On the menu today: Noah Rothman and James Lynch have you covered on Joe Kent’s resignation as National Counterterrorism Center director, and his claim that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” This morning, I want to turn our attention to Kent’s longtime ally, the woman for whom he served as acting chief of staff in the first few months of the Trump administration, director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. As the U.S. fights a war for regime change in Iran that she had long opposed . . . what’s going through her mind these days? And in an administration that has no shortage of figures competing for time in front of the cameras and pounding their chests, isn’t Gabbard’s relative quiet during this period a pleasant change of pace and recognition that a DNI should be heard by the president frequently but the public rarely?
Gabbard’s Been Flying Under the Radar
This cannot be the foreign policy that Tulsi Gabbard thought she was signing on to help enact.
In January 2019, then-Democratic Representative Gabbard wrote on X, “The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders — so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”
Back in April of that year, Gabbard appeared on Chris Matthews’s program on MSNBC and warned:
This administration and the neocon war hawks that surround President Trump have made no secret about what their intentions are to further this regime-change effort both in Venezuela as well as in Iran. So we’re hearing these war drums beating. President Trump is acting not with our interests in mind, not with the American people’s interests in mind, and moving forward with something that will prove to be very, very costly. . . . We do have a situation with a cabinet full of neocon war hawks whose history is very well known in leading our country into one regime-change war after the other and to great expense in American lives to trillions of dollars coming out of our taxpayers’ pockets as well as the lives and the suffering, the devastation, of the people in the countries where we’ve waged these wars.
As mentioned yesterday, her 2020 presidential campaign once sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts for $24.99.
But a whole lot has changed since the first half of the 2020 campaign cycle — Covid-19, January 6, the entire Biden administration, Russia invading Ukraine, the October 7 attacks, Trump’s comeback. During that time, Gabbard left the Democratic Party and became a Trump loyalist, in part because she believed Trump would enact her desired noninterventionist (some would say “isolationist”) foreign policy. Gabbard also may have rationally concluded that after her ruthless debate clash with then-Senator Kamala Harris, she had no real future in a Democratic Party where Harris had a leading role.
And Gabbard surely knew that Trump was not a 100 percent convert to her foreign policy worldview, and that she would have to fight to persuade him. Back in a July 2024 appearance on Megyn Kelly’s program, Gabbard warned that then-Senator Marco Rubio “represents the neocon warmongering establishment of Washington, D.C.,” cautioning that if Trump selected Rubio to be his vice president, it would “cause a lot of people to question what kind of foreign policy will actually be executed. Will it be the one that Trump wants and stands for, or will it be one that will continue the deep-state neocon warmongers who’ve gotten us into the mess that we are in now?” Gabbard joined the Republican Party in October 2024.
Trump rewarded her with what appeared to be a pretty plum position, director of national intelligence, although I predicted Gabbard would grow to hate the job; it has a lot of responsibility but nearly no budgetary authority.
In the first year of Trump’s second term, Gabbard had a bumpy ride. She was not invited to the president’s Camp David meeting preceding strikes against the nuclear sites in Iran. She posted a video on her personal social media accounts in June, warning, “We stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” and shortly thereafter, Trump said in front of news reporters and cameras, “I don’t care what she said.”
That pattern continued into 2026:
The White House excluded Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from months of planning to oust Nicolas Maduro because her previous opposition to military action in Venezuela cast doubt on her willingness to support the operation, people familiar with the matter said.
The move to cut Gabbard out of the meetings was so well-known that some White House aides joked that the acronym of her title, DNI, stood for “Do Not Invite,” according to three of the people. They asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. A White House official denied there was any such joke.
If Gabbard opposed the Venezuelan operation, she’s done an exemplary job of swallowing her pride and playing the role of a loyal cabinet official. After the U.S. operation that grabbed Maduro, she wrote on X, “President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers. Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve.”
Yesterday afternoon, in response to Kent’s resignation and accusation that Trump succumbed to sinister Israeli influence, Tulsi Gabbard posted on X:
Donald Trump was overwhelmingly elected by the American people to be our President and Commander in Chief. As our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is responsible for helping coordinate and integrate all intelligence to provide the President and Commander in Chief with the best information available to inform his decisions.
After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.
If you read between the lines, you can see Gabbard not explicitly stating that she herself also believed the Iranian regime posed an imminent threat. But this is a fairly supportive statement, describing the president “carefully reviewing all the information before him.”
Gabbard will get a lot of tough questions today when she testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee. There will be a lot of people who will claim that she has sold out all her old values and beliefs, or that she’s a gargantuan hypocrite, or that she’s been seduced by the temptation of power and proximity to the Oval Office.
Allow me to offer another perspective, one uncharacteristically uncynical on my part.
Tulsi Gabbard has served in the Hawaii Army National Guard since 2003 and has risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel. She understands what her current job requires. She helps present the best available intelligence to the commander in chief and gives him her best advice on whatever topic is on the table that day. Some days, he agrees with her. Some days — and on some big, consequential decisions! — he goes in the other direction. And when that happens, she says, “Yes, sir” and goes back to her office and back to doing her job.
She might strongly disagree with the decision, or she might even hate it. But she understands and accepts that in our system of government, the decision of using military force is made by the president, and once he’s given the order, you can either do your job, or resign, as Kent did. And so far, Gabbard has chosen to keep working, hoping that she’ll be able to steer the president in the right direction on the next decision.
In a Washington that is full of narcissistic egomaniacs and showboating windbags . . . accepting a president’s decision as final and not undermining its enactment feels like a refreshing breath of fresh air — honorable, even. (Some people claim Gabbard or her office leak a bunch, but those accusations are, so far, unproven.)
There will also be a lot of war critics who will want to paint Kent as a heroic conscientious objector while Gabbard is allegedly a shameless sellout. But in his confirmation hearing, Kent told the Senate Intelligence Committee, “American citizens inside our own borders and U.S. military personnel stationed abroad face a growing, not diminishing, terrorist threat. . . . Our brave men and women in uniform remain in harm’s way in the Middle East as Iranian-backed militant proxies continue Iran’s bidding across the region as they have for decades.” And then there’s the fact that in 2020, after the U.S. strike on Qasem Soleimani, Kent said of Iran, “We should crush their ballistic & nuke [capabilities] and get out of Iraq, with sanctions to follow.” He repeated that preferred approach a few days later.
Now suddenly, Kent says, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. . . . This was a lie and is the same tactic that the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq conflict that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.” Wait, what happened to that Iranian threat to U.S. military personnel in the region? What happened to the threat of Iran’s ballistic and nuclear capabilities?
Either Kent was saying things he didn’t truly believe in his testimony under oath to the Senate, or he’s not saying what he really believes now.
Still, you must wonder if Gabbard is where she thought she would be, doing what she wanted to be doing at this moment. I wrote on December 13, 2024, “Considering that the job is a thankless, frustrating combination of heavy responsibility and limited power, if GOP senators really want to punish Gabbard, they’ll vote to confirm her.”
ADDENDUM: Many conservative figures and organizations marked the passing of David Keene, a legendary leader in the conservative movement and one of the key architects in the growth of CPAC, and the former president of the National Rifle Association. But strangely, two organizations either forgot, didn’t notice, or chose to not mark the passing of Keene: CPAC and the NRA.