Tulsi Gabbard’s Iran Pivot Comes With Contradictions

One might be tempted to think that the most shameless shape-shifter in the Trump administration is JD Vance. After all, the vice president once called Donald Trump America’s Hitler, and ten years later, he is one of the president’s most ardent supporters. But Vance is a piker compared to the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. No one in American politics is more brazenly hypocritical — and considering the contenders in the Republican Congress, that’s saying something. 

Gabbard appeared last week before the House Select Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee and, along with FBI Director Kash Patel and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, delivered the worldwide threats assessment. But most of the questions were about the war in Iran. 

Gabbard’s testimony was of particular interest because, prior to joining the Trump administration, she was known for her strident and uncompromising anti-war philosophy. In fact, when she ran for president in 2020 while serving as a congresswoman for Hawaii’s second district, her platform was explicitly built around an anti-Iran war message, which she specifically aimed at Trump. She even sold T-shirts that said, “No War With Iran.”

Although Gabbard had been a Bernie Sanders supporter in previous races, after she dropped out of the primary campaign that year she endorsed Joe Biden, even though Sanders was still in the race. That move came as a surprise, but in retrospect it was just the beginning of her move away from the left, and it wasn’t long before she began to play footsie with MAGA. With Trump running on his “America First” platform, and as the man who didn’t start any new wars, his camp was a natural place for her to land. By 2024 she had fully transitioned to being a Trump supporter, and her support provided important  validation for Trump’s phony peacenik image, particularly among independent voters. 

Still, it came as a shock when the president named Gabbard as the director of national intelligence since she had little expertise or experience. But she wound up being just one of many with such a pedigree in his Cabinet, and she’s kept a low profile ever since. Along with Vance and a few others who emerged from the right-wing fever swamps to buy into Trump’s isolationist pretenses, Gabbard was assumed by many political observers to be a quiet force within the administration against the so-called deep state. But it soon became clear that Trump didn’t have much use for her, or her analyses. 

According to POLITICO, as Trump was preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, he was reminded by a reporter that Gabbard had reiterated the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran wasn’t close to getting a bomb. “I don’t care what she says,” Trump responded. When quizzed about it again a couple of days later, he snapped, “She’s wrong.” As we know, he went ahead and hit the facility, using the United States’ most lethal bomb short of a nuclear weapon and immediately declared that Iran’s nuclear capacity had been “obliterated.”

Despite the president’s obvious disdain for her, Gabbard kept her head down and continued going to work. Completely marginalized during the administration’s Venezuela incursion, she was reportedly not even being invited to the White House Situation Room to observe the operation. Soon after she was spotted lurking around the FBI raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, election office, apparently on some secret mission from the White House to oversee their election suppression efforts. 

All this has led to speculation that Gabbard will soon be reassigned to an ambassadorship in a country far, far away. Still she’s hanging in there, apparently willing to debase herself before the world in an attempt to cling to a job that the Tulsi Gabbard of 2020 would have spat upon if the person in it had turned in the performance she gave before Congress last week. 

Gabbard was playing for an audience of one: Trump. She attempted to distance herself from the intelligence community’s finding that there was no imminent nuclear threat from Iran. In her written testimony she had used the president’s own words, saying that the nuclear program had been “obliterated.” But she omitted those words when she delivered the statement to the Senate committee, a change that was noted by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. 

She was quick to try to clean up her faux pas, claiming she had skipped over the section because her statement was running long, but no one believed it. The omission clearly came because Trump and other administration officials, including Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, have said that Iran was “a week away” from possessing nuclear weapon-making capability, and Gabbard didn’t want to contradict them, particularly on live television.

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Her tap dance was, and is, awkward. Recall that Gabbard had always agitated against waging preemptive war. As a congresswoman in 2018, she introduced the weirdly specific No More Presidential Wars Act, which stated that the president must “seek congressional authorization prior to any engagement of the U.S. Armed Forces against Syria, Iran, or Russia.” Eight years later, here she was defending Trump for launching the war without congressional authorization, despite her personal knowledge that Iran posed no imminent threat.

The biggest moment of the hearing came when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., asked Gabbard if the intelligence community had determined if the Islamic Republic presented an imminent threat to the safety of the United States. This is, of course, the only acceptable reason a president can unilaterally launch an attack against another sovereign nation unless America has been attacked. (The definition of the word “imminent” is currently up for debate, with GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas saying that “Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years.”) 

Gabbard disingenuously replied that “only the president can determine if there is an imminent threat.” No doubt Trump was thrilled to hear that, seeing as he has been telling everyone who will listen that the only thing that can constrain him is his “own mind and morality.” In the case of Iran, the White House has explicitly said that he started the war because “he had a good feeling.” Likewise, the president said he will end the war when “I feel it in my bones.” 

Based on this, what Gabbard said is technically true: Trump decides based on his feelings if there’s an imminent threat that requires him to start a war. The actual facts, though, do not matter. 

Gabbard’s performance led MAGA influencer, conspiracy theorist and Trump whisperer Laura Loomer to predict that she would soon follow counterterrorism chief Joe Kent’s lead and resign. Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said he expected Gabbard to be fired. But it also called into question the role of the U.S. intelligence community in the decision-making about Iran; it would once have been tasked with making determinations about imminent threats. And it also shined a spotlight on Gabbard’s effectiveness in her position, since she basically serves the function of a potted plant.

One can’t help but wonder what is motivating her at this point. If she sincerely thought in 2024 that Trump had become an anti-war president, why is she going along with his war of choice today? Or has she actually changed her mind and joined Trump’s crusade to conquer the world? Or is it something else entirely? 

Gabbard has an odd habit of defending American adversaries. In fact, her support for Iran over the years can easily be seen in that light, although she’s been all over the map. During the debate over the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, she inexplicably voted to increase sanctions on the regime, which puzzled those on the left who expected her to back diplomacy as they did. At the time, that position was understood to be a GOP tactic designed to sink the deal, so one might assume her actions were to help the Iranian hardliners. Who knows? She’s nothing if not enigmatic. 

Then there’s her very odd behavior toward Syria. While she was still a congresswoman in 2017, she took an unauthorized trip to the country and met with its despotic war criminal leader Bashar al-Assad. This violated the prohibition against individuals speaking to governments in dispute with the U.S. and came at a time when the Syrian government was slaughtering thousands of civilians. Gabbard’s trip shocked both Democrats and Republicans, and she has never adequately explained why she made it, nor did she disclose what she and Assad talked about. But upon her return she filed a bill titled “Stop Arming Terrorists” that demanded a halt of American support for Syrian rebel groups. She urged the U.S. to “end our war to overthrow the Syrian government and focus our attention on defeating al-Qaeda” and ISIS. 

Syria, like Iran, was a strong ally of Russia, and if she has one consistent position through all of this, it is her support for Russia. As the New York Times pointed out in 2024, she is a favorite of Russian state media for that very reason — and for her apparent willingness to parrot Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. While it may be hard to understand why she’s now going along with Trump’s war against a Putin ally, perhaps she calculated that the president would attack Iran no matter what and saw an upside — the temporary lifting of Russian oil sanctions. This will do wonders for Russia’s war effort against Ukraine, which she has appeared to support. Gabbard may just feel that supporting this war in Iran is for the greater good. The question is: for whom?

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