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.
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.
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 month 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mark Z. Barabak is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, focusing on politics in California and the West.
