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Gabbard, a former congresswoman, once apologized for her anti-LGBTQ+ past but has done an about-face yet again.
Donald Trump has picked Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman with an anti-LGBTQ+ record, for director of national intelligence.
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Trump announced his choice of Gabbard Wednesday. Her appointment is subject to Senate confirmation and “is sure to set off a major confirmation fight,” CNN notes. In the post, she would oversee all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies.
“I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace through Strength,” said a statement from Trump. “Tulsi will make us all proud!” He claimed that “she has broad support” from both Republicans and Democrats, but it’s doubtful that she will have much Democratic backing.
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Gabbard, a native of American Samoa, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2013 to 2021, representing a Hawaii district. She was in the Hawaii House from 2002 to 2004 and on the Honolulu City Council from 2010 to 2012. She was a member of the Hawaii Army National Guard from 2003 to 2020 and is now in the Army Reserve, where she is a lieutenant colonel.
In 2024, when she was a Hawaii state representative, she argued against a bill to establish civil unions for same-sex couples. “To try to act as if there is a difference between ‘civil unions’ and same-sex marriage is dishonest, cowardly and extremely disrespectful to the people of Hawaii,” Gabbard testified. “As Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”
She also used the term “homosexual extremists” that year in describing opponents of her father, Mike Gabbard, who was running for Congress at the time. He did not win, but he has been a Hawaii state senator since 2006. He was once a Republican but switched to the Democratic Party in 2007. He has been a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ activist in Hawaii, at one point heading the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, which called homosexuality “unhealthy, abnormal behavior that should not be promoted or accepted in society” and endorsed conversion therapy. He worked with other anti-LGBTQ+ groups as well.
The Alliance for Traditional Marriage advocated for a 1998 Hawaii state constitutional amendment that gave the legislature power to “reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples.” The amendment was adopted at a time when it looked like Hawaii would be the first state with marriage equality, as the result of a court case, but that didn’t happen. The amendment didn’t require the legislature to limit marriage rights, and in 2013 lawmakers passed a marriage equality bill. The amendment stayed on the books, however, until voters approved the repeal of it this year.
Tulsi Gabbard worked with her father in the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, but when she sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 election cycle, she tried to explain away her anti-LGBTQ+ past. “I was raised in a very socially conservative home. My father is Catholic; he was a leading voice against gay marriage in Hawaii at that time,” she said at a CNN town hall in 2019. Tulsi Gabbard is Hindu and was the first member of that faith to be elected to Congress.
At the time, she said her views had evolved, partly because of her experience in the military with LGBTQ+ colleagues in the Middle East, including when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was in force. “I saw firsthand the negative impact of a government attempting to act as a moral arbiter for their people, dictating in the most personal ways how they must live their lives,” she said at the CNN event. In 2019, she also posted a video to YouTube in which she said her anti-LGBTQ+ views were wrong and hurtful.
In Congress, she had a pro-LGBTQ+ record, supporting the Equality Act and receiving high scores on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard, including a perfect 100 score in one term. In March 2020, she dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Joe Biden.
But in recent years, Gabbard has done another turnaround. In December 2020, as her tenure in Congress was winding down (she had not sought reelection), she introduced a bill to bar transgender girls from competing with cisgender ones in school sports. The bill went nowhere.
In April 2022, she posted a video message to social media saying Florida’s recently approved “don’t say gay” law, limiting school instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, didn’t go far enough. “I gotta tell you, I was shocked to learn that it only protects kids from kindergarten till third grade,” she said. “Third grade? What about 12th grade or not at all?” She also decried educators who she claimed are “indoctrinating woke sexual values in our schools.” The law was eventually expanded to ban such instruction through 12th grade, but a legal settlement this year gutted it, establishing that certain discussions of the topics are permitted.
In October 2022, she announced she was leaving the Democratic Party. The party is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, and who are hostile to people of faith and spirituality,” she said in a video from her podcast, The Tulsi Gabbard Show.
She said President Joe Biden’s administration is targeting as terrorists “parents who are vocally standing in opposition to radical curriculums and explicit sexual content being taught to their kids in public schools” and is erasing women by supporting transgender people. She became a Republican this year, endorsed Trump for president, and helped prepare him for his only debate with Kamala Harris.
Also controversial is her coziness with some dictatorial foreign leaders. She criticized U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war and met with the nation’s despotic president, Bashar al-Assad, in 2017. She has further contended that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided in the U.S. and NATO “had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border,” as she wrote on X in 2022.
The Democratic National Committee denounced her nomination as intelligence director. “It is a danger to the American people to place a person who has coddled conspiracy theorists, defended Vladimir Putin, promoted Russian-backed disinformation campaigns, and cozied up to fringe hate groups in our nation’s top intelligence post,” said a statement from DNC Rapid Response Director Alex Floyd. “Once again, Trump’s cabinet picks are showing that when it comes to our national security and our leadership on the world stage, loyalty to him comes first — and America comes last.”
