A woman named only as Mumina sits before a darkened window, her face silhouetted to hide her identity. Off camera, she is questioned by Tulsi Gabbard, then a 35-year-old Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii with grand ambitions. Gabbard prompts her to tell her harrowing story. “They wore masks. They kept shooting…until they ran out of bullets,” Mumina says, recounting a night near Damascus when Islamist rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, gunned down her father as she watched. Gabbard comforted Mumina: “You are incredibly brave and strong.”
It was January 2017, and Gabbard was on a fact-finding tour of Syria that doubled as an opportunity to film a documentary. Under Assad, Syria had become a pariah state, subject to sanctions from America and other countries for the government’s use of chemical weapons against its own people, and the murder and torture of thousands of prisoners. To help put down the rebellion against him, Assad had invited Russia’s armed forces into the country. Gabbard became the first serving member of Congress to visit Damascus in years. She hoped to publicise the depravity of Assad’s opponents in order to advance her conviction that “Assad is not an enemy of the United States,” as she would later claim.
The Economist recently reported on the untold story of Tulsi Gabbard’s visit to Syria in 2017. Read more here about her secret diplomacy and how the trip revealed fresh intelligence about Austin Tice, an American journalist who has been missing since 2012
Her husband, Abraham Williams, a cinematographer, filmed Mumina’s interview. Gabbard later released it on social media as an episode of “Voices of Syria”, an ad hoc collection of her encounters in the country. The series is part evidence-gathering, part agitprop and part newscast by its charismatic correspondent.
Mumina’s testimony may have been true. Yet Gabbard did not acknowledge that Mumina’s account – of murderous al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates hijacking the opposition to Assad that had emerged during the Arab spring – parroted regime propaganda. Nor did Gabbard acknowledge that Mumina and every other person she interviewed risked prison, or worse, if they deviated from Assad’s official line.
The next day, Gabbard sat down at the Four Seasons hotel in Damascus with Ali Haidar, the minister for reconciliation in Assad’s government. Over wine and Western food, Gabbard questioned him about the “national dialogue”. Haidar was supposedly leading an attempt to bring peace to the country – a surreal position given the bloody war the government was waging. Recently, Haidar told 1843 magazine that even he had privately concluded that Assad was not remotely serious about peace talks.
In 2017, Tulsi Gabbard (right) spoke to the alleged victims of Islamist rebels in Syria. For those interviewed, deviating from Assad’s narrative could have meant prison or worse
This should have been obvious from Assad’s conduct of the war – the barrel bombs Syrian and Russian planes dropped indiscriminately on cities and the destruction of Aleppo, which had resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians by the time of Gabbard’s visit. Haidar recalls wondering why Gabbard did not ask him the obvious question: if he had been minister for reconciliation since 2012, why was the country still aflame? The few visiting dignitaries who made it to Syria had little interest in genuine inquiry. These kinds of meetings “were about propaganda rather than real discussions”, said Haidar. “It was all for show.”
Less than a decade ago Gabbard was a progressive Democrat and rising star. As late as 2019, she ran to be the Democratic presidential candidate on a quixotic platform to end American intervention abroad and slash the defence budget. These days, though, she is podcast pals with Tucker Carlson, formerly an anchor at Fox News. They finish one another’s sentences as they unpack the conspiratorial machinations of the powerful.
In 2022 Gabbard left the party, claiming it had been captured by “an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”. She went on to write a polemical book rife with attacks on “government-controlled currency” and the “big arm of Big Brother”. During the 2024 presidential campaign, she endorsed Donald Trump. Even to politicians in Hawaii who have worked closely with her for years, Gabbard’s political path is hard to fathom. “She’s a shape-shifter,” said Neil Abercrombie, a former governor of Hawaii who once backed Gabbard but has come to regret it. “She can literally become something else than what appears in front of you.”
Gabbard hoped to publicise the depravity of Assad’s opponents in order to advance her conviction that “Assad is not an enemy of the United States”
Trump has now rewarded Gabbard with a nomination as his director of national intelligence (DNI). The DNI decides what secret intelligence the president will hear each day and oversees a multi-billion-dollar network of 18 American spy agencies. Gabbard’s qualifications on paper – a record of military service, four terms in Congress – are thin but acceptable. She attracts controversy mainly because her views on international affairs and America’s place in the world lie far outside the mainstream. She has long been an unabashed campaigner for world peace but has lately taken on what she regards as Washington’s self-perpetuating war machine. The capital’s foreign-policy elites have used the Ukrainian people as “cannon fodder” and thwarted Trump’s efforts to make peace with Vladimir Putin so that “Their friends in the military-industrial complex make trillions of dollars,” she wrote recently. She is a fan of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing about the extent of American surveillance, and is a believer in the existence of a shadowy Deep State, which includes “propaganda media, Big Tech, the FBI, the CIA and a whole network of rogue intelligence and law-enforcement agents.”
Her journey to Syria early in 2017 has become a touchstone for concerns about her judgment. Why did she choose, of her own volition, to become the first sitting member of Congress to visit the country since the Arab spring? And how did she become an apologist for Assad and Putin?
By the time Gabbard travelled to Damascus, she had already marked herself out as a fierce critic of Barack Obama’s policy toward Syria. She denounced CIA and Pentagon programmes to aid the rebels fighting to oust Assad as another instalment in America’s “interventionist, counterproductive regime-change wars” in the Middle East. She argued America’s meddling would empower al-Qaeda and Islamic State, prolong civilian suffering and might lead to nuclear war with Russia, Assad’s main backer.
There were indeed grounds for worrying about al-Qaeda and Islamic State’s role in the rebellion, but Gabbard conflated all rebels with the most notorious jihadists. The only way out, she argued, was “direct conversation, engagement with President Assad”. She proposed to end all support to rebel forces and align with Assad in fighting Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
Haidar recalls wondering why Gabbard did not ask him the obvious question: if he had been minister for reconciliation since 2012, why was the country still aflame?
She was hardly alone in her criticism of Obama’s policy. Obama himself worried privately that American aid might enable jihadist rebels. Yet the way Gabbard expressed her views often left people scratching their heads. Shortly after Gabbard had returned from her trip to Syria, in April 2017, Assad deployed chemical weapons against his own people. Gabbard told an interviewer that she was “not in the business of defending President Assad” but added quickly that she was not interested in “passing judgments on character”, either. She met Assad twice during her trip. “He wants to be seen as someone who cares for his country,” she explained. “A nationalist president. He wants to be seen as someone who would not conduct these kinds of atrocities.”
How did an ambitious politician come to sound so credulous? “The kindly view is that she is an orphan looking for a place,” said Denby Fawcett, a journalist in Hawaii who has covered Gabbard for two decades. “To me her views are not authentic. [She says] anything that will get her publicity.” Certainly it is fair to describe Gabbard as a politician who has been ideologically adrift for many years. Her elusiveness may trace in part to her upbringing. “She had an unusual childhood,” Fawcett noted, one infused with polarising ideas and the influence of a strong-willed leader.
Mike and Carol Gabbard, Tulsi’s parents, settled in Hawaii in the 1980s and became involved with a yoga and meditation community that was inspired by Hare Krishna. It was led by a charismatic guru, Chris Butler, a university dropout who built a movement called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler urged adherents to strive for the highest level of self-actualisation, which he described as “perfect spiritual love”.
Some former members have described the community as a cult. They say acolytes sometimes prostrated themselves when Butler entered a room, and that followers ate sand he had stepped on or treated his food scraps as relics. “I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God’s voice on Earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God,” an anonymous former member wrote in an essay posted on Medium. In December, Anita van Duyn, a former adherent, wrote to members of Congress urging them to examine Butler’s influence on Gabbard. (Science of Identity did not respond for comment.)
She has not spoken much in public about being Butler’s pupil, but has emphasised that she had never seen him act abusively. Although Gabbard attended a Science of Identity school in the Philippines for two years, she didn’t live in the community and seems to have encountered Butler largely as a preacher. Indeed, Gabbard and her parents appear to have found Butler’s teachings to be enriching over a long period of years. His sermons and writings mainly contain self-help bromides, but he told an interviewer in 1982 that he spoke on “very heavy subjects like old age and death and sex and communism and capitalism and war”. The available record of Butler’s views on international affairs is thin, but he warned against capitalistic materialism and often celebrated spiritual love as a universal aspiration. This may well have been a source of Gabbard’s abhorrence of war – even if peace requires acceptance of dictatorial rule. As recently as 2015 Gabbard described Butler as her “guru dev”, or master teacher.
Gabbard came of age as her parents led increasingly public campaigns against marriage equality and gay rights
Gabbard, who identifies today as a Hindu, describes criticism of her ties to Science of Identity as bigotry. Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for Gabbard, described such criticism as “Hinduphobia” and said that Gabbard “is not nor has ever been affiliated” with Science of Identity. Yet there can be little doubt that Butler had an effect on Gabbard’s spiritual outlook and her pathway through politics: a fascination with figures of authority who demanded deference would mark her public career.
Butler was particularly vociferous in his denunciation of homosexuality – a cause also taken up by the Gabbard family. On a weekend afternoon in June 1991, at the second annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade along Waikiki beach, Carol Gabbard turned up with a tiny group of counter-protesters. She stood beside two men dressed as grim reapers who carried signs proclaiming: “Homosexuality, Lifestyle of Death”. Carol Gabbard was by then a mother of five. Tulsi, the fourth child, was 11 years old.
Gabbard came of age as her parents led increasingly public campaigns against marriage equality and gay rights. The family paid a price: a local radio station cancelled Mike Gabbard’s talk show because the managers found his views unacceptable. A restaurant he ran closed, Mike said, because of picketing. Yet Mike persisted and went on to become president of the Alliance for Traditional Marriage-Hawaii, a state-wide advocacy network.
The Gabbard family pose for a family photo in 1984. From left to right: Mike, Tulsi, Jai, Narayan, Bhakti, Vrindavan, Carol
Tulsi, who was mainly home-schooled by her mother and father, adopted her parents’ beliefs as a teenager. In 2000, when she was 19, her mother ran for the school board. Tulsi joined Carol and Mike at a public demonstration against protections for gay students in Honolulu. “I’m here to support my parents and what they are doing 100%,” Tulsi told a reporter from the Honolulu Advertiser. “Everything they are accusing us of – hate and harassment – they seem to be doing the same thing.”
In 2002 Tulsi ran as a Democrat for an open seat in the lower chamber of Hawaii’s state legislature. Although Hawaii reliably votes Democratic, her views were not disqualificatory – the state has a streak of social conservatism dating to the influence of Christian missionaries during the 19th century.
She found campaigning uncongenial. She was “an introvert by nature” who struggled when she was younger with anxiety, she recalled in a lengthy interview given 18 months ago to the Veterans Project, an oral-history group. On many days she had to force herself to get out of her car and knock on doors. If “anyone I grew up with had said, ‘Tulsi, you’re going to be the one who runs for president one day,’ I would have laughed my ass off.”
She showed her capacity to bend her principles when it was expedient by reversing her opposition to gay marriage, saying that military service had broadened her perspective
On a candidate questionnaire she listed her occupation as martial-arts instructor and said she was qualified for elected office because of the work she had done with her father to block gay marriage: “I learned that real leaders are willing to make personal sacrifices for the common good.”
Buoyed up by name recognition, Gabbard won a four-way race with 43% of the vote. As the results came in, photographers captured her smiling and bedecked in flowers, sitting beside her father, who won a Honolulu city council seat the same night. The election affirmed politics as the family business. More than two decades later, Mike Gabbard is still in office, currently as a state senator.
The 9/11 attacks were a formative experience for Gabbard, who was 20 when they happened. She “hadn’t put much thought into foreign policy or the geopolitical threats facing Hawaii and our nation”, she told the Veterans Project, but her instinct after the attacks was to go “after the guys who did this”.
Gabbard had not yet finished college, so despite her preternatural achievements in elected politics, she enlisted as an entry-level private. When her part-time National Guard unit was called up for full-time duty in Iraq, she could have opted out. Instead she chose to go. She toyed with running for re-election for her seat in the state legislature in 2004, but ultimately withdrew as she prepared to ship out, bringing to an end her brief first stint as a professional politician.
Gabbard first enlisted in the National Guard in 2003 while still in elected office as a state representative. In 2005, she chose to deploy to Iraq
After writing letters to her family – to be read in the event that she didn’t return – Gabbard arrived at Balad, an air base north of Baghdad, in early 2005. The region was a hotbed of Sunni resistance to the American occupation. Gabbard was part of the 29th Brigade Combat Team of the Hawaii National Guard. Her job was to scan through a list of all the American soldiers wounded or killed in action across Iraq during the previous 24 hours, and identify members of her brigade who might need medical treatment or evacuation.
Although Gabbard did not participate in combat, sifting through the names of the dead and wounded proved traumatising. And Balad repeatedly came under mortar fire. “It was a stressful environment to be in,” said Bruce Oliveira, a retired brigadier general who came to know Gabbard as the 29th’s deputy commanding officer. “There’s a lot of things that you never think of seeing and experiencing.” He had to send soldiers home who could not manage the pressure, but Gabbard proved her mettle: “She was very squared away.”
Balad changed Gabbard’s view of America, she would write later. “As I grieved the loss of every one of my friends, wondering what this was all for, I thought of those politicians sitting in the safety of their fancy Washington offices, fat and happy, smoking their cigars, laughing their way to the bank with the money they got from their buddies in the military-industrial complex. They made me sick. And angry.”
She began to praise Putin as Russia intervened on Assad’s side: “Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them. Putin did”
There is a lot of bitter recollection in her recent book, yet it is hard to be sure how firmly Gabbard held these views at the time. After her 2005 deployment, she went to officer candidate school, earned a commission and chose to go back for a second tour of the Middle East, in 2008, this time as a military-police officer in Kuwait. Oliveira again commanded her unit and found her “very conscientious, did everything she was supposed to do”. She rose to become a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a billet she still holds – and a strange position for a sceptic of the military-industrial complex.
It is of course possible to forge a successful career in the armed forces while privately despising the civilian politicians who send you off to fight. Gabbard is one of a generation of majors and colonels in the American army disillusioned by the wars they saw up close and the personal losses they endured. Gabbard clearly enjoyed her service – the mission, the physical challenges, the sense of order – so perhaps the personal rewards outweighed her seething anger at the “warmongers” in Washington, DC. Her upbringing in Science of Identity and her experience in Iraq seem to have forged a paradoxical attitude towards power – she is both drawn to it and the individuals who wield it, yet at the same time suspicious of the gargantuan institutions through which it is exercised.
There is certainly a clear line connecting Gabbard’s chastening experience in Iraq and her opposition to later American interventions in Libya and Syria. Her understanding towards Putin seems to have emerged from his military support for the Assad regime. She denounced Democratic elites for painting him as “the new Hitler” and accused the “Democrat ruling elite” of believing that “a nuclear war can actually be won”. She argues that mainstream Democrats have “chosen a path of war to serve their own personal, political and financial interests” while purposefully seeking to “tighten the noose of government control over the people”.
But Gabbard wasn’t talking about the permanent war machine, the surveillance state or the libelling of Putin – at least not in public – when she came home from the Middle East. She resumed her career in local politics by winning a seat on Honolulu city council in 2010. Then she began a journey that informed her worldview as much as her service in Iraq: her rapid rise and fall as a darling of the national Democrats.
When one of Hawaii’s two seats in the House of Representatives fell open in 2012, Gabbard started out as an underdog but won over the party establishment in Hawaii and Washington. She showed her capacity to bend her principles when it was expedient by reversing her opposition to gay marriage, saying that military service had broadened her perspective. In debates, she called for more environmental regulation and for the immediate withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan, a relatively lonely opinion at the time.
She easily won the Democratic primary and faced no serious Republican opposition that November (the party’s nominee was a homeless man). The party immediately rewarded her with a coveted speaking role at the Democratic National Convention, where Democrats re-nominated Obama for a second term. She later received a plum appointment on the Democratic National Committee. Gabbard seemed a media-friendly avatar of her party’s coalition and a potential future candidate for president who offered something to all wings of the party: a woman of colour, a captain in the army reserve and a progressive who spoke her mind.
In Washington, however, she bridled at taking the party whip and seemed distracted by her celebrity. In India, she won attention as the first Hindu-American in Congress, and repeatedly visited Narendra Modi, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister of India. Seemingly channelling Modi’s attitude towards Muslims, she soon criticised Obama on Fox News for his reluctance to label Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists”. It was the first in a succession of puzzling political judgments. Why alienate the most popular and powerful Democrat in Washington by picking a fight that had no salience back home in Hawaii?
Publicising her experiences back home, Gabbard offered no caveats about the limits of fact-finding while being welcomed as a dictator’s guest of honour
Part of it seems a matter of temperament – an unwillingness to become a compliant footsoldier. New members of Congress embraced by their party as Gabbard was are typically urged to staff up with party pros who can mentor them and keep them out of trouble. But Gabbard relied heavily on volunteers and staff from the Science of Identity – people she evidently trusted but who did not know the ropes in Washington. She also bristled when Obama’s White House came down on her for public dissent. The more the party pressed her, the more she seemed determined to go her own way.
“She really is an isolate,” said Neal Milner, a retired professor of politics at the University of Hawaii. “She became a politician who wanted to become more influential but at the same time wanted to isolate herself in many ways.”
As the Arab spring yielded to grinding civil war in Syria, Gabbard fixated on Obama’s policy as another instance of failed American interventionism. The administration publicly sought Assad’s overthrow, at least on paper; the CIA and the Pentagon both ran programmes to fund and train “vetted” anti-government rebels untainted by al-Qaeda or Islamic State. But the conflict had become extraordinarily complicated. Russia intervened in 2015 to prop up Assad. In November Islamic State used its Syrian sanctuary to launch barbaric attacks on the streets of Paris. Obama prioritised bombing Islamic State enclaves while remaining committed – at least in public – to ousting Assad.
Gabbard went after the president again, this time saying that he should stop funding Syrian rebels because they all had ties to Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and that he should start attacking jihadists of all stripes. She began to praise Putin as Russia intervened on Assad’s side: “Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them. Putin did.” She joined Republicans to support a law, opposed by the White House, that would tighten the screening of Syrian refugees to guard against terrorists. But it was Gabbard’s naive attitude towards Assad, more than specific policy positions, that alienated allies. She advertised herself as an independent thinker who spoke truth to power. Yet she was repeatedly evasive about Assad’s war crimes.
In the summer of 2015, Gabbard joined a congressional delegation to the Middle East. Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an opposition group in Washington, escorted the visitors to a Turkish town near the Syrian border teeming with refugees. Moustafa took Gabbard alone to meet two Syrian girls, aged nine and four, who had been badly burned in a bombing carried out by Syrian warplanes or those of their Russian allies. Their parents had been killed in the attack. After they told their story, Gabbard replied with a question, Moustafa recalled: “How do you know if it was Assad? What if it was ISIS?” (ISIS had no air force). “It dawned on me that Tulsi wasn’t misinformed or ignorant,” Moustafa said. He was “appalled” by her “lack of empathy” for the girls and worried that she held “a worldview that was adversarial to the United States”. Through Henning, Gabbard said that Moustafa’s account of the episode is “false”.
Gabbard’s rising profile in national politics rankled party bosses in Hawaii. After her second term, she drew a primary opponent in 2016 who did not threaten her re-election but whose challenge signalled trouble on the horizon. “Her critical statements about President Obama shocked most of the political class here,” recalled Colin Moore, a politics professor at the University of Hawaii. “The reaction was, ‘Why are you creating this trouble for yourself and Hawaii?’”
The arguments that John Brennan heard from Russian counterparts were “very similar to the types of things that Tulsi Gabbard was saying. There were striking similarities”
Gabbard became a regular on Fox News, an early exemplar of the “horseshoe” tendency of the American populist revival, where the far left and far right have converged on topics such as non-interventionism. Gabbard’s flirtations with the Trumpist right took her further away from establishment Democrats. Early in 2016, she resigned from the DNC and endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. She pounded Hillary Clinton for backing a proposed no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians and anti-Assad rebels, dismissing the idea as another escalation of “this regime-change war in Syria”.
After Trump defeated Clinton, he invited Gabbard to Trump Tower in Manhattan. They discussed her ideas about Syria. Democrats reacted with predictable exasperation. She dismissed her critics as “neocons” banging the “drumbeats of war”.
Flattered by Trump and untethered from mainstream Democrats, Gabbard made quiet preparations that autumn for the journey to Damascus that would cause her so much grief. According to two people familiar with her trip, she served as a conduit from Trump to Assad, to explore whether Assad would be open to a reset in relations with the new administration, as reported by The Economist this January. By one account, she asked if Assad would take a call from Trump; according to a second source, she carried a letter from the president-elect. Gabbard denies any such thing took place. “The Trump administration was not aware or involved in her trip in any way, and she did not relay any communications from the Trump administration,” said Henning, Gabbard’s spokeswoman. (The Economist also revealed that a member of Gabbard’s travelling party claims to have had an encounter with Austin Tice, an American journalist missing since 2012.)
On the night of January 14th 2017 Gabbard flew out of Washington on the first leg of her trip to Damascus. She did not inform Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, or other party leaders before she left, later citing security precautions as the reason for her secrecy. Her travelling party included Dennis Kucinich, a former left-wing congressman and longshot presidential candidate turned Fox News commentator.
During her four days in Syria, Gabbard met Assad twice and visited Aleppo, which had been recaptured by Assad’s forces only days earlier. She interviewed Christian leaders whose fear of extreme Islamists tethered them to Assad. She and her entourage heard narratives ladled out in recent years to many other official visitors: the rebels threatened Syria’s fragile religious and ethnic diversity; al-Qaeda and Islamic State tortured and repressed civilians; and American intervention in the war had only increased the suffering of innocents.
She told Carlson she had gone to Damascus to meet with the Syrian people, “to share the care, the love and the ‘aloha’ that the people of our country have for them”
Publicising her experiences back home, Gabbard offered no caveats about the limits of fact-finding while being welcomed as a dictator’s guest of honour. On the contrary, she wrote that her investigations corrected “the false, one-sided biased reports pushing a narrative that supports this regime-change war at the expense of Syrian lives”.
In addition to Mumina’s story, Gabbard publicised other testimony, including that of an unnamed boy who told the congresswoman he was “tortured, waterboarded, electrocuted, placed on a cross and whipped” by rebels simply because he had defied them by going to school. The story is unverified; perhaps it was true. But the emotive imagery of Christian martyrdom might have given pause to a sceptic of regime propaganda.
The talking points Gabbard amplified were also pushed during this period by Russia. John Brennan, Obama’s outgoing CIA director, travelled to Moscow to discuss Syria during 2016. The arguments he heard from Russian counterparts were “very similar to the types of things that Tulsi Gabbard was saying”, he recalled. “There were striking similarities.”
Gabbard faced paroxysms of criticism when she revealed that she had met Assad, and when it appeared that she had accepted financial support for the trip from allies of Assad. Adam Kinzinger, then a Republican congressman, called her visit “a shame and a disgrace”. Placed on the back foot, Gabbard repaid an Ohio foundation that had funded her travel expenses. Yet she did not back off from her argument that America should stop trying to overthrow the Syrian president.
In February 2017, she joined Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show. Carlson aired some of the footage shot by Gabbard’s husband. She told Carlson she was “not a defender of Assad” but had gone to Damascus to meet with the Syrian people, “to share the care, the love and the ‘aloha’ that the people of our country have for them”. (Gabbard regularly suggests that international conflicts could be solved with a little more aloha, the Hawaiian word for love and fellowship.) Carlson asked why the “entire foreign-policy establishment in Washington” persisted in seeking Assad’s overthrow. “It’s unfortunate,” Gabbard replied. “It’s the idea that the United States should be the world’s police.”
It also did not help that members of the MAGAsphere such as Steve Bannon and far-right personalities such as Richard Spencer and Mike Cernovich praised Gabbard’s candidacy
Gabbard lacked the nous and the coalition-building skills to be effective in pursuit of her aims. Her signature bill of this period, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which would have shut down aid to anti-Assad rebels and possibly even allies like Turkey that supported them, attracted only a handful of co-sponsors in Congress. It never had a chance of becoming law.
The last leg of Gabbard’s journey to the MAGA Republican Party began in 2019, when she gave up her seat in Congress and ran for president in the Democratic primary. By now Gabbard’s popularity in Hawaii had fallen so low that if she had tried to seek re-election to her House seat, she may well have lost, Moore said: “I don’t think her iconoclastic positions gained her a lot of support here.” It also did not help that members of the MAGAsphere such as Steve Bannon and far-right personalities such as Richard Spencer and Mike Cernovich praised Gabbard’s candidacy. “She’s got a good energy, a good vibe,” Cernovich said. “She seems very Trumpian.”
Her campaign never lifted off. Polls showed her mired at single-digit support among Democrats. Hillary Clinton speculated that Gabbard was a Russian asset; Gabbard sued her for $50m but later dropped the case. (The accusation that Gabbard is a Russian stooge has frequently been aired, but no evidence that this is the case has ever come to light.) The establishment’s attack on her “as a traitor…is a message being sent to every single American who speaks out for peace”, she said. By the time Gabbard suspended her campaign in March 2020 and endorsed Biden, she had won only two delegates.
Two years later, she quit the Democratic Party, initially becoming an independent. She joined Fox News as a paid contributor and took up podcasting. But as Trump’s re-election campaign took off in 2024, she endorsed him and, on the eve of the vote, she announced that she was joining the Republican Party.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to question Gabbard at a confirmation hearing on January 30th. A vote by the full Senate could follow quickly. Prediction markets view Gabbard’s chances of becoming DNI as almost a coin toss.
Gabbard’s long career as a progressive Democrat, her outspoken support for Edward Snowden and her past scepticism about surveillance powers used by the DNI in counterterrorism cases are among the reasons that a few Republicans may hesitate to endorse her. But the Senate’s narrow decision to endorse Pete Hegseth as secretary of defence, despite his inexperience and the allegations of heavy drinking and sexual assault levelled against him, suggests there are not enough Republicans willing to deny Trump the nominations he wants. (Hegseth denies the allegations of sexual assault and maintains he does not have a drink problem.)
If Gabbard does become DNI, her first tasks will include combing the spy agencies for officials disloyal to the president
If Gabbard does become DNI, her first tasks will include combing the spy agencies for officials disloyal to the president – a job that has been laid out in two executive orders signed by Trump during his first days in office. One order requires the new DNI to undertake a sweeping review of the intelligence community’s activities during the Biden administration, to identify people who “weaponised” intelligence or interfered in domestic politics, and to take disciplinary action – including dismissal – against any offenders.
In this respect, Trump’s otherwise puzzling nomination of Gabbard as DNI makes sense. She has made clear her belief that the partisan Deep State is real and purposeful, and that spy agencies perpetuate permanent war-profiteering by influencing elected officials and the media. Despite being a career military officer, Gabbard seems not to have learned from experience that America’s sprawling national-security bureaucracies are more prone to incompetence and inertia than organised malevolence.
On Gabbard’s podcast, Tucker Carlson once told her that he was convinced that “there are members of Congress who were controlled by the intel agencies.” Gabbard concurred. She quoted a Democratic senator who had once uttered “the quiet part out loud”, namely, that a president shouldn’t take on the spy agencies “because they can screw you seven ways to Sunday”. She may now test that supposition by hunting down and purging the spies she judges to be insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump, despite having no experience of navigating intelligence agencies. Gabbard is more likely to weaken American security than fix it. ■
Steve Coll is a senior editor at The Economist. Additional reporting by Liz Sly
ILLUSTRATIONS MICHELLE THOMPSONSOURCE IMAGES: ALAMY, GETTY, REUTERS, Aaron Schwartz/Sipa US, (C) The Veterans Project, (C) The Gabbard Family, Courtesy of Abraham Williams via YouTube, Office of Representative Gabbard