Tulsi Gabbard’s curious and confounding political odyssey may have reached its end. She has announced her resignation as Trump’s director of national intelligence, citing her husband’s medical struggles. Her departure comes in the wake of months of reporting that Gabbard was being sidelined within the administration and that Trump was considering firing her.
She hung on for 15 months. In that time, she made a mockery of what she’d always presented as her core principles. It looks like it wasn’t enough to save her job.
From 2013 to 2016, Gabbard was vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. She dramatically resigned from that position to endorse democratic socialist Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries. At the time, she explained her decision in terms of Sanders’ support for a less interventionist foreign policy. In an appearance on “Meet The Press,” she said there was “a clear contrast” between the two candidates for the Democratic nomination “with regard to my strong belief that we must end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much.”
This, she argued, mattered more than anything else, saying, “This is not just another issue. This is the issue, and it’s deeply personal to me.”
In her speech at the Democratic National Convention that July, she returned to the same theme, speaking about the “lives lost, lives ruined, and countries destroyed by counterproductive regime change wars.” She ran for president herself during the next election cycle, and the issue so defined her run that her campaign store actually sold “No War with Iran” T-shirts. Her desire to make sure nothing like the disastrous wars with Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya happened again was still, it appeared, “not just another issue” — but her singularly defining issue.
And then she got close to power and threw it all away.
At the end of February, the president announced the beginning of an open-ended war in Iran. Since then, the administration has wildly seesawed between brutal air strikes, long ceasefires, a threat to wipe out Iranian “civilization” and claims of progress in negotiations. From the beginning, a cloud of confusion has surrounded both the goals of the war and how “Operation Epic Fury” is supposed to accomplish those goals. In his brief speech announcing the beginning of the operation, though, Trump said part of his purpose was to bring “the hour of freedom” to “the great proud people of Iran.”
You could be forgiven for assuming that a principled dissident against America’s “regime change policies” would have taken the opportunity to resign in protest. If you did assume that, though, you would be mistaken. She stuck around, and she toed the line.
She hedged and equivocated and stayed loyal to Trump. That loyalty wasn’t reciprocated.
In a message posted to social media in mid-March, she dutifully said, after “carefully reviewing all the information before him,” Trump “concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.” (Gabbard didn’t express any of her own thoughts on the decision.) In Senate hearings the next day, she dodged questions about whether Iran had actually posed such an “imminent threat.”
If she’d said loud and clear that it wasn’t, and she was fired then and there, such a high-profile disavowal of the war could have done real political damage to the administration and encouraged the antiwar movement. She also would have saved at least a scrap of her dignity.
Instead, she hedged and equivocated and stayed loyal to Trump. That loyalty wasn’t reciprocated, and it looks very much like her political career could be over.
Yes, stranger things have happened in American politics. Look at Trump’s comeback — winning the popular vote and a return to the White House despite felony convictions and an attempt to overturn a democratic election. As of this moment, though, Gabbard doesn’t appear to have any clout to offer anyone, politically. Having sacrificed any lingering credibility she might have had as an antiwar dissident, her only remaining political “lane” was one where she remained attached to the president. Now that Trump has discarded her like a used McDonald’s wrapper, even that lane is closed.
The dilemma she faced wasn’t unique to her, even if she had to navigate it in a particularly humiliating way. The cocktail of factors that led Trump to victory in 2024 included the support he ended up getting from outside of the MAGA fold.
A motley collection of politicians and media figures who’d presented themselves as fiercely independent, heterodox anti-interventionist populists swung their support behind Trump and helped him eke out his 49.8% plurality of the national popular vote. Like Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was part of that mix — an ex-Democrat that Trump supporters could point to as one of the few “good ones.” Kennedy parlayed that into a Cabinet position running the Department of Health and Human Services. Mega-popular podcaster Joe Rogan, a longtime Trump skeptic who endorsed him on the eve of the 2024 election, was another. Trump also successfully courted the support of much of the Libertarian Party, speaking at the party’s convention and convincing many Libertarian voters in swing states to pick him over their own party’s nominee Chase Oliver.
Now, everyone with a public profile in that wing of his 2024 coalition (let’s call them the “Contrarians for Trump”) faces the same basic choice as Gabbard. You can eat a little crow and admit you got it wrong when you embraced Trump as a supposed “peace candidate” in 2024, or you abandon the independent heterodox pretense and accept full assimilation into MAGA.
To be sure, the stakes are very different for Cabinet members and podcasters. So, it’s not surprising that Rogan, for example, has been willing to express buyers’ remorse while Kennedy and Gabbard have remained loyal. But what just happened to Gabbard is a stark reminder that loyalty to Trump is always a one-way street, and not worth the toll.
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast.