Tulsi Gabbard: The Wildest Card

TULSI GABBARD HAS lived the American Dream, or whatever’s left of it, without the rags-to-riches part. She is ambitious but not ex­actly methodical in chasing her ambition. She has risen to a great height, without being a consistent climber. She was a conservative on the left. She is a liberal on the right. Things didn’t just happen to her. Born in American Samoa to Mike and Carol (née Porter) Gabbard in 1981 and given a very Hindu name by her mother, Tulsi had a very Hawaiian child­hood of sea and surf, with yoga and sundry martial arts thrown in. But she also read the Bhagavad Gita, associated with an ISKCON offshoot, was initially homeschooled—and ended up in the military, eventually going to Iraq, while serving as a state legislator. At 21, she was the youngest can­didate to win a seat in the Hawaii House of Representatives in 2002. Before that first of many turning points, she was teaching martial arts, having dropped out of community college.

Gabbard was a “distant underdog” when she ran in the Democratic primary for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district but by November 2012, she had won the congressional election itself, becoming the first Hindu member of the House. Hawaii, of course, is the bluest of Democratic bastions. Nevertheless, no less than Nancy Pelosi had introduced Gabbard to America at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) earlier that year.

Four years later, she had made her first break with the Democratic establishment by ditching Hillary Clinton for Bernie Sanders, whom she backed for the 2016 presidential nomination. Clinton never forgot the ‘betrayal’, going on record later to call her a “Russian asset”. Twelve years on, Gabbard’s break with the Democrats is complete; after a brief sabbatical as an Independent supporting Donald Trump, she joined the Republican Party in the run-up to the November 5 election. Democrats—whom she called “an elitist cabal of warmongers”—by that time had disowned her as a conspiracy theorist, a friend of dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, a darling of the Russian state media (which she is), a pusher of Kremlin propaganda, a fixture on Fox (with or without Tucker Carlson), etc. And then, Trump made her a key instrument of his designs on DC. Her appointment as the incoming director of national intelligence (DNI) set the tiger among the hawks.

Syria, she had said, “is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States”. In helping the Syrian rebels, the Obama administration had aligned with Islamists. But then she told CNN she doubted Assad had anything to do with the chemical weapons attack that killed so many people. On February 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, she argued on social media that the West’s indifference to Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” about Ukraine’s proposed NATO membership was responsible for a war that could have been prevented. But soon, she accused the US of funding biolabs in Ukraine ready with deadly pathogen. This has been a pattern with Gabbard, and not unlike genuine conspiracy theorists, she mixes logic and lunacy. The allegation of Ukrainian biolabs was Russian propaganda and proven false. And yes, the Syrian regime did use chemical weapons.

Doubtless, they love Gabbard in Moscow and while there is no evidence of her ever colluding with the Russians—she claimed the Democratic Party had put her on a terror watchlist—she cannot run from that fact. Which is not exactly an asset for someone who will make daily intelligence briefings to the president of the US and help shape his geopolitical worldview. A recent New York Times analysis concluded: “[S]he echoed story lines that Russia’s propagandists created, which the Russians then recycled on their own media as evidence that the conspiracy theories they had manufactured were true. For the Kremlin, it was a virtuous cycle.”

Gabbard is a maverick, sincere or otherwise, but Trump and Putin have a shared hatred of the US intelligence community albeit for different reasons. Now, all 18 US intelligence agencies will report to Gabbard directly, provided she clears what will be a difficult confirmation process since, despite GOP control of the Senate, opposition to her appointment crosses the aisle. That’s to say nothing of behemoths like Homeland Security and the CIA.

For the DC establishment, Gabbard is the last person to be trusted with overseeing intelligence. For MAGA foot soldiers, she will help Trump make peace and not war. Need those be mutually exclusive?

Donald TrumpHawaii House of Representativesintelligence chiefMAGATulsi GabbardUS politics