Mother Jones illustration; Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP; Mattie Neretin/CNP/Zuma
These days, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is a faithful servant for President Donald Trump, going so far as to cook up a phony intelligence report so Trump’s Justice Department can pursue investigations of his perceived enemies. But not so long ago, Gabbard slammed Trump for being a warmonger supporting a “genocidal war” in order to score billions of dollars in arms sales and for pushing an “insane” policy “to protect Al Qaeda.”
These blistering criticisms of Trump came during the first Trump presidency, when Gabbard was a Democratic House member from Hawaii and a founding fellow of the Bernie Sanders Institute, a nonprofit the socialist senator from Vermont set up after his 2016 presidential campaign to promote progresssive policies. In the fall of 2018, Gabbard, who had supported Sanders’ presidential bid, recorded a video with Jane Sanders, the senator’s wife and a co-founder of the institute, in which she accused Trump of profound perfidy.
Gabbard not only blasted the Trump administration’s policy as misguided; she asserted that Trump was backing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen to protect $2 billion in US arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Gabbard excoriated the “disastrous decisions” of the US government that had led to “regime-change wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Referring to the “genocidal war that Saudi Arabia” was then waging in Yemen, she noted that it had created the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world,” and she decried the Trump administration for “standing shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia in this war, as they commit these atrocities against Yemeni civilians.”
Gabbard referred to this conflict as “an illegal war that the United States is waging” with Saudi Arabia. She added that Trump was using US taxpayer dollars to “refuel Saudi planes, to provide precision missiles” that were attacking weddings and school buses. She called for stopping all US military support for Saudi Arabia—a government with which Trump was striving to forge a closer bond.
Gabbard not only blasted the Trump administration’s policy as misguided; she asserted that Trump was backing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen to protect $2 billion in US arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. She leveled a serious charge at the Trump White House: “These leaders are making decisions for profits on the backs of the lives of these innocent civilians in Yemen. It’s heartbreaking to see how these millions of people’s lives have just been devastated by the continuance of this war.”
Sanders turned the conversation to the ongoing civil war in Syria. Trump had recently threatened to use military force against Russia-backed President Bashir al-Assad if Assad attacked Idlib province, a stronghold of the jihadist opposition, and Gabbard assailed the president for his “beating of the war drums.”
She contended that Al Qaeda controlled Idlib and Trump’s action was a “complete betrayal of the American people, of those who lost their lives on 9/11, of the troops who have been fighting against terrorism and their families.” She said, “It’s insane, frankly, that we would hear these threats coming from the United States president and the commander in chief that they will force ‘dire consequences’ and the use of military force against these other countries to protect Al Qaeda.” (At that point, the largest rebel force in Idlib was a group with historic ties to Al Qaeda.)
Explaining to Sanders why Trump was supposedly protecting Al Qaeda, Gabbard described what was close to a conspiracy theory:
Since 2011, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this kind of slow, drawn-out regime-change war in Syria, it is terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—these different groups—that have morphed and taken on different names but are essentially all linked with Al Qaeda or [are] Al Qaeda themselves that have proven to be the most effective ground force against the government in trying to overthrow the Syrian government. So President Trump and his war cabinet recognize now that if Al Qaeda is destroyed in Syria, in Idlib, which is kind of their last stand, then that ground force will be gone, and this regime-change war, in effect, will be over.
Gabbard was saying that Trump was purposefully backing what she called Al Qaeda in order to keep the war going in Syria.
Regarding Idlib, Trump’s national security team at that time was concerned that an Assad assault on the province—with the likely support of Russia and Iran—would produce much bloodshed and chaos and cause a massive flow of refugees into Turkey. This flood could include thousands of jihadist fighters who might move to other parts of Europe. Trump’s advisers also feared that Assad in attacking Idlib might once again use chemical weapons.
Gabbard did not address these matters and focused only on her belief that the Trump administration was aligning itself with Al Qaeda to keep alive the war against Assad. She seemed supportive of allowing Bashar to proceed with an assault on Idlib—or not taking steps to prevent him from doing so.
By this point, Gabbard had already positioned herself as an outlier on Syria policy and had been branded an apologist for Assad. She had questioned international findings that Assad had used chemical weapons on civilian targets. And in 2017, she held a secret meeting with him.
This conversation with Sanders was not a one-off. In an interview with the Nation weeks earlier, Gabbard had castigated Trump for protecting “al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces in Syria,” all the while “threatening Russia, Syria, and Iran, with military force if they dare attack these terrorists.” She slapped Trump for acting “as the protective big brother of al-Qaeda and other jihadists.” She painted a dark picture of him:
The president loves being adored and praised, and despite his rants against them, he especially craves the favor of the media. Trump remembers very well that the only times he has been praised almost universally by the mainstream media, Republicans, and Democrats, was when he has engaged in aggressive military actions… Right now, President Trump’s approval ratings are dropping, and he craves positive reinforcement. He and his team are making a political calculation and looking for any excuse or opportunity to launch another military attack, so that Trump can again be glorified for dropping bombs… President Trump and his cabinet of war hawks are concerned that if Al Qaeda is defeated in Idlib, then our regime-change war to overthrow the Syrian government will be over.
During her chat with Jane Sanders, Gabbard, who was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, affirmed Sanders’ calls for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. She bemoaned the nation’s “addiction to fossil fuels.” And when Sanders referred to the “autocratic nature” of Trump, Gabbard nodded along. She also praised the “great work” of the Bernie Sanders Institute.
Mother Jones sent Gabbard a long list of questions about her harsh criticism of Trump’s actions related to Yemen and Syria, her work with the Bernie Sanders Institute, and her support of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. She did not answer any query, but her press secretary at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, emailed, “For a publication that brands itself as ‘investigative’ and pro-peace, your inquiry conveniently ignores everything President Trump and DNI Gabbard, under his leadership, have done to keep Americans safe and advance peace since day one. Shame on you for using cherry picked remarks from seven years ago in a clear attempt to smear them.”
In December 2018, Gabbard was a featured speaker at a conference organized by the Bernie Sanders Institute, and appeared on a panel with actor Susan Sarandon, civil rights activist Ben Jealous, and progressive economist Radhika Balakrishnan. Addressing the topic of environmental justice, she said that “the most basic and fundamental human right is clean air and clean water.” She asked the audience to hold its breath. “You can’t exist for very long without air, ” she remarked.
At this gathering of leftist Democrats and progressives, Gabbard was quite at home. She noted that “so many of the decisions that are being made in regards to policy” were “being driven by greed.” She recounted her participation in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, South Dakota. She assailed the fossil fuel industry. She noted that economic conditions in Central America were driving people in that region to flee their countries and called for US policies to address that. She urged “economic empowerment” in the United States “based on human rights and needs, not consumerism and greed.”
Two months later, in February 2019, Gabbard announced her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After a year of campaigning, having collected merely two delegates, she withdrew from the race and endorsed Joe Biden, the eventual nominee. Two years later, Gabbard, who had once been a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, left the party—calling it too woke and too hawkish—and endorsed several Trump-backed GOP congressional candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.
In August 2024, Gabbard, the onetime progressive House Democrat and Bernie Sanders Institute fellow, endorsed Trump, now claiming he had the “courage” to pursue peace and see “war as a last resort.” His support of Saudi war crimes in Yemen (due to a greedy desire for revenue from arms sales) and his supposed scheming to support Al Qaeda in Syria were memory-holed—as were her previous leftish views on economics, health care, and the environment.
Trump’s current stable of top appointees includes several who were once fierce critics and who dumped their harsh views of Trump in order to serve him. On this roster are Secretary of State Marco Rubio (“a con artist”); Vice President JD Vance (either “a cynical a–hole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler”) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (“a threat to democracy”). But only one of his senior aides previously accused Trump of making common cause with Al Qaeda, betraying the nation, and supporting war crimes for the sake of profits—and that person now comfortably works for Trump and oversees the entire US intelligence community.