As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has remade the Republican Party over the past eight years, several of his nominees to serve in his next cabinet have undergone their own political evolutions, tacking sharply to the right as figures and ideas once considered fringe have entered the party’s mainstream.
Of all of Trump’s cabinet nominees, though, perhaps none have covered quite as much political ground as former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump has tapped to serve as his director of national intelligence (DNI).
A surfer and combat veteran from Hawaii, Gabbard was once seen as a rising star of the Democratic Party, which, after leaving its ranks in 2022, she now describes as an “elitist cabal of warmongers fueled by cowardly wokeness.” In 2020, she endorsed then-presidential candidate Joe Biden; two years later, she spoke at the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where she said she was fighting against the “Biden-Clinton-neocon-neolib foreign policy.”
Gabbard also holds some of the most controversial foreign-policy views among Trump’s picks to serve in top national security roles, having consistently echoed unevidenced Russian talking points about the wars in Syria and Ukraine.
Donald Trump and Gabbard embrace as conservative commentator Tucker Carlson laughs behind them on stage at a campaign event sponsored by Turning Point USA in Duluth, Georgia, on Oct. 23. Carlos Barria/Reuters
Gabbard’s stance on the conflicts, as well as her 2017 trip to Syria, where she met with the country’s then-embattled leader, Bashar al-Assad—who fled to Russia over the weekend as rebel groups made a lightning advance through the country—has given some current lawmakers and former intelligence officials pause.
While Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, and Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration as attorney general, have garnered the most attention thus far, Gabbard’s record is set to move into focus this week as she is in Washington for a series of meetings with lawmakers about her nomination. When asked by reporters on Capitol Hill for her reaction to Assad’s ouster, she smiled and made no comment.
“There are questions about whether or not she is now a Russian asset,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois who, like Gabbard, is an Iraq War combat veteran, told CNN’s State of the Union in a recent interview.
Gabbard has strenuously denied the suggestion that she is a Russian asset, and no evidence has ever come to light to corroborate the allegation.
But Gabbard’s scattershot political views and policy positions—which defy categorization and, at times, explanation—raise more fundamental questions given her potential elevation to serve as the most senior intelligence officer in the country: What does Tulsi Gabbard really believe, and where does she get her information?
Gabbard talks about bacterial testing on the sands of Ala Moana beach on the island of Oahu in Hawaii on April 21, 2006, after efforts to contain a sewage spill.Lucy Pemoni/AP
Gabbard’s search for a political home long predates Trump’s ascent to national politics. Born in American Samoa and raised in Hawaii, Gabbard—the fourth of five children—was mostly homeschooled and kept sheltered from outside influences, her aunt Carolina Sinavaiana-Gabbard told the Independent in 2022.
By her early 20s, Gabbard exhibited a willingness to make the kind of bold, if unconventional, moves that would later propel her into the national spotlight.
“She’s always marched to the beat of her own drum. She’s very independent-minded,” said Omeed Malik, an investment banker and early supporter of Gabbard’s 2020 presidential bid.
At the age of 21, Gabbard dropped out of community college to run for a seat in Hawaii’s state legislature, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to a statehouse anywhere in the country. The next year, she enlisted in the Hawaii National Guard, completing her basic training between legislative sessions. The following year, she volunteered for a combat tour with a medical unit in Iraq.
Early in her political career, Gabbard exhibited an unusual medley of politics: a passion for the environment informed by her love of surfing and a pronounced conservative streak on gay rights, denouncing “homosexual extremists” at a 2004 hearing on civil unions.
Gabbard’s views on gay rights at the time echoed those of her father, Mike Gabbard, then a member of the Honolulu City Council and prominent opponent of same-sex marriage. The junior Gabbard has since apologized for her past statements, saying she was brought up in a socially conservative household.
But people who have followed Gabbard’s rise also point to her upbringing in the Hawaii-based new religious movement, the Science of Identity Foundation, that grew out of the Hare Krishna movement, a branch of Hinduism. Gabbard attended a school run by the group in the Philippines for two years as a child, and she described the movement in a 2017 interview with the New Yorker as a “wonderful spiritual practice.” But former members have also described it as a cult whose leader, Chris Butler, espoused virulently homophobic, as well as Islamophobic, views. (Gabbard has denied ever hearing Butler say anything “hateful” or “mean.”)
Foreign Policy reached out to a Gabbard spokesperson to request an interview for this article and were referred to the Trump transition team. Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, said that while Butler is one of Gabbard’s spiritual mentors, she has no affiliation with the Science of Identity Foundation or any religious group.
Little is known publicly about the group, which is thought to have just a few thousand followers spread throughout Hawaii, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. People who have worked with Gabbard, who requested anonymity to share their insights, said they grappled to understand the group and the extent to which it influenced the former congresswoman’s worldview.
Many in Gabbard’s inner circle are thought to have ties to the group. In the years running up to her 2020 presidential bid, Gabbard paid over $500,000 to political consultant Kris Robinson, who also has ties to the sect. Robinson runs a little-known internet marketing firm, Northwest Digital, from a remote village in the Northern Cascades mountains in Washington State with no cellphone service or roads. An investigation by Honolulu Civil Beat found that neither Robinson nor his companies had ever worked for any other political figure.
Sinavaiana-Gabbard described the movement in a 2022 interview as the “uncritical cheerleader, if not patron and primary generator” of the former congresswoman’s political agenda and rightward shift.
Some have seen the scrutiny of Gabbard’s history with the group as unwarranted. “I always thought that was kind of an example of religious bigotry,” said Neal Milner, a retired professor of politics at the University of Hawaii. “My feeling is that, whatever her worldview is, that’s the least part of what I’m worried about.”
Democratic presidential candidates including (from left) Gabbard, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders walk arm in arm with local Black leaders during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in Columbia, South Carolina, on Jan. 20, 2020. Randall Hill/Reuters
Gabbard’s 2012 run for Congress caused an upset in Hawaii’s Democratic politics as she beat out the presumptive nominee, former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann, to secure the party’s nomination.
“She’s a tremendous communicator,” said Denby Fawcett, a longtime Hawaii TV and newspaper reporter. “She was very good in debates with this fellow who graduated from Harvard.”
In her journey to Washington, Gabbard notched a number of firsts along the way as the first Samoan American and the first Hindu to be elected to Congress. Young, photogenic, and poised, she was the subject of a Vogue magazine profile which, in 2013, asked, “Is Tulsi Gabbard the next Democratic Party star?”
Those who have followed Gabbard’s career recall that she has had an easy confidence beyond her years. A person who worked with Gabbard, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, recalled that as a freshman member of Congress, she had no apparent insecurities. “A lot of people thought she had big star potential,” they said.
Gabbard and Duckworth were the first two female combat veterans to be elected to Congress, and the former’s experience in the Hawaii National Guard and later in the U.S. Army Reserves informs two rare throughlines in her politics: a hawkish stance on terrorism and a deep disdain for wars of regime change. Gabbard campaigned in 2012 on a platform of withdrawing from the war in Afghanistan and described “small quick-strike special forces and drones” as the most efficient way to target overseas terror groups.
“I think you see a lot of people who have served come back being skeptical of just sending people out to combat,” said Malik, the investment banker. “I think to a lesser extent J.D. Vance falls into that category, too.” Malik considers both Gabbard and Vance as his good friends.
She entered Congress in early 2013, as the civil war in Syria was grinding into its second year and then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s ill-fated red lines over Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians were dominating headlines.
It was her readiness as an up-and-coming young Democrat to publicly criticize Obama’s handling of the conflict that began to attract attention on the right.
In 2015, Gabbard also began to attack Obama for not emphasizing the role of Islamic extremism in fueling terror groups in the Middle East, and she criticized his administration’s focus on the socioeconomic conditions that can drive people into the arms of extremist groups. (Obama purposely avoided using terms such as “Islamic terrorism” so as not to, in his words, lump the “murderers” in al Qaeda and the Islamic State in with “the billion Muslims that exist around the world, including in this country, who are peaceful.”) Gabbard soon became a frequent guest on Fox News.
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Tulsi Gabbard in a red jacket and jeans shakes hands with a man in a camo cap. In the foreground is a person in a military style hat. Behind them are flags and tables in a booth.
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Tulsi Gabbard wearing a blue suit smiles and reaches out her hand to a crowd behind a barricade, many wearing red MAGA hats and using cell phones to take photos. Several U.S. flags on stands are behind her.
Left: Gabbard talks with members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at the group’s booth at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Aug. 9, 2019, during her Democratic campaign for president. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Right: Gabbard arrives for a campaign event with Trump in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on Aug. 29. Scott Olson/Getty Images
The following year, Gabbard introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which called for a ban on the United States providing weapons, financing, or other assistance to the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham—groups that were already designated terrorists by the U.S. government and therefore barred from receiving any kind of support. Gabbard said the legislation was necessary because, she alleged, the United States was “quietly supporting allies, partners, individuals and groups who are working directly with al-Qaida, ISIS, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and other terrorist groups by providing them with money, weapons and intelligence support in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”
But Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an expert on those groups and U.S. policy in Syria, said Gabbard’s allegations were “based off of conspiracy theories and disinformation that Assad and the Russians put out.”
Gabbard participated in a congressional delegation trip in 2015 to the Syrian-Turkish border, where she and her colleagues met with civilians who had been injured in the war in Syria. At a displacement camp in Gaziantep, the congresswoman was introduced to three young girls, the eldest of whom were 12 and 9 at the time, recalled Mouaz Moustafa, the director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force—a U.S.-based nonprofit advocacy group that opposes the Assad regime—who organized the trip. The girls explained how their families had been killed and that they had been badly burned in airstrikes by the regime. Gabbard had a question, recalled Moustafa, who translated for Gabbard: How did they know it was the Syrian government that had bombed them, and not the Islamic State?
Henning described Moustafa’s account as “false” in an email to Foreign Policy.
In early 2017, Gabbard made a secret trip to Syria alongside former congressman Dennis Kucinich, where she met with Assad. Upon her return, Gabbard defended her decision to meet with the Syrian leader, who is thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, saying that her commitment was to ending the war. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur, there has to be a conversation with him,” she told CNN.
Screen grabs from a video made by Abraham Williams and released by Gabbard’s House office show the congresswoman during her trip to Syria.Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard House office/Courtesy of Abraham Williams via YouTube
Shortly after that meeting, Gabbard said she was “skeptical” of U.S. conclusions that Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in Khan Shaykhun, citing flawed intelligence that led the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. Though the Trump administration and a joint Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-U.N. investigation concluded that the Syrian government was behind the attack, Gabbard continued to question its origins while campaigning for president in 2020.
As a member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, Gabbard had a wealth of resources and briefings about the conflict at her disposal. But people familiar with Gabbard during her time in Congress said they struggled to pinpoint where she was getting her information from. “There was this worldview of things that were just not right that someone had clearly put into her head,” said the first person. “She did spend a lot of time on Reddit and random internet sites, definitely conspiracy theory sites,” said the second.
Henning said Gabbard’s foreign-policy views have been “shaped by her military service and multiple deployments to war zones, where she’s seen the cost of war and who ultimately pays the price.”
In 2018, as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Gabbard attended a closed-door briefing with “Caesar,” the pseudonym used by a Syrian military police photographer who smuggled tens of thousands of images out of the country that showed widespread evidence of torture, starvation, and death in government detention facilities.
“I remember being, like, scared shitless that Tulsi is going to take a photo of this guy,” said Moustafa, who helped organize the briefing. A congressional aide familiar with the situation echoed Moustafa’s concerns. “We were generally at the time worried about Caesar’s identity, and especially Tulsi Gabbard and some of her statements and things had made folks uncomfortable,” said the aide, who was granted anonymity to discuss their recollections of the hearing.
Asked about the allegations, Henning said Gabbard possesses an active security clearance. “As someone who served for eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives and attended many classified briefings, there is zero evidence that confidentiality has ever been violated,” she said.
Gabbard’s remarks on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have similarly raised eyebrows. As the invasion was underway on Feb. 23, 2022, Gabbard tweeted that the war could have been avoided if the Biden administration and NATO “simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO.” While Moscow has long railed against NATO expansion, Ukrainian membership of the alliance was a remote prospect at the time of the invasion.
She also appeared to amplify Russian talking points when she posted a video online warning of the presence of over 25 U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine that if breached could spread deadly pathogens around the world. While the United States has supported scientific research for public and agricultural health, Gabbard’s remarks—while making no specific mention of bioweapons—were reminiscent of long-standing Russian claims that the U.S. government is secretly funding the development of deadly biological weapons in neighboring countries.
Gabbard speaks before Trump takes the stage at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Gabbard’s history of embracing fringe ideas and conspiracy theories has drawn renewed scrutiny in light of Trump’s nomination for her to serve as DNI. Her past statements raise “questions about her ability to take the fact-based analysis of the community and present that to the president,” said Larry Pfeiffer, who served for three decades in the U.S. intelligence community.
Henning pushed back against the suggestion. “These unfounded attacks are from the same geniuses who have blood on their hands from decades of faulty ‘intelligence,’ including the non-existent weapons of mass destruction,” she said.
Gabbard has in the past expressed suspicion of the very U.S. intelligence community that, if confirmed, she would oversee, and she has spoken in support of former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who were responsible for the biggest leaks of classified intelligence this century.
The releases exposed expansive government eavesdropping as well as gross abuses by the U.S. military, including the killing of civilians, but both individuals and their actions remain highly controversial within the intelligence agencies charged with gathering and protecting government secrets. “It reflects a lack of understanding of who we are, and it reflects a lack of respect for what we do,” former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon said on CBS’s Face the Nation in November.
As DNI, Gabbard would serve as the principal intelligence adviser to the president. “It’s that person’s lens that a lot of intelligence flows through,” said Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. The DNI attends the presentation of the president’s daily intelligence briefing, making them a rare member of the cabinet who sees the president in person on a day-to-day basis. “It’s an amazing level of access,” Harding said.
The DNI also oversees the work of the 18 agencies and organizations, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself, that compose the U.S. intelligence community. Critics note that Gabbard has no experience working in intelligence and little in organizational management.
“The intel community is a pretty complex, complicated enterprise,” Pfeiffer said.