Tulsi Gabbard is putting Trump’s interests over America’s
Tulsi Gabbard’s political journey has not been easy.
As a teenager, he worked for his father, a prominent anti-gay activist, and his political organization opposing gay marriage. He was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives in 2002, becoming the youngest person to serve in the Legislature at the age of 21.
Gabbard was a Democrat and remained so for two decades as she biked from the statehouse to the Honolulu City Council to the U.S. House of Representatives.
He abandoned his anti-LGBTQ views and ran for president in 2020. He apologizes for his previous behavior.. He was an aide to Bernie Sanders and a harsh critic of Donald Trump, especially his foreign policy. At one point he accused her of being “Saudi Arabia’s whore.”
Now Gabbard is MAGA, down to her socked feet.
Trump chose him as director of national intelligence, the nation’s intelligence chief, even though he had no obvious qualifications other than his obsequious appearance on Fox News. For no earthly reason, Gabbard was there last week when the FBI conducted a hard-hitting raid on Georgia’s Fulton County election office, pursuing a bird-brained theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Instead of reviewing the latest intelligence from, say, Ukraine or Gaza, Gabbard watched as a team of agents in bulletproof vests carried away hundreds of ballot drop boxes and other election materials.
This will keep the homeland safe.
But as strange and inexplicable as it was, Gabbard’s presence outside Atlanta made some sense. He’s been dealing with crazy conspiracies for a long time. And no matter which way the prevailing winds blow, it will bend like a swaying palm.
John Hart, a communications professor at Hawaii Pacific University, said some have called him the “Manchurian candidate,” a reference to the malleable cipher in the famous political thriller. He suggested that in a different world, Gabbard could be Sanders’ running mate.
“It requires a certain amount of flexibility to consider that someone who could be the Democratic Vice President is now in Trump’s cabinet,” Hart said.
The job of the nation’s director of national intelligence — a position created to address some of the failures that led to the September 11 attacks — is to act as the president’s top intelligence adviser and synthesize vast amounts of foreign, military and domestic information to help defend the country and protect its interests abroad.
This has nothing to do with relitigating the US election or dealing with the hurt feelings of an onion-skinned president.
The work needs to be non-partisan and apolitical, which goes without saying. But it must be said at this time that all roads (and the actions of every cabinet member) lead to Trump and his ego, whims and insecurities.
There were plenty of signs that Gabbard was an extremely poor choice as intelligence chief.
He held NATO and the Biden administration responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He claimed that the United States was financing dangerous biological laboratories in the country and, in the words of then-Utah Senator Mitt Romney, “parroting fake Russian propaganda.”
He opposed US aid to rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad, met with the then-Syrian dictator and defended him against allegations that he used chemical weapons against his own people.
He defended Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who were accused of leaking two of the biggest intelligence secrets in US history.
Still, Gabbard was confirmed by the Senate by a narrow margin of 52-48. The vote, which was almost entirely along party lines, was off to an inauspicious start, and nothing since has been able to address lawmakers’ entrenched lack of trust.
Trump ignored Gabbard’s congressional testimony about Iran’s nuclear capabilities — “I don’t care what she says” — and bombed the country’s nuclear facilities. The putative intelligence chief was apparently uninterested in the administration’s ouster of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Gabbard’s strange presence in Georgia, where FBI agents reportedly arranged for her to call the president after the raid, appears to be nothing more than a way to get back into his good graces.
(Also, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that a U.S. intelligence official had filed a whistleblower complaint against Gabbard, who has been in contention with Congress over sharing details.)
California Senator Adam Schiff said it was “clear to everyone” that Gabbard lacks the ability and credibility to lead the nation’s intelligence community.
“He has been sidelined by the White House, ignored by the institutions, and has zero credibility with Congress,” the Democrat wrote in an email. He responded by parroting Trump’s Big Lie, “complete with cosplay” [a] He violates all norms and rules by associating the undercover agent in Fulton County and the President of the United States with the law enforcement officers executing the arrest warrant. “The only contribution Tulsi Gabbard can make right now is to resign.”
The former Hawaii congressman had bad breath for years.
“This started with criticism of President Obama, a respected Hawaiian native, on foreign policy and a sense that he was more interested in getting national media coverage than working for the state in Hawaii,” said Colin Moore, a University of Hawaii political science professor and another longtime Gabbard watcher.
“Hawaii politicians, with a few exceptions, tended to make low-drama deals, not the kind that attract national attention,” Moore said. “The aim is to increase seniority and bring back benefits to the state. And that was never the model that Tulsi followed.”
In recent years, sightings of Gabbard in Hawaii have been few and far between as she moved into Trump’s orbit, according to Honolulu Civil Beat, a statewide nonprofit news organization. Not that he’s missed too much in the deeply Democratic state.
“I’ve heard some less charitable people say, ‘Don’t let the door hit you.’ [rear end] on the way out,” Hart said.
But Gabbard’s rise to intelligence director isn’t Hawaii’s loss and America’s gain. America also lost.
