Who is Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s new intelligence director, and why is she controversial?

On Wednesday, the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as President Trump’s new director of national intelligence. Only one Republican, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, voted against her.

An ex-Democrat, Gabbard has long been a divisive figure in Washington. Here’s how she got that reputation — and why Trump picked her anyway.

Gabbard’s early biography is full of twists and turns

Born in 1981 in American Samoa to a mother from Indiana and a father of European and Samoan descent, Gabbard moved to Hawaii with her family at the age of 2. She was raised in the Hindu faith — specifically as a member of a sect now known as the Science of Identity Foundation, which has ties to a direct-marketing firm accused of orchestrating an international “pyramid scheme.”

Gabbard has described the group’s leader as her “guru dev” — meaning, roughly, her spiritual master — while he has likened her to a star pupil. But in 2024, the Trump transition team insisted Gabbard has no affiliation with the SIF, adding that “the repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and loyalty to our country are not only false, they are bigoted as well.”

Gabbard’s father, Mike Gabbard, was elected to the Hawaii state Senate in 2006 as a Republican; he rose to prominence campaigning against homosexuality and gay marriage. Gabbard initially supported her father’s efforts, but later apologized. “In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong,” Gabbard explained in 2019. “And worse, they were very hurtful to people in the LGBT community and to their loved ones.”

In 2002, Gabbard, then 21, became the youngest woman ever to win a seat in a U.S. state legislature (in this case, Hawaii’s House of Representatives). The following year, she enlisted in the Hawaii Army National Guard and went on to serve in Iraq (2004-05) and Kuwait (2008-09). After a stint on the Honolulu City Council, Gabbard was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Hawaii’s Second District. She was the first American Samoan and the first Hindu to serve as a voting member of Congress.

Her views have increasingly aligned with Trump’s

In 2020, Gabbard ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was widely seen as a progressive candidate, with 100% ratings from Planned Parenthood and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence as well left-wing positions on climate change and Medicare for All.

But citing her experience as a combat veteran, Gabbard was also critical of establishment Democrats for supporting what she dubbed "regime change wars” — and even then, she advocated for withdrawing U.S. troops from conflict zones like Syria and Afghanistan.

After losing the 2020 primary to Joe Biden — whom she subsequently endorsed — Gabbard gradually moved to the right on guns, abortion, climate and other issues. In 2022, she left the Democratic Party — which she described as “an elitist cabal of warmongers” — and joined Fox News as a paid contributor.

Over time, Gabbard has increasingly aligned her preexisting anti-interventionist views with Trump’s America First ideology.

For years, one of her main interests was Syria: She worried that American opposition to Bashar Assad, the country’s authoritarian president, might empower Islamic terrorists and spark a broader war. In 2017, she visited Assad in Syria — a move that was widely criticized by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

"Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” Gabbard said at the time, expressing skepticism that the regime had used chemical weapons against its own citizens.

More recently, Gabbard has blamed the United States and NATO for provoking Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by ignoring Russian security concerns — and she has gone on to suggest, as the New York Times reported last November, that America “covertly worked with Ukraine on dangerous biological pathogens and was culpable for the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany in September 2022.”

These remarks, in turn, have made Gabbard “a darling of the Kremlin’s vast state media apparatus,” as the Times put it — and raised concerns in Washington about a worldview that “mirrors disinformation straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook.”

“Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda,” former Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah once wrote on X. “Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

Why Trump picked Gabbard

In the 2022 midterm elections, Gabbard campaigned for Republican election deniers such as Arizona’s Kari Lake. In 2024, she formally joined the Republican Party and endorsed Trump.

During the campaign, Gabbard assisted Trump with debate prep, attacked the so-called deep state and criticized the Biden administration’s “woke” policies — at one point going so far as to compare diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to the "geneticist core principles embodied by Nazism and Adolf Hitler."

“The Democrat elite and their cronies are using our criminal justice system to prosecute and distract the Republican presidential candidate in the midst of his campaign," Gabbard said after Trump was indicted for mishandling classified documents.

Trump initially rewarded Gabbard with a spot on his transition team, calling her an “amazing person.” Then he nominated her to oversee 18 spy agencies as his director of national intelligence.

What Gabbard will do as Trump’s top intelligence official

Unlike previous directors, Gabbard hasn’t held any senior government roles. Her immediate predecessor, Avril Haines, served as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs before taking over the top job. In contrast, Gabbard spent two years on the House Homeland Security Committee.

But as with many of Trump’s other Cabinet-level nominees — Pete Hegseth at Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services — that’s part of the point. In his first term, the anti-establishment Trump tried to placate skeptics in his own party with establishment-friendly picks. But now Trump seems to prefer nominees more like himself: Beltway outsiders who aren’t afraid of blowing things up.

Officially, the director of national intelligence — a job that was created after 9/11 — is supposed to prevent future intelligence failures by streamlining interagency cooperation. Gabbard will also oversee the President’s Daily Brief, an intelligence summary assembled each morning.

But more broadly, Gabbard’s job is to root out what she and Trump see as “all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus,” as Trump put it in 2023.

“There are plenty of them,” Trump continued. “The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled.”

At her confirmation hearing last month, Gabbard insisted that her critics were wrong to question her motives. “Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the Constitution of the United States — accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet,” she said. “Not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters.”