It was inevitable that another inferior angel would be expelled from St. Petersburg – the nickname given to the Washington swamp surrounding Donald Trump and the living embodiment of the Peter Doctrine. The only question was who? The smart money was either on Kash Patel, whose self-aggrandizing behavior was beginning to irritate the president in chief, or Tulsi Gabbard, whose anti-war stance was increasingly at odds with the Trump administration’s moves.
It turned out that the titular actress was the one who went first as Gabbard, an avid surfer, found herself outside the boat.Now her departure has become inevitable, with aides openly joking that DNI, short for Director of National Intelligence, should stand for “Do Not Invite.”Since Trump came to power, the administration has reneged on every promise made by MAGA during the election season. China was supposed to be contained, but now Beijing is flexing its muscles more than ever.
Instead of preventing America from playing the role of global policeman, Uncle Sam is involved in direct conflicts with many foreign powers and in indirect conflicts with his allies. The Russia-Ukraine war shows no signs of abating.
The idea of peace in the Middle East lies in such pieces that have led to the expansion of the conflict from Israel against the axis of resistance to include the entire region, shaking global markets, and reminding the world that Iran is capable of playing the role of guardian of global energy needs by strengthening its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
The gap between Trump’s actions and Gabbard’s worldview made the latter’s position unacceptable. Her fate may have been sealed last June, when, less than two weeks before Operation Midnight Hammer, she posted a video in which she said that “warmongers from the political elite are carelessly stoking fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” This post appeared shortly before the United States struck Iranian nuclear sites in an operation borrowed almost from the plot of the movie Top Gun: Maverick.While the official reason for her departure was her husband’s diagnosis of bone cancer, numerous reports indicate that Gabbard was pressured to leave, with White House officials increasingly dissatisfied with her actions.
The rise and fall of Tulsi Gabbard
Tulsi, who shares her name with the heroine of a hugely popular Indian family television series, has had a somewhat unlikely American political journey.From the strange ideological archipelago of Hawaii, where she grew up around the Identity Foundation, a little-known spiritual movement with Hare Krishna roots and a history of controversy, to the Iraq War, where she served in uniform and built a veteran authority that later fortified her against the usual accusations of anti-interventionism.
Tulsi Gabbard and her husband Abraham Williams
She entered Congress as the first Hindu member of the House of Representatives, carried the Bhagavad Gita as she was sworn in, navigated Democratic politics with the calm of someone who looked as if she had been assembled by a casting director for a “post-partisan America,” and then gradually revealed herself as something much harder to classify: socially devious, foreign policy heretic, gun-toting enough to unsettle liberals, anti-war enough to unsettle hawks, anti-woke enough For the magic of truth.
She was ambitious enough to understand that in American politics, the quickest way to go from obscurity to myth is to become impossible to locate.Gabbard resigned as vice chair of the Democratic Party in 2016 when she accused the party of gaming the system against Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton. She also got major brownie points from MAGA for criticizing the Obama-era Russiagate investigation and dismantling Kamala Harris in the 2019 DNC debate.
Over time, Trump would select her to be Director of National Intelligence and give her the highest title that could exist in MAGAland: “She’s hotter than everybody.
“Despite the title of Director of National Intelligence, this role is less powerful than it seems and largely requires coordinating the US intelligence community and keeping the president informed of what is going on in the agencies. Gabbard entered that job with an unusual handicap: She was no fan of intelligence, had little institutional support within the world she was supposed to run, and arrived with a long record that made Democrats and old-school security hawks skeptical of her judgment.
As Mark Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer, explained to the Washington Post: “It doesn’t have a role anymore. If you don’t have the ear of the president, if you don’t have his trust, you can’t be effective. This is the 101st intelligence chief in Washington.” All the intelligence agencies in Washington have their own tricks, and the Director of National Intelligence is all about coordination, access, and trust. With Trump following his own style, the role has become redundant.Gabbard was chosen because of her non-interventionist “America First” ideology, and those instincts were at odds with Trump’s actions in Iran and Venezuela.
According to a CNN report, when Trump’s national security team was touring Mar-a-Lago to watch US operations in Venezuela, Gabbard was miles away in Hawaii.Even within the world of intelligence, things were not smooth at all. Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly had a fraught relationship, with Gabbard feeling that Ratcliffe was going around her directly to the president. She became isolated even within her own office, where she surrounded herself with a small circle of advisors.
In Washington, that is rarely a sign of strength. This is usually the moment when the music stops and the character does not yet realize that there is no longer a chair left.Earlier, Joe Kent, another Trump appointee, resigned from the post of head of the National Counterterrorism Center. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, another Gabbard ally, also resigned, weakening the anti-war coalition within MAGA.
Civil War Anti-War MAGA
For better or worse, one of the core elements of MAGA that brought many disparate conservatives together was anti-war.
The likes of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard, and the America First wing have convinced themselves, thanks to the actions of Trump 1.0, that the specter of Bush and Cheney roaming the Republican Party will finally be buried.Carlson was the loudest of all, as he did not portray the Iranian escalation as an American war, but rather as a war directed by another party against America. “This is Israel’s war. This is not America’s war,” he said, a phrase that embodies the anti-war right’s deepest fears: that “America First” has once again become “Israel First” with a better label.Bannon’s warning was less moral and more political. “We can’t do this again. We’ll tear the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq,” he said, speaking on behalf of the MAGA faction that believes Trump’s mandate is to close the imperialist tab, not open a new one.Kent turned opposition into resignation. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran poses no imminent threat to our nation,” he wrote, making him the rare Trump official who not only complained from the sidelines but withdrew from the mechanism itself.
The problem was that Trump’s anti-war rhetoric was always more instinctive than ideological. He hated Iraq because it seemed like a foolish country, Afghanistan because it ended in humiliation, and “endless wars” because they made America look like a country that could neither win nor get out. As evidenced by messages from the White House, Trump loves the idea of war and winning, and often shares videos of enemies being bombed.While the other While those who were anti-war were outside the establishment, Gabbard was very much part of Trump’s world.
No MAGA for women?
During his reality TV days, Trump liked to say, “You’re fired,” a phrase that these days seems mostly reserved for people with XX chromosomes. Gabbard is the fourth woman appointee, and perhaps the most high-profile, to leave Trump’s cabinet.As head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem bore the brunt of the administration’s clumsy anti-immigration crackdown and the broader chaos surrounding the Department of Homeland Security. Her case was not helped by a $220 million border security ad campaign in which she appeared.
Trump told Reuters he did not sign it: “I never knew anything about it.” In a White House, where only one person is allowed to be the face of power, Noem has become a branding issue.The downfall of Attorney General Pam Bondi was due to the Epstein files and the Trump revenge machine. The Epstein case became a radioactive inside MAGA because the base was expecting exposure, not redaction. Bondi helped raise expectations, but what followed was confusion, disappointment and a feeling among Trump loyalists that the big reveal had somehow turned into a bureaucratic fog. At the same time, Trump reportedly felt she was not moving quickly enough to prosecute critics and opponents he wanted to face criminal charges. In Trump’s world, loyalty is never enough if it does not lead to punishment.
Lauri Chavez de Remer’s departure was less ideological and more scandal-driven. She resigned as Labor Secretary amid allegations of misconduct and questions about her leadership of the department.
The official language about exits in Washington is always soft. People are looking for special opportunities, spending time with family, or looking for new challenges. But the message was simple: It was becoming more trouble than it was worth.Gabbard’s exit belongs to a fourth category. Noem failed the optics test, Bundy the revenge test, Chavez de Remer the scandal-survival test, and Gabbard the obedience test.Despite all this, there are many Cabinet members with XY chromosomes who are still sticking around despite failure, controversy and public embarrassment.
This does not mean that every woman left for the same reason. This means that the Trump court has a familiar rhythm: Women are useful as tokens until they become liabilities, and once they are liabilities, they rarely get the same long rope as men.
Postscript from Iran
The failure of the whole experiment may have been summed up in a mockery of Iran, which has already upped its funny game amid the war with Israel and America. Writing from her embassy’s account in Armenia, she wished Gabbard’s husband a “swift and full recovery,” praised her for “speaking the truth about Iran, which Trump hates,” and said it was unfortunate that she worked for a government that “marginalized America” and became “an agent of Israel.”In Hindu tradition, Tulsi, or holy basil, is considered auspicious, but is usually kept outside the home. The same thing eventually happened to Tulsi Gabbard, who shares her name with Indian television’s most famous bahu, and learned the hard way that in a Washington soap opera, the patriarch is always right.Kyunki DNI called bhi kabhi thi.