Washington — President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he has selected former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress as a Democrat and unsuccessfully sought the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, to serve as his director of national intelligence.
“For over two decades, Tulsi has fought for our country and the freedoms of all Americans,” Trump said in a statement announcing Gabbard as his pick. “As a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, she has broad support in both parties — she is now a proud Republican!”
The president-elect said Gabbard “will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our intelligence community, championing our constitutional rights, and securing peace through strength.”
The position requires Senate confirmation. Gabbard does not have experience in the field of intelligence and opposes the United States’ intervention in the war in Ukraine. In 2019, she also expressed opposition to U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war and said the country’s leader, Bashar al-Assad “is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.” Gabbard met with Assad in 2017, which she defended at the time as a “fact-finding mission,” but in 2019 she described him a “brutal dictator.”
She represented Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House from 2013 to 2021 and ran for president in the Democratic primaries in 2020.
Trump has spent the days following his election to a second term filling the ranks of his Cabinet and senior staff at the White House. Among those the president-elect has tapped for his national security team are Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida for national security adviser, former Rep. John Ratcliffe for CIA director and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense.
Gabbard served in the Army National Guard for more than 20 years and was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait. She was elected to represent Hawaii in Congress in 2012 and served four terms in the lower chamber. During her tenure in the House, Gabbard served on the Armed Services, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, she opted not to pursue another term in the House and instead mounted a long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Gabbard’s selection to join Trump’s administration continues a shift in political allegiance for the former Democrat, who endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, during the 2016 presidential campaign and stepped down from her role as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to do so.
Gabbard announced in 2022 that she would be leaving the Democratic Party, claiming it is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers” driven by “wokeness.” She endorsed Trump in his bid for the White House in August and was tapped to serve as co-chair of his transition team with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had also been a lifelong Democrat until he ran for president as an independent.
