Is Tulsi Gabbard Okay?

You can probably guess the answer.

Photo by Caitlin James on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will be taking a few days off to present at the Fletcher School’s annual Talloires Symposium. This year’s theme is “The Impact of the United States on Global Affairs.” A lot of important topics will be discussed. The fact that it will take place at a locale just next to Lake Annecy — in June — is purely a coincidence!

I will be talking about Trump and the Madman Gambit. This theme reminds me, however, that the president is not the only U.S. official who has been behaving oddly. A quick scan of the Drezner’s World archives reveals that Dan Bongino, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio have all displayed erratic or pathological behavior during their time in office.

And this brings us to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

By the second Trump administration’s appallingly low standards, Gabbard’s performance so far is par for the course. In May she has fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council in no small part because their staffers were producing intelligence that flatly contradicted Donald Trump’s claims. According to the Washington Post’s Warren Strobel:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council, weeks after the council wrote an assessment that contradicted President Donald Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process….

The actions are the latest purge by Gabbard, who has said she is fighting politicization of the intelligence community but has removed or sidelined officials perceived to not support Trump’s political agenda….

The firings took place a week after the ODNI released a partially declassified intelligence assessment, dated April 7 and produced by the National Intelligence Council, that found that the Venezuelan government is most likely not directing the activities of the gang known as Tren de Aragua, or facilitating its operations in the United States.

The document, whose existence was first reported by The Washington Post, undercut Trump’s stated rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. Trump invoked the 18th-century act in mid-March, proclaiming without evidence that Tren de Aragua is perpetrating an “invasion” of the United States “at the direction” of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government….

In late April, Gabbard said that she had asked the Justice Department to investigate alleged leaks from the intelligence community by people she described as “deep-state criminals.” Her deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, said on X that one of the leaks included information published in a Post article on Tren de Aragua.

So that is, how you say, “not great” from the perspective of producing intelligence analysis free from political interference and slant.

Gabbard has gone further in politicizing intelligence by compromising the independence of the inspector general’s office. WaPo’s Meryl Kornfield and Ellen Nakashima reported on this last week:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard installed one of her top advisers to a position within the office of the inspector general of the intelligence community, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The move potentially compromises the integrity of the independent watchdog office while it is investigating the use of the Signal messaging app by top government officials to discuss classified details of a pending U.S. military strike against the Houthis in March.

The adviser, Dennis Kirk, was placed within the watchdog office on May 9, but reports to the DNI, according to one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity….

In a statement to The Washington Post, Gabbard’s press secretary, Olivia Coleman, accused the intelligence community inspector general of failing to fulfill “the responsibility to be an independent organization unbeholden to partisan interests.”

Call me crazy, but Gabbard appointing a political toady to the inspector general’s office is not gonna make most people believe that the office is “an independent organization unbeholden to partisan interests.”¹

So Gabbard has, like others, tried to make her corner of the deep state that much shallower, going so far as to rely on artificial intelligence as a piss-poor substitute for human analysts.² It’s bad!

And now we shift from the bad to the weird. A few days ago Gabbard released a rather odd video about her visit to Hiroshima. Give it a watch:

Most of the video is, as nuclear holocaust warnings go, anodyne. Gabbard’s statements about the horrors of Hiroshima — and the potentially greater horrors of a 21st century nuclear war — are correct.

It is at the very end where things get weird. Here’s the transcript of what she says:

This isn’t some made-up science fiction story. This is the reality of what’s at stake, what we are facing now. Because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers. Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to. So it’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust.

I have some questions:

1. Does Gabbard know that, given her position, she’s someone who will have access to a nuclear shelter? It is rich for Gabbard to paint herself as a simple woman of the people when she a cabinet officer who would be sheltered if a nuclear holocaust were to break out.

2. Who are these “political elite warmongers” with access to fallout shelters?! Nuclear bunkers are pricy these days, and mostly the province of the ultra-rich. And most of the plutocrats, like Elon Musk and David Sacks, are awfully friendly with Russia and unlikely to advocate for policies that could push countries towards nuclear war — just like Gabbard!

3. Is Gabbard aware that other Trump administration policies are exacerbating the risk of a conflict involving nuclear and near-nuclear powers?

Needless to say, even elected Republicans are acknowledging that Gabbard’s video was wacko. MSNBC’s Steve Benen notes:

The message was so strange that some of the Republican senators who voted to confirm her to her current position — despite her lack of qualifications and habit of echoing Russian propaganda — made no effort to defend her.

Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, for example, told Jewish Insider that “she obviously needs to change her meds.” Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who has a flare for classic understatements, added that Gabbard’s message was “very strange.”

Before the Senate confirmation vote on the former Hawaii congresswoman, a variety of former national security officials urged senators not to vote for her. In hindsight, perhaps the chamber’s GOP members should’ve heeded their warning.

Well, yeah.

I could try to rationalize or sanewash what Gabbard is trying to do, but it seems pretty straightforward. Gabbard, like Trump and Putin, thinks there is some deep state pushing Russia and the United States towards a nuclear war. What she repeatedly fails to realize is that she is now the minding the deep state store, and doing a craptacular job of it.

1. Going on Fox News and defending Trump on issues way out of her lane does not help in this regard.

2. Don’t get me started on how Gabbard wants to jazz up the president’s daily intelligence briefing.