Tulsi Gabbard Feels the Freeze

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, June 20, 2025

 

America’s “restrainers,” MAGA isolationists, and undisclosed Qatari influencers have all been having a rough go of it recently, as Donald Trump has vigorously backed Israel’s successful-to-date strikes on the Iranian regime’s nuclear program. American military might now stands squarely behind Israel and may yet participate in one form or another in any final strike against its hardest targets. And now the Trump administration’s most open (and sanctimonious) war skeptic has bent the knee.

 

The administration’s foreign policy wing is notoriously a house divided against itself, stocked with overlapping and mutually loathing groups of “restrainers” who sit awkwardly alongside more traditionally Reaganite “big stick”/peace-through-strength types. The restrainers — most credibly led on a policy level within the administration by men like Michael Anton and Elbridge Colby — are a motley crew, but perhaps summarizable as foreign policy minimalists scarred by the lessons of the Iraq and Afghan Wars. For these historical reasons in particular, they harbor intense skepticism of American entanglement in a region they often argue is of less pressing immediate concern than the Far East.

 

And nobody has positioned herself as their public face and brand ambassador more than Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and military veteran, is a bundle of contradictions best left unexplored for now, but suffice it to say that her anti-hawk bona fides are so well established that they nearly derailed her confirmation. (Gabbard, if you recall, secretly journeyed to Syria while still in Congress to visit Assad, who she suspected was getting a bum rap.)

 

Gabbard’s dovish proclivities are not hidden; they have in fact been her primary selling point to a certain (very online, and thus very influential) segment of the Trump coalition that feels she is one of their own, their “woman in the inside” so to speak. And indeed, Gabbard affirmed that by testifying before Congress on March 25, downplaying the idea that Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon. Clips of that testimony have been running all around Twitter ever since Israel began its move against Iran. Donald Trump finally had enough of being asked about it, snapping at a journalist, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it.”

 

That’s why it was a sign of the times this afternoon when Gabbard pulled a heel turn for the ages and went on Twitter/X to take a public loyalty oath:

 

The dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly. President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree. My full testimony below.

 

There you go, folks — Tulsi Gabbard: neocon fraud. This was a ritual necessity, of course, but Gabbard made the mistake of linking to video of the testimony in her tweet. Maybe she was hoping people would just take her on her word and not bother to click, but if you did you would have noticed that she of course avers the exact opposite: “The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. The IC continues to monitor closely if Teheran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.”

 

It is only after this opening thesis statement that she grimacingly adds that Iran has increased its public rhetoric surrounding the permissibility of a nuclear bomb, and that it has stockpiled increasing amounts of enriched uranium. (A fun detail left unmentioned by Gabbard: The Iranian regime just added an image of an atom to its paper currency to signify its goals.) But the intended thrust of her remarks was crystal clear: No current threat. (If these two segments of her testimony read almost as if they were contradictory, or written by two separate sets of hands or competing internal factions, that is likely because they were.)

 

Gabbard has let her discontent be known in other coded ways. On June 10, she released a weirdly inapposite video to mark the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Referring to the bombings as an attack and focusing exclusively on the civilian loss of life — as opposed to Japanese responsibility for the war — it sounded such a discordantly abased and penitent note that observers noticed only later that she had released it under her own auspices rather than as an official administration statement.

 

Two days later, on June 12, Israel began its attack on Iran. People who are inclined to connect two and two have naturally theorized that Gabbard recorded that video as her own veiled protest against what she knew was coming but could not stop. The media noticed. Trump noticed. The New York Times officially noticed earlier this afternoon, which is likely what directly prompted Gabbard’s tweet. The upshot is that Trump’s rebel DNI has dog-whistled and spun her way out of his inner circle of trust with her public antics, and is now seeking to claw her way back into his orbit.