Tulsi Gabbard Falls in Line

The Atlantic

26-06-2025

Tulsi Gabbard believed she had found her people. The Trump White House would be a place where 'America First' isolationism ruled. No one would make the hurtful suggestion that her talking points sounded suspiciously like Kremlin talking points. And her decision to meet with Syria's now-deposed dictator as he bombed his own cities would not be unfairly judged. Her mission as director of national intelligence was straightforward, she told associates: to clean up America's spy agencies so they wouldn't be able to misuse intelligence in pursuit of war.
But scarcely six months in the job, the onetime Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate is confronting the limits of her sway with Donald Trump as he celebrates his decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, muses about regime change in Tehran, and posts footage on social media of B-2 bombers to the tune of the parody song 'Bomb Iran,' which includes the lyrics 'Time to turn Iran into a parking lot.'
This isn't what Gabbard had in mind.
In her public remarks, she actually appeared to undermine the case for U.S. action while diplomatic efforts were progressing. At the end of March, Gabbard told Congress that the American intelligence community 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon' despite having stockpiles of enriched uranium that are 'unprecedented' for a state without nuclear arms. That assessment remains unchanged, a U.S. official told us. But Trump, asked about her conclusion that Tehran had not decided to restart the nuclear-weapons program it suspended in 2003, disparaged his own spy chief, telling reporters, 'I don't care what she said.' He later said, even more bluntly, 'She's wrong.'
Gabbard has so alienated Trump that she may be endangering the existence of her office altogether, which the president has mused about scrapping. 'She touched the third rail—she testified that the intelligence community doesn't assess that Iran is sprinting toward a bomb,' a former U.S. official who worked closely with Gabbard told us. 'It's hard to overstate how many people she angered by doing that, and the amount of work required to get back into their good graces.'
Gabbard, who declined our request for an interview, has sought to minimize any apparent distance with the president, writing on social media last week, 'America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.' A former intelligence official focused on the Middle East told us there are differences of opinion within Gabbard's office about how to interpret the intelligence. But career officers don't see her revised account as a reflection of new knowledge based on a second look, the former official said. Rather, the prevailing view is that she 'changed her stance to satisfy the president,' the former official said. 'And that's a big blow to her credibility within the building.'
Her statements left some longtime associates and admirers marveling at how quickly she had fallen in line—a sign, they said, that voices of restraint within the administration had gone quiet and that Gabbard's peace-at-all-costs approach was a bad fit for the administration's more martial orientation.
The perception that Gabbard is out of step with the president, and off message, had already eroded her influence by the time Trump confronted the most serious foreign-policy crisis of his second term so far. In an effort to prove her loyalty, Gabbard has sought to conform the analysis produced by her office with the president's policy aims, politicizing intelligence in the very way that she has promised to prevent. But even that may not be enough to return her to the president's circle of trust: The White House refused to send Gabbard to a classified Capitol Hill briefing on Iran today.
After Trump announced a cease-fire on Monday, Gabbard praised him on social media for his 'herculean effort.' Yesterday, she declared that 'new intelligence' had emerged showing that Iran's nuclear facilities had been 'destroyed,' setting its program back by years. That conclusion appeared at odds with an initial assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, first reported by CNN and confirmed to us by two people familiar with its contents, that the bombing campaign did not dismantle key elements of Iran's nuclear program and likely set back the country's capabilities by only a matter of months. Although the finding was deemed low-confidence by the agency that produced it—and the CIA followed up by saying that Iran's program had been 'severely damaged'—the disclosure of a less-than-rosy assessment produced a furious reaction from the Trump administration, where officials have been under pressure to support Trump's insistence that the bombings he ordered had succeeded in every possible way.
In fact, elements of the intelligence community had warned of an incomplete outcome ahead of the attack. It's not clear that anyone listened.
By the time Trump ordered the Iranian strikes, Gabbard's influence with the president had eroded so significantly that she lacked a meaningful voice in his decision-making process. A Trump ally told us that the president appreciates Gabbard's political appeal to disaffected Democrats but doesn't look to her counsel on foreign policy or national security. 'She's a nonplayer,' the ally told us. 'When I want to call someone to influence Trump, I don't even think of her.'
Earlier this month, Gabbard released a direct-to-camera testimonial after a trip to Hiroshima—a trip made for as-yet-undisclosed reasons—in which she argued that the world stands 'closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.' She said that 'political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions' because they have access to nuclear shelters that won't be available to 'regular people' in the event of disaster.
The macabre remarks angered the president, who confronted Gabbard during a meeting in the Oval Office, someone with knowledge of the interaction told us. Trump admonished his spy chief, saying he didn't like the video and didn't understand why she would make such a depressing pronouncement. She was subdued, responding simply, 'Yes, sir.'
Trump's interest in curbing the work of her office, if not outright eliminating it, is in tension with Gabbard's political aspirations. 'She doesn't want to be like Linda McMahon, the last one to turn off the lights at her own office,' another former U.S. official told us, referring to the secretary of education, who is dismantling her own department. In fact, Gabbard's associates have said that she wants to be the most powerful and consequential DNI in the office's short history, according to the former official, and sees the role as a stepping stone to a second run for the presidency after her failed attempt as a Democrat in 2020.
Given the limited influence that most DNIs have had, that path to power strikes many within the intelligence community as unusual. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created to improve coordination among U.S. spy agencies after the September 11 attacks. But many senior administration officials at the time resisted its creation, predicting that the new office would add another layer of bureaucracy without effectively corralling the loose federation of intelligence agencies. Today, the DNI is nominally the top intelligence officer in the government, but the CIA and the Defense Department maintain their own centers of power over operations and budgets.
The creation of the office that Gabbard now oversees coincided with the intensification of the American-led war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, a period that Trump, despite having supported the invasion, now argues diminished America's international credibility. As president, he has portrayed himself as a victim of a career national-security bureaucracy that doesn't share his values and that he claims has used the powers of the intelligence community against him.
It's fitting, then, that Trump would lock arms with Gabbard, whose service in Iraq and Kuwait is a touchstone of her criticism of American foreign policy. Renouncing her partisan loyalties in 2022, she reached for the kind of rhetoric that is common among online extremists on the left and the right, calling the Democratic Party an 'elitist cabal of warmongers.' When she endorsed Trump last year, she vowed that he would 'walk us back from the brink of war.' And when, in January, she came before the Senate for confirmation as Trump's spy chief, she presented herself as a bulwark against the distortion of intelligence to justify war. '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.
Before she became a Cabinet official, Gabbard found it easy to lob those kinds of critiques at the 'deep state.' Now she's the president's principal intelligence adviser, struggling to reconcile the conclusions of career experts with the aims of the president she serves.
In meetings, Gabbard is prepared, follows a script or bullet points, and often asks pointed questions of her aides and advisers, people who have worked with her told us. She has dropped much of the critical rhetoric that characterized her time in Congress. But occasionally, she expresses ideas that some described to us as 'conspiratorial,' such as her persistent belief that the U.S. government routinely violates the privacy of its citizens through intrusive surveillance, said one person, who was surprised that her time as DNI had not convinced Gabbard that intelligence authorities are highly constrained by law and regulation.
When they're together, CIA Director John Ratcliffe often defers to Gabbard, given that she at least nominally oversees his agency. This makes for an awkward dynamic, people who have observed them told us. Ratcliffe did Gabbard's job in Trump's first term and has more experience managing the intelligence process. When Mike Waltz was still the national security adviser, he brought Gabbard and Ratcliffe together in a regular Thursday conference that they called the 'secret-squirrel meeting,' a tongue-in-cheek reference to clandestine discussions. In White House meetings, Gabbard often relies on Joe Kent, a former CIA officer who has been acting as her No. 2 while he awaits confirmation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent, like Gabbard, is a fervent critic of military intervention. In a podcast interview last year, he criticized U.S. policy toward Israel's war in Gaza and left no doubt where he stood on the question of confrontation with Iran. 'This idea that we're going to escalate the war further by directly going to war with Iran, like Lindsey Graham and some of the other neocons are advocating, that's incredibly dangerous,' Kent said.
Opposition to military confrontation with Iran is also the long-held stance of William Ruger, an Afghanistan veteran and a former vice president of the Charles Koch Institute whom Gabbard tapped to coordinate intelligence gathering and analysis across agencies. Ruger, who most recently led a libertarian think tank based in Massachusetts, told associates when he was named to his post that he worried about risking his credibility as a voice of military restraint if the administration went in a different direction. He also expressed doubt, a person who spoke with him told us, about how long Gabbard would last in the role.
In response to questions for this story, a Gabbard spokesperson, Olivia Coleman, emailed us a statement saying, in part, that the U.S. spy chief is 'fearlessly implementing needed change across the intelligence community, rooting out weaponization, and challenging the darkest parts of the deep state in the process, which is why they are using their tired tactic of spewing flat-out lies through tabloid outlets like The Atlantic.'
As a Cabinet official, Gabbard has not focused on some of the issues that preoccupied her in Congress, such as the fate of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. But one of the former U.S. officials we spoke with said that Gabbard has been outspoken on a number of foreign-policy dilemmas, including aid to Ukraine and U.S. policy toward Syria.
She was among those who favored suspending assistance to Ukraine, including intelligence sharing, after Trump's dramatic Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. She argued that Zelensky had grown too confident about U.S. assistance and that Washington needed to demonstrate its leverage, according to the former official. In wrestling with a U.S. presence in Syria after the toppling in December of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator whom she'd met during a trip to the country in 2017, Gabbard was among those advocating for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Ruger, the senior intelligence official installed by Gabbard, has been busy calling experts for input on how to manage the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a central hub for assessments of crucial policy issues. He has sought out advice about the composition of the council and its relationship with policy makers, two people who have spoken with him about the matter told us.
The NIC has been battered by the perception of political interference. Last month, Gabbard removed two veteran intelligence officers leading the NIC after Kent sought to rewrite the council's assessment that the Venezuelan government wasn't directing the activities of the Tren de Aragua gang—a finding that contradicted Trump's justification for deporting Venezuelan immigrants. Kent wrote that the original assessment 'could be used against the DNI or POTUS.'
The two veteran officers have been in limbo since, prevented from returning to their former roles at the CIA but required to update the agency regularly about their whereabouts, people familiar with the dynamic told us. Gabbard's associates maintain that the career officials were dismissed for legitimate reasons; her chief of staff went so far as to accuse the longtime analysts of politicizing intelligence, calling them 'Biden holdovers' on social media. The episode has cast a pall over the council, ordinarily a sought-after destination for analysts because of its relevance to high-profile policy decisions.
'My impression is one of great disorientation and anxiety in the workforce,' a former intelligence official told us. John McLaughlin, who was the deputy director of the CIA in the early 2000s, told us that Gabbard is now carrying out the 'weaponization of intelligence in the name of combatting weaponization—without a persuasive case that wrongdoing occurred in the first place.'
'This is Alice in Wonderland territory,' McLaughlin said. 'We're through the looking glass.'
The perception that Gabbard's office is toeing a political line extends beyond the NIC. People being considered for senior positions within her office have been quizzed by White House personnel about how they voted in previous elections and rebuffed after revealing that their preference hadn't been for Trump. (A senior intelligence official told us, 'At ODNI, we do not ask about political preference when hiring.') Gabbard has declassified documents and falsely crowed on social media that they show that the Biden administration equated COVID skepticism with violent extremism. Gabbard has also sought to carry out DOGE's agenda internally; an ODNI official told us that Gabbard has 'identified efficiencies that will result in saving approximately $150 million annually in contracts,' including a purported $20 million in DEI-costs savings.
Gabbard's performance is satisfying senior Republicans on the Hill. A spokesperson for Senator Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent us a statement from the Arkansas Republican saying, 'I appreciate the work that Director Gabbard has done to advance President Trump's agenda, depoliticize intelligence analysis, and eliminate duplication and burdensome bureaucracy at ODNI.' She also has some important allies around the president. Vice President J. D. Vance, sensing that Gabbard lacked some of the connections to the White House benefiting other Cabinet members, made a point of forging a relationship with the intelligence director, current and former officials told us. In a statement provided to us by Gabbard's office, the vice president stressed her MAGA bona fides, calling her 'a veteran, a patriot, a loyal supporter of President Trump, and a critical part of the coalition he built in 2024.'
Read: Trump changed. The intelligence didn't.
Democrats see her track record differently. 'If you just look at her social media, which is what most of America sees, she's working very hard to defend the United States from the threat of the Biden administration,' Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told us. 'You know, it's Epstein files, and it's mischaracterizing the risk of domestic violent extremists.'
An outside White House adviser told us that Gabbard is resorting to theatrics because she lacks substantive priorities for her office. 'In the absence of something real, she's struggling to be relevant,' the ally said. A better approach, this person added, would be to 'strip her office down to the studs—to get rid of duplicative offices and fulfill the promise made at her confirmation hearing to really downsize the ODNI.' A senior intelligence official told us that announcements about additional reform will be 'coming soon.'