraq from entering the United States.
By November 2016, after Trump’s first election victory, his far-right, Islamophobic campaign manager Steve Bannon was trying to set up a meeting for him with Gabbard, with one source telling The Hill: “[Bannon] loves Tulsi Gabbard… She gets the foreign policy stuff, the Islamic terrorism stuff.”
It is also worth considering the pernicious way in which Gabbard deploys loaded phrases like “Islamic extremism” and “radical Islam.” In a video posted to Twitter in 2019, Gabbard accused the president of Turkey, an ally of the United States, of being a “radical Islamist megalomaniac who wants to establish a caliphate with himself as the Caliph — the supreme ruler.” Whatever your views of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are – and I have my own criticisms – this is conspiratorial, Islamophobic nonsense.
4. She Is a Fan of Narendra Modi
Gabbard may not like Erdoğan, but she really, really likes India’s far-right Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi.
In 2014, she traveled to India at the invitation of Modi, having been elected as the first Hindu member of Congress two years earlier. “I was delighted to accept the invite of Prime Minister Modi,” Gabbard said at the time. “He is a leader whose example and dedication to the people he serves should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere.”
Modi, as chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, oversaw anti-Muslim pogroms that killed around 1,000 people and was accused by multiple scholars and human rights groups of complicity in that communal violence. An unpublished UK Foreign Office report stated that Modi was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity” that enabled the mass killings. The US State Department even banned Modi from entering the United States (until he later became prime minister), a decision that Gabbard opposed and called a “great blunder” while suggesting there was “a lot of misinformation” around the 2002 riots.
Since Modi and the BJP came to power in India a decade ago, press freedoms have deteriorated while attacks on minorities, especially the country’s Muslims, have escalated.
Gabbard denies ties to Modi’s BJP and its bigoted allies, yet, back in January 2015, even an Indian newspaper referred to the then-Democratic congresswoman as a new “mascot” of the far-right, fascistic Indian organization, the Sangh Parivar. When Gabbard got married in a “postcard-perfect Vedic wedding” in Hawaii three months later, a top BJP official “flew in from India with a special message from Modi.”
To be clear: the issue here is not Gabbard’s Hinduism. The former congresswoman and the Indian PM are allies not because the two of them happen to share the same faith but because they both harbor noxious attitudes toward Muslims.
(Other media organizations, however, have raised issues about Gabbard’s faith or, more specifically, her membership of an alleged cult called the “Science of Identity Foundation,” led by Chris Butler. Butler has been accused of being “abusive” by former members and, in a 2017 profile of Gabbard, the New Yorker reported stories of “devotees lying prostrate whenever he entered the room, or adding bits of his nail clippings to their food, or eating spoonfuls of sand that he had walked upon,” which both Butler and Gabbard deny.)
5. She Supports Israel and the Gaza Genocide
It’s not just the Indian far right that Gabbard has a soft spot for but the Israeli far right, too.
Back in 2015, when she was still pretending to be a progressive, she spoke at a conference organized by Christians United for Israel (CUFI), where she heaped praise on the US’ “longstanding friendship and partnership with Israel.” CUFI is a far-right Christian Zionist group led by the notorious John Hagee, who has made anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim, and antisemitic remarks.
The following year, in 2016, she was feted by far-right, pro-Israel activist Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who shared a photograph he took with Gabbard and fellow far-right, pro-Israel activist Miriam Adelson. Today, Adelson is a prominent billionaire donor to the Trump campaign and reportedly wants Israel to illegally annex the occupied West Bank with US support, while Boteach recently referred to Gabbard as a “close friend.”
Over the years, there have been moments where Gabbard has criticized Israel. For example, during the ‘Great March of Return’ in 2018, when Palestinians in Gaza were protesting at the Israel-Gaza border, she called on the Israeli military “to stop using live ammunition in its response to unarmed protesters in Gaza.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, however, she has been in lockstep with the racist and fascistic Netanyahu government, opposing a ceasefire and bizarrely insisting Hamas wants a “global Islamist caliphate.”
Here at home in the United States, she has called pro-Palestine, anti-war protesters on college campuses antisemites and “puppets” of Hamas, while accusing members of the Democratic Party’s left-wing ‘Squad’ in Congress of being “apologists for Islamist jihadists.”
Gabbard isn’t a progressive or a leftist – and never was. She is a hawkish Zionist, who supports Hindu nationalism, indulges in Islamophobic tropes, and defends some of the worst dictators in the world.
Do Americans really want such a person in charge of our national intelligence?
Check out more from Zeteo on Trump 2.0:
Gabbard is dangerous, and she is being offered a position where she can do great harm to imagined enemies and help the wrong trumpists in other nations.
A friend of Shmuley, (a Smut Merchant with his own Daughter!) is an enemy of Humanity!