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?