Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, has been picked by President-elect Donald Trump to oversee the U.S. intelligence community. While Trump had long been expected to pick an "outsider" for the role of national intelligence director, some elected officials were still caught off-guard by the selection of someone who has no formal intelligence experience.
Gabbard, who was a Democrat until 2022 but critical of her party long before that, endorsed Trump in the 2024 election. In a statement announcing her selection, Trump said that Gabbard would bring a “a fearless spirit” to the intelligence agencies and secure “peace through strength.”
Others are not so sure. Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who served in Iraq, has long been critical of foreign policy establishment. Her deeply skeptical views of most U.S. foreign policy, including support for Ukraine, sympathy for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria and embrace of various conspiracy theories has earned her many critics who say that she would not pass muster in a Senate confirmation process.
Gabbard, like many other "America First" proponents, exempts Israel from her quasi-isolationist critiques, once describing pro-Palestine protesters as puppets of a "radical Islamist organization" and serving as a keynote speaker at a conference hosted by Christians United for Israel. But one senior former intelligence official told Politico that allies like Israel would still have "serious qualms" about Gabbard.
Gabbard, who served in the Hawaii National Guard and then joined an Army reserve unit that was deployed to Iraq, has said that her skepticism of intervention was rooted in her experience from serving in a war that she saw as unnecessary and costly. But critics on both sides of the aisle say that far from just advocating for restraint, she has embraced talking points from militaristic autocrats like Assad and Putin, and as overseer of 18 spy agencies would undermine national security and the international order. Under former President Barack Obama, she called for escalating the U.S. war on terror, accusing the president of failing to target extremist rebel factions in Syria.
"Her politics, which are otherwise incoherent, tend to be sympathetic to these two strongmen, painting America as the problem and the dictators as misunderstood," wrote anti-Trump conservative and former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols in an op-ed published by The Atlantic.
"This is a disaster for US security & alliances. Of all Trump's decisions so far, might be the worst. Tulsi Gabbard has consistently parroted pro-Putin propaganda. Director of National Intelligence is a critical position for which she has absolutely no experience and skill," Thomas Judeau, professor at the University of Ottawa, wrote in an X post.
