Donald Trump‘s inner circle is filled with people who once opposed him but soon joined his ranks. And Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is no different, according to 2019 Gabbard footage shared on X.
Gabbard, a Hawaii Army National Guard veteran who served in a medical unit in Iraq, used to be a Democrat, and she ran for president in 2016. Three years later, Hillary Clinton suggested Russia had groomed a female “Democrat” as an “asset,” and in 2020, Gabbard ran again but later dropped out and endorsed Biden.
Gabbard left the Democrats two years later. And in 2024, she endorsed Trump. (Gabbard sued Clinton for defamation regarding the Russian accusations, but later dropped the case. But while there’s no publically available proof Gabbard is involved with the Kremlin, she has certainly championed many pro-Russia talking points, more on that later.)
It remains to be seen if Gabbard is approved as the nation’s top national intelligence officer, but it’s not so surprising that Gabbard once spoke out against Trump, as the footage below reveals. Trump’s incoming VP JD Vance, after all, once called Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot” while likening him to Hitler, only to later stand side-by-side with Trump on the campaign trail.
How Trump does it — or how he turns former adversaries into compliant allies — remains a mystery. One thing’s for certain: According to Gabbard’s statement below, something certainly changed her opinion about Trump’s fitness for the presidency.
“Pimping out our men and women in uniform to a foreign power”
Armed forces advocacy with an anti-war message has long been a Gabbard talking point. And at a 2020 campaign stop, before she dropped out, Gabbard said this on camera, referring to the incumbent president: “He’s essentially pimping out our men and women in uniform to a foreign power who’s the highest bidder … He is unfit to be our commander-in-chief.”
There’s some crucial context missing there, but since then, Gabbard has taken Russia’s side in the Russian-Ukraine war by, among many other examples, writing on Twitter, then X, in 2022, the same year Russia invaded Ukraine:
This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border
— Tulsi Gabbard
(@TulsiGabbard) February 24, 2022
In what’s perhaps not a coincidence, RFK Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said similar things.
Geopolitics and international diplomacy are complicated, but the view NATO provoked Russia’s invasion by ignoring legitimate Russian security concerns regarding proposed NATO expansion in Ukraine is, at best, disputed if not completely debunked by many experts.
On that note, ” … [Putin claims] that the West betrayed Russia in the post-Soviet period because much of Eastern Europe, in fact, joined NATO. And this is at least part of what motivates his aggression now,” former Kyiv press attaché at the U.S. Embassy, Ken Moskowitz, wrote for the American Foreign Service Association on the cause of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Moskowitz added, ” … [T]his putative betrayal does not carry the weight of a violation of a formal agreement, a violation of which Putin himself is guilty. By signing the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994, the Russian Federation promised not to threaten or use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.”
It’s all reminiscent of what former Illinois Republican Representative and veteran Adam Kingzinger, who endorsed Harris in 2024, recently wrote about Gabbard in The Bulwark.
“What I saw in Gabbard when we were in the House was a politician who seemed more concerned with self-promotion than serious governance,” Kinzinger wrote in part, before adding: “While some members of Congress are known for their principled stands, she was known for her erratic behavior and frequent flip-flopping. She switched positions on key issues whenever it suited her political ambition.”
