In June 2022, I participated in a debate with Tulsi Gabbard at a Broadway theater.
For months, the lineup for my panel was two right-wing influencers (James O’Keefe and Tim Pool), me and a “second leftist” yet to be determined. After some back-and-forth about possible names, they decided that the “second leftist” would be former then- Democratic Hawaiian Rep. Gabbard.
I wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect. I’d long distrusted Gabbard, whose political history included several dramatic reversals. She was involved in activism against same-sex marriage in her early years in politics, for example, though she claimed to have seen the light on that issue in 2012 — just as it was becoming clear that public opinion was swinging in the direction of marriage equality.
Gabbard, like me, supported democratic socialist presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic primary. But then Gabbard ran against Sanders in 2020, even endorsing Joe Biden while Sanders was still in the race. And it seemed obvious to me in summer 2022 that her politics were shifting yet again. She might still start her sentences with “as a Democrat …,” but any attachment she had to that side of the aisle felt increasingly tenuous.
My debate with Pool and O’Keefe ended up largely revolving around labor unions and corporate power. Tellingly, Gabbard almost entirely stayed out of it. Just two years before the debate, as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, she said she supported sweeping left-wing reforms such as Medicare for All. Now, she was silent during bitter exchanges with right-wing influencers about union-busting and workers’ rights. It seemed like she was neither ready to publicly commit to right-wing positions by agreeing with Pool and O’Keefe nor willing to alienate her new right-wing friends by agreeing with me. After her cursory initial “aloha, I’m Tulsi Gabbard” stuff, she barely spoke unless she was responding to direct questions.
After her cursory initial “aloha, I’m Tulsi Gabbard” stuff, she barely spoke unless she was responding to direct questions.
Just a few months after the debate, in October 2022, she made a big show of “leaving the Democrat Party” — even incorporating the right-wing pejorative use of “Democrat Party” into a book title. By then, I don’t think anyone was particularly shocked. Any impression that she was a critic of the Democratic establishment “from the left” that still lingered by the time of our debate was almost entirely due to her anti-war stance. A military veteran herself, she constantly and aggressively expressed opposition to any new “regime change wars,” such as the war in Iraq. In 2020, her presidential campaign actually sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts.
Then in 2024, Gabbard endorsed Donald Trump, completing her transformation from Sanders supporter to MAGA loyalist. A few years earlier, she’d railed against Trump for tearing up Barack Obama’s nuclear détente with Iran and assassinating Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Over and over again, she warned that under the influence of “neocons” in his administration such as John Bolton, Trump might start a war with Iran. All of this was conveniently forgotten when she got on board the Trump train in 2024. Now, Trump was the “peace candidate.”
The most generous interpretation of this pivot, and her subsequent decision to join his administration as Trump’s director of national intelligence, is that she genuinely believed that the second term would be better. In his first administration, Trump was surrounded by neocons, and he made aggressive foreign policy moves such as ending the nuclear deal and assassinating Soleimani. In the second term, with “anti-war” voices such as her and Vice President JD Vance in the mix, Trump has been influenced in a more peaceful direction.
I was never inclined to be that generous. Anyone willing to give Gabbard the benefit of the doubt, though, got a rude awakening when Trump attacked Iran last summer. As national intelligence director, Gabbard stayed loyal to her new team. Then, a few weeks ago, it happened again. This time, Trump made it clear that this would be a far less limited operation. He’s repeatedly said he will accept nothing but “unconditional surrender,” part of his goal is to bring “freedom” to Iran and he should have a role in determining Iran’s new leaders.
In other words, this is precisely the kind of “regime change war” that Gabbard had supposedly dedicated her career to opposing.
She could have at least salvaged some remnant of her dignity by resigning in protest. If she has been quietly lobbying for a more dovish Iran policy, Trump hasn’t listened, and her resignation might at least make a splash and embolden critics of the war. Instead, in a statement on social media on Tuesday, she kissed Trump’s ring, affirming for the record that she wouldn’t criticize his regime change war.
“Donald Trump,” Gabbard wrote, “was overwhelmingly elected by the American people to be our President and Commander in Chief.” (In reality, he received less than 50% of the popular vote.) As commander in chief, Gabbard wrote, Trump alone gets to decide “what is and is not an imminent threat.” As national intelligence director, her role is restricted to presenting the president with intelligence. After “carefully reviewing” that intelligence, “President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.”
In other words, You’re in charge, Mr. President, sir, and if you want to go to war in Iran, who am I to disagree?
In a Senate hearing Wednesday, Gabbard was coy about whether she actually believed that Iran was pursuing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit the United States. This has been a key component of the administration’s narrative about Iran having been such an imminent threat that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no choice but to launch a surprise attack as diplomatic talks were ongoing. Gabbard said only that Iran had technology it “could” use to eventually develop ICBMs, “should Tehran attempt to pursue that capability.”
Does Gabbard think that this would have happened? And if so, does she now think that would justify launching exactly the war she once claimed to be so dedicated to preventing?
I suppose it’s possible. People change their minds, and if we accept Gabbard’s version of her political biography, she changes hers quite a bit. More likely, though, she never had any genuine principles at all.
Ben Burgis
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast.
