Stop the nonsense and confirm Tulsi Gabbard

Conservatives of all stripes have enjoyed the first week of Donald Trump’s presidency. The events of the past week have made it very clear that President Trump has come in well-prepared and is laser-focused on fulfilling the many promises that won him the election. Whether it’s securing the border, breaking the DEI cartel, or ending Department of Justice lawfare, the president is executing his agenda with unprecedented energy and aggression.

In the long term, though, securing the president’s promises can’t be done with executive orders alone. Success will come down to the president picking appointees who can carry out his will.

The American intelligence world is arrogant, wayward, and in dire need of reform. That is precisely why President Trump chose Tulsi Gabbard to be his DNI.

President Trump chose Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence for a very clear reason. Ever since he entered the political scene 10 years ago, Trump has faced not just opposition but outright sabotage and deceit from the so-called “intelligence community” of Washington, D.C. They spied on his campaign and gave life to the ridiculous smear that he was a Russian agent. Analysts deliberately withheld information from the president, then leaked about what they were doing to the press.

And of course, during the 2020 election, the intelligence apparatus pressured America’s tech companies to engage in widespread censorship while a network of “former intelligence officials” lied through their teeth to denounce the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”

The American intelligence world is arrogant, wayward, and in dire need of reform. That is precisely why President Trump chose former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a longtime critic of these agencies, to be his DNI.

Gabbard is indisputably qualified. She is a veteran of the Iraq War, the worst of the wars that the intel agencies blundered us into. She spent eight years in Congress and served stints on the Homeland Security, Armed Services, and Foreign Affairs Committees, all of them relevant to the job. She has authentic bipartisan credentials: She represented the Democrats in Congress, is the choice of a MAGA president, and has the personal endorsement of Meghan McCain (a Republican with whom I have no shortage of differences).

And what do her opponents bring against her? It’s simple: They lie. Every attack on Gabbard is a smear concocted by those desperate to prevent the change voters demanded in November.

Some bad actors in D.C., and even within the Republican Party, think they can rerun the game plan of 2017 when people thought the Donald Trump moment was a fluke that would soon be over. And I mean “rerun” literally because one of the top smears against Gabbard is the same one brought against Trump eight years ago: the wild claim that Tulsi Gabbard is a “Russian asset.”

Just like the attack on Trump, this smear was popularized by Hillary Clinton, and just like the attack on Trump, it’s based wholly on Gabbard’s refusal to endorse the failed groupthink consensus of Washington. Gabbard supported military aid to Ukraine prior to the country’s invasion in 2022. She called Putin a U.S. adversary. But none of that matters because this attack was never about the truth. It’s about smearing Gabbard for opposing regime change, forever wars, and a blank check for the D.C. cabal.

The same rules apply to the wild claim that Gabbard is an “Assad sympathizer” in league with the fallen dictator of Syria. The allegation is utterly ridiculous. Gabbard’s 2017 trip was cleared by the House Ethics Committee beforehand, and she did a debriefing with America’s ambassador to Lebanon afterward.

Members of Congress are free to meet with foreign leaders, especially if those leaders are the ones Americans are supposed to spend billions of dollars fighting, directly or indirectly. This is why President Trump has sought direct diplomacy with Vladimir Putin and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

With nothing else to argue, Gabbard’s critics fall back on the complaint that she didn’t believe Assad actually used chemical weapons during his fight to hold onto power. It’s another lie — Gabbard has been saying she believes Assad used chemical weapons for more than five years.

But it wouldn’t even matter if she thought otherwise. Unlike nearly all of Washington’s war hawks, Gabbard has direct experience fighting in a misbegotten war sold with bad intelligence. Unlike most of Washington, Gabbard learned the lesson that spectacular claims about weapons of mass destruction should be backed with proof, not ridiculous threats against anyone showing skepticism.

Other attacks are even more pathetic. There’s the Hail Mary that she is “soft on Iran” when her track record makes it clear she simply shares the president’s goal of avoiding another fruitless war in the Persian Gulf. Attacks on Gabbard’s Hindu religious beliefs are so puerile they don’t even merit a reply.

Gabbard brings to the table exactly what President Trump needs in a DNI: an independent thinker who isn’t shackled to decades of Beltway consensus and who has learned to be skeptical. This isn’t just what President Trump wants, though. It’s what the American public voted for in 2024 — and the election was not a squeaker.

Republicans who hold office right now hold it thanks to voters who expect them to help Trump keep his promises. If those same Republicans instead scuttle one of the president’s essential appointments based on establishment smears, then I have a simple promise: They will face a primary challenge. I, and many others, will do whatever it takes to see them replaced. Republicans can either participate in the president’s reform agenda or they can be trampled by it.

It’s up to them. Any questions?

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.