The former Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Tarsi Gabbard of Hawaii have an unpredictable political career.
But becoming President Donald Trump's National Intelligence Director was an incredible twist for many.
Gabbard has never worked for an intelligence agency. However, her skepticism of foreign interventions fake during the deployment of national guards overseas, and her distrust of “deep nations” has curtailed US military operations around the world, fundamentally engaging in the federal government. It's a natural choice for the White House who wants to scale back.
Gabbard has been a rising star in the Democratic Party for most of 2010, becoming a long-term presidential candidate in 2020, from a featured speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
She eventually defeated the party in establishing its policy position in Syria and Russia, first supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, left the party altogether in 2022, and ultimately supported Trump. He joined the Republican Party in 2024.
I explained today Host Sean Ramswaram with senior economist editor Steve Koll and his growing up in a spiritual community in Hawaii to military deployments into Iraq, and from his turbulent times at the national political stage, Gabbard. We talked about a long, strange trip. Coll writes Gabbard's long profile and publishes many books on American intelligence and foreign policy. Ghost Wars, Bin Ladenand Directors.
Below is an excerpt from the conversation edited for length and transparency. There's a lot more to the full podcast, so listen I explained today You can get podcasts anywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify and more.
Steve in America has a new spy chief. For example, why is Tarshi Gabbard different from everything that was before her?
A lot, actually. Because she has no direct experience in the Intelligence World, and because of her unorthodox views on American power in the world and in the deep state, it is partly an unorthodox choice.
I think you are kind and kind about it. Some people there are Tarshi Gabbard Russian operatives.
Well, that's a leveled fee for her. She once sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million by saying something along those lines. I think that's going too far.
“[S]He coincides with Donald Trump's agenda… to review disloyal people and take disciplinary action against them. ”
However, she expressed sympathy for Putin's dilemma and dictators like Bashar al-Assad, a former Syrian dictator. She sought the pardon of Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who exposed illegal surveillance of Americans. She sometimes sounds like a progressive politician than the facility's spy chief. And I think she'll say that's the point – we need a different perspective on the American intelligence report system.
It sounds better to understand that the overhauled intelligence chief has a better understanding of how to further change relations with Russia. So let's get a better understanding of Tulsi Gabbard. Where does she start?
She grew up in Hawaii under somewhat unusual circumstances. Her parents were members of a religious community called The Science of Identity Foundation, which was derived from the Hare Krishna branch of meditation and yoga education.
The community where her parents belonged and she had quite a lot of exposure as a child was a charismatic figure named Chris Butler, a former surfer and college dropout who lived on the streets as a follower of Hare Krishna. He was led by a unique person, but began to start his own community. Some of the previous members described it as a cult. They described him as an authoritarian figure, and described him as being worshiped to the extent that people fell down when he came to the room or when they considered his food scraps as a relic .
And how does she enter politics?
Her parents made the path to politics when she was a young woman. One of Chris Butler's most stubborn views was, at least in the '80s and '90s, opposition to homosexuality, which he regarded as hatred, and on the establishment of rights for gay and lesbian couples. And as a teenager, Tarshi Gabbard found himself on the streets of Honolulu, protesting with his parents against the establishment of gay marriage rights in Hawaii.
It was when she, she and her father ran for public office in Hawaii, when she was only 20 or 21 years old, very young. She was elected to the state legislature, and her father was initially elected to the city council.
Then 9/11 happened. She decided after 9/11 she wanted to join the military. She initially joined the Hawaii National Guard and was later deployed to Iraq, where she went to a base north of Baghdad in 2005. She describes the war experience as transformative in her perspective on the US government, American power.
She eventually became a vice-colonel, especially in her case, disillusioned with the wars America fought after 9/11. She eventually returned to politics. First up at Honolulu City Council. And then in 2012, a seat in Congress, one of the four Hawaii has, was opened. She won the Democratic primary and was soon accepted by the National Democrats. At a democratic conference that summer, they gave Tarshi Gabbard the coveted speaking spot.
She arrives in Washington, [then-House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi took her under her wings. She was considered perhaps the next Obama, another Hawaiian politician, a woman of colour, a military career. Good speaker, telegenic.
Then, very quickly, as these things progressed in Washington, it began to fall apart. In part, she didn't play the game. And she began to choose to fight against her party leaders, including Barack Obama.
And by the time the 2016 presidential cycle arrived, she had begun to leave the party that had accepted her. She decided to step down from the Democratic National Committee and support Bernie Sanders for her 2016 campaign. And the decision continued to draw her to the left of the party. By 2016, what you can see is the beginning of what some people called the horseshoe shape of American political populism. There, the more you go left, the closer you go to the right.
Many American voters went on, and there they voted for Obama, then moved towards Bernie, and then voted for Donald Trump a few times.
Yes, that's absolutely correct. By 2019, she was still a Democrat and she met him in the fall of 2016 after being elected when he was auditioning for a member of his first administration, but she was He is critical of Donald Trump in public. Either way, she was already part of the conversation in Maga. She knows Tucker Carlson and appeared on his show on Fox News, where she has won praise from enthusiastic Trump supporters for things like Manosphere and podcasting landscapes.
Despite this, she remained in the Democrats with the ambitions she exhibited in 2019. And she really spent a rough time on it. She didn't come out of the single digits. She really couldn't raise a lot of money. She was attacked by Hillary Clinton and others as an instrument of foreign power. And then she suspended her campaign and supported Joe Biden. However, she was apparently no longer interested in the party's leadership, they were no longer interested in her, and it was a relatively short time since she became such a rising star.
How will she go from becoming a Republican to becoming one of the most important players, if not the most important players in our intelligence community?
It's possible that Donald Trump has appointed her as a veteran affairs secretary or whatever, and everyone said, “What an innovative choice!”, so it's really a puzzle. And she would have been confirmed without difficulty. Instead, he named her the top spy in the US system.
As a director of national intelligence, she has two jobs. One is to edit and filter the secret information that the President and his top cabinets get every morning. That is the most important part of the job.
The second important part is that she oversees 18 vast American spy agencies that eavesdropped on from the CIA to the National Security Agency. She sets strategies, sets Kivitz about their budgets, and otherwise sets direction for the intelligence news community.
She has no experience with these bureaucrats. She is not an intelligence analyst. Certainly, many of her have taken over the foreign policy questions she was most interested in for years. She sometimes coincided with misinformation and propaganda coming out of dictatorships in Russia and Syria. She seemed like an uncritical thinker.
Although she clearly had a strong policy view, she chose facts as if she was just cruising the internet and was making her arguments from what she found. So I was working on her biographies and initially left me. Why, why this job?
However, this answer appears in her own story, writing and her own beliefs. And she brought some of this to her confirmation hearing.
And this is actually why Donald Trump is attracted to her leadership and why she aligns with Donald Trump's agenda in the intelligence community. Early on, they essentially designated directors of national intelligence for several months to review dishonest people and discipline against them, and in the previous administration, they “weaponized intelligence” someone who had or otherwise could not be politically trusted. She's going to lead that review.
And all you can say is that she has the motivation to do it. She believes there is a really deep problem in the intelligence news community that she has the power to do something right now.
So those are her first job from her boss. But obviously, most of her work will be countering the adversaries of the United States. China comes to mind. Russia is something that comes to mind historically. But what does Tarshi Gabbard say about our national intelligence reporting, where we are heading with Russia, and what Trump wants to achieve in Russia?
Well, she didn't see Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the United States. She tended to express herself indirectly about this by criticizing the democratic elite to demonize Putin. She chuckled at them for calling him the new Hitler. She accused NATO of causing Putin. In that sense, she was in line with Putin's reputation as a person who could work with him and as someone who would do business with him.
Perhaps there are people around President Trump who have seen an epic strategy on this. They say that US policies have driven Russia and China closely, complicating the US's great power position, and that the US must separate one of these two, and that Russia is a better choice It might be. It appears to be a hypothesis that linked hawks and non-interventionists during this early period of the Trump administration.
But with Tulsi Gabbard, I can't hear anything on such a chessboard. I think she has an instinct that the elite is doing it all wrong.
