Tulsi Gabbard’s political journey has been anything but straightforward.
As a teenager, she worked for her father, a prominent anti-gay activist, and his political organization, which opposed same-sex marriage. In 2002, she was elected to Hawaii’s House of Representatives, becoming — at age 21 — the youngest person to serve in the Legislature.
Gabbard was a Democrat and remained so for two decades, as she cycled from the statehouse to Honolulu’s City Council to the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 2020, she ran for president, renouncing her anti-LGBTQ views and apologizing for her earlier stance. She was a Bernie Sanders acolyte and a fierce critic of Donald Trump and, especially, his foreign policy. She denounced him at one point for “being Saudi Arabia’s bitch.”
Now, Gabbard is MAGA down to her stocking feet.
Despite no obvious qualifications — save for her fawning appearances on Fox News — Trump selected her to be the director of national intelligence, the nation’s spymaster-in-chief. Despite no earthly reason, Gabbard was present last week when the FBI conducted a heavy-handed raid at the Fulton County elections office in Georgia, pursuing a harebrained theory the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Instead of, say, poring over the latest intelligence gleanings from Ukraine or Gaza, Gabbard stood watch as a team of flak-jacketed agents carted off hundreds of boxes of ballots and other election materials.
That’ll keep the homeland safe.
But as bizarre and unaccountable as it was, Gabbard’s presence outside Atlanta did make a certain amount of sense. She’s a longtime dabbler in crackpot conspiracies. And she’ll bend, like a swaying palm, whichever way the prevailing winds blow.
Some refer to her as the “Manchurian candidate,” said John Hart, a communication professor at Hawaii Pacific University, referring to the malleable cipher in the famous political thriller. In a different world, he suggested, Gabbard might have been Sanders’ running mate.
“It does take a certain amount of flexibility to think that someone who could have been the Democratic VP is now in Trump’s cabinet,” Hart observed.
The job of the nation’s director of national intelligence — a position created to address some of the failings that led to the 9/11 attacks — is to act as the president’s top intelligence adviser, synthesizing voluminous amounts of foreign, military and domestic information to help defend the country and protect its interests abroad.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with re-litigating U.S. elections, or tending to the bruised feelings of an onion-skinned president.
The job is supposed to be nonpartisan and apolitical, which should go without saying. Except it needs to be said in this time when all roads (and the actions of each cabinet member) lead to Trump, his ego, his whims and his insecurities.
There were ample signs Gabbard was a spectacularly bad pick for intelligence chief.
She blamed NATO and the Biden administration for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She claimed the U.S. was funding dangerous biological laboratories in the country — “parroting fake Russian propaganda,” in the words of then-Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.
She opposed U.S. aid to the rebels fighting Bashar Assad, met with Syria’s then-dictator and defended him against allegations he used chemical weapons against his own people.
She defended Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who were indicted for masterminding two of the biggest leaks of intelligence secrets in U.S. history.
Still, Gabbard was narrowly confirmed by the Senate, 52 to 48. The vote, almost entirely along party lines, was an inauspicious start and nothing since had dispelled lawmakers’ well-placed lack of confidence.
Trump brushed aside Gabbard’s congressional testimony on Iran’s nuclear capabilities — “I don’t care what she said” — and bombed the country’s nuclear facilities. The putative intelligence chief was apparently irrelevant in the administration’s ouster of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Her bizarre presence in Georgia — where Gabbard reportedly arranged for FBI agents to make a post-raid call to the president — looks like nothing more than a way to worm her way back into his good graces.
(Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that a U.S. intelligence official has filed a whistleblower complaint against Gabbard, which is caught up in wrangling over sharing details with Congress.)
California Sen. Adam Schiff said it’s “patently obvious to everyone Gabbard lacks the capability and credibility” to lead the country’s intelligence community.
“She has been sidelined by the White House, ignored by the agencies, and has zero credibility with Congress,” the Democrat wrote in an email. She’s responded by parroting Trump’s Big Lie “complete with cosplaying [a] secret agent in Fulton County and violating all norms and rules by connecting the President of the United States with line law enforcement officers executing a warrant. The only contribution that Tulsi Gabbard can make now would be to resign.”
Back in Hawaii, the former congresswoman has been in bad odor for years.
“It started with the criticism of President Obama” — a revered Hawaii native — over foreign policy “and a sense in Hawaii that she was more interested in appearing on the national media than working for the state,” said Colin Moore, a University of Hawaii political science professor and another longtime Gabbard watcher.
“Hawaii politicians have, with a few exceptions, tended to be kind of low-drama dealmakers, not the sort who attract national attention,” Moore said. “The goal is to rise in seniority and bring benefits back to the state. And that was never the model Tulsi followed.”
In recent years, as she sidled into Trump’s orbit, Hawaiian sightings of Gabbard have been few and far between, according to Honolulu Civil Beat, a statewide nonprofit news organization. Not that she’s been terribly missed in the deeply Democratic state.
“I’ve heard some less-charitable people say, ‘Don’t let the door hit your [rear end] on the way out,” said Hart.
But it’s not as though Gabbard’s ascension to director of intelligence was Hawaii’s loss and America’s gain. It’s been America’s loss, too.
