Tulsi Gabbard’s career as a national political figure has not been very long, but it has been unusually circuitous: her supporters and her detractors tend to agree on this, even though they disagree about what we should make of it. She comes from Hawaii, where she served in the state legislature and the National Guard; in those years, she campaigned against “homosexual advocacy organizations” and in favor of environmental protections. Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012, running as a Democrat, and was made a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. Since then, she has left the D.N.C., because she wanted to endorse Bernie Sanders; left Congress, because she wanted to run for President; and left the Democratic Party, because she had become convinced that it is, she says, “led by an élitist cabal of woke warmongers.” In August, she endorsed Donald Trump, later saying, “A vote for President Trump is a vote to express our deep love for our country, and our appreciation for our God-given rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.” And in November, a few days after the election, Trump nominated Gabbard to be the next director of National Intelligence. “If Tulsi is guilty of anything, it’s that, since she was born, her views, opinions, and beliefs have evolved to reflect her life’s experiences,” Richard Burr, the retired Republican senator from North Carolina, said. He was visiting the Senate to fight back against what he called “a coördinated effort to kill this nomination.” Unlike most of Trump’s nominees, Gabbard faces notable skepticism from some Republicans—although not, it seems, from Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator who is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I can only laugh at some critics who say that Ms. Gabbard has unconventional views,” Cotton said, as he launched the hearing. “Maybe Washington could use a little more unconventional thinking.”
Of course, “unconventional” is relative, especially in the Trump era. Most of the President’s prominent allies are converts to his agenda, which was considered pretty unconventional until he made it mainstream. In fact, Gabbard’s flexuous political journey slightly resembles that of her prospective boss, who was allied with both the Reform Party and the Democratic Party before remaking the Republican Party in his own image. In 2019, near the end of her eight years in Congress, Gabbard declared that Trump had “violated public trust.” (At the time, she was arguing that Trump deserved to be censured for his efforts to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Joe Biden, but she declined to support his impeachment—she voted “present,” instead of yea or nay.) But, during her testimony on Thursday, she betrayed no concern over the prospect that Trump might, in his second term, commit another such violation. When Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, asked Gabbard what she would do if Trump directed her to withhold funds from the inspector general tasked with overseeing the intelligence community, Gabbard refuted the premise. “I don’t believe for a second President Trump would ask me to do something that would break the law,” she said.
Gabbard is an uncommonly poised politician, and she tends to answer potentially uncomfortable questions by smiling, making eye contact, and calmly sticking to the script. On Thursday, she introduced herself not by praising the work of her predecessors in the national intelligence community but by criticizing it. “For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures, and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution,” she said. Gabbard has long taken an interest in the case of Edward Snowden, a government contractor who leaked classified information in order to sound an alarm about state surveillance; he was charged with violating the Espionage Act, and has lived in exile, in Russia, for more than a decade. In Congress, Gabbard sponsored a bill calling for the federal government to “drop all charges against Edward Snowden,” in recognition of the fact that practices he had exposed were “illegal and unconstitutional.” On Thursday, Gabbard refused to praise Snowden while also refusing increasingly heated demands, from both Democratic and Republican senators, to denounce him as a “traitor.” (Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, seemed particularly exasperated.) Instead, she returned again and again to a simple statement of fact: “Edward Snowden broke the law.”
Gabbard’s performance was impressive, but it was also frustrating, because she offered little insight into how and why her views have changed over the years, if indeed they have. She has been a fierce critic of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners without a warrant, even if they are communicating with Americans. Last year, Gabbard suggested to Joe Rogan that recent reforms had given the government even more power, which it might use to infringe on Americans’ civil liberties. “It took an already bad problem and made it many, many times worse,” she said. On Thursday, Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, asked Gabbard to affirm that, on the contrary, those reforms had allayed her concerns.
He said, “You would agree that there were reforms made, which fixed a number of the items that you had a problem with in the first place, is that correct?”
“It’s correct, Senator,” Gabbard replied.
Later, Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said that the exchange had left him unsure of what Gabbard really thought about Section 702. “I am candidly confused,” he said.
Probably it is unrealistic to expect Senate confirmation hearings to resemble earnest intellectual seminars. There is nothing particularly unusual about a politician who changes positions without explaining exactly why. But, usually, those evolutions are easy to explain: the politician is following the party or the public, even while posing as a brave leader. Gabbard’s career has never been easy to explain. For years, one of her main issues was Syria: she worried that American opposition to Bashar al-Assad, the authoritarian President of Syria, might empower the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and possibly spark a broader war. Early in 2016, she told Rachel Maddow that Syria policy was central to her endorsement of Bernie Sanders, because American involvement in the country threatened to undermine Democrats’ domestic agenda. “If this Syrian war continues, we will not have those resources to fund these important social programs, and to really provide that investment into our future here at home,” she said. At the end of that year, after Trump’s election, she startled many of her Democratic supporters by meeting with Trump. “I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country, and the world,” she said. A few months after that, she met with Assad himself; the meeting became probably the single most controversial episode of her career.
Gabbard has never provided a satisfying account of her intense interest in Syria, or explained why, in recent years, she seems to have shifted her focus. Last year, she published “For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind,” a book that mentions Syria only briefly and in passing. On X, her most recent posts about Syria are more than a year old, even though Assad’s government was overthrown in December. When Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, asked Gabbard about Syria on Thursday, she suggested that she viewed the change with mixed feelings. “I shed no tears for the fall of the Assad regime, but today we have an Islamist extremist who is now in charge of Syria,” she said. It was impossible to figure out whether she viewed this situation as catastrophic, in line with her earlier statements, or merely difficult. “I’m worried that her nomination may be in jeopardy,” Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said on Fox News Thursday night. He supports Gabbard, and he seemed to be trying to insure that his colleagues wouldn’t abandon her.
When I profiled Gabbard for this magazine, in 2017, I found that it was hard to make sense of Gabbard’s world view without understanding the faith tradition that has nurtured and shaped her. She has a longstanding association with a group that is now known as the Science of Identity Foundation, and its leader, a teacher named Chris Butler, who is also known as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and whom Gabbard has called her “guru dev”—meaning, roughly, “spiritual master.” (Butler has identified himself with the Vaishnava Hindu tradition; his own spiritual teacher was A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement.) Gabbard grew up largely among fellow-disciples, and spent part of her girlhood in the Philippines, studying with followers of Butler. In Hawaii, people associated with Butler’s group have been involved in politics since the nineteen-seventies. And a recent report in the Wall Street Journal described links between the group and an “alleged pyramid scheme” with international ties.
Throughout the hearing, Gabbard promised to bring “transparency” to the national intelligence community, even though she has not been particularly transparent about this part of her life. A spokesperson for Gabbard recently told the Times that “she has never and doesn’t have affiliation” with the Science of Identity Foundation. And when I was reporting on Gabbard, I asked about her spiritual teacher, and she told me that she had no spiritual teacher who was more important than the others. It is clear, though, that Butler’s teaching has played a central role in her life. And in October, 2017, I spoke with Butler himself, who helped me to understand Gabbard’s spiritual path. He seemed to regard her with fatherly pride, speaking of himself as the spiritual equivalent of a music teacher. “He’s taught one of his students cello,” Butler told me. “And he sees that, oh, this student of mine is now playing cello in the philharmonic orchestra. And it’s beautiful.” Little of this was discussed at the hearing, although in her opening statement Gabbard acknowledged her spiritual life, as well as the accusation that she is too sympathetic to foreign leaders such as Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin. “Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the Constitution of the United States—accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet, Modi’s puppet,” she said. “Not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters.” ♦
