Tulsi Gabbard Takes the Exit Ramp

By Shane Harris

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant, that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.

 

Gabbard, who informed Trump of her resignation today, spent 15 months as the director of national intelligence—on paper, at least. By law, the DNI is supposed to serve as the president’s chief intelligence adviser. Gabbard never was, and many of her stances were at odds with administration actions. Trump was contemptuous of even her modest efforts to speak truth to power. In the spring of 2025, when Gabbard testified to the intelligence community’s consensus view that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Gabbard has long opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran and did not publicly come out in support of Trump’s decision to go to war. One of her top lieutenants quit in protest of the war.

 

In her resignation letter, Gabbard told Trump that she would step down on June 30, having recently learned that her husband, Abraham Williams, has a rare type of bone cancer. “Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage,” Gabbard wrote. People who know the couple have told me that they are exceptionally close; Williams, a video producer and cinematographer, has filmed Gabbard throughout her time in public service, including when she took a trip to Syria to meet the dictator Bashar al-Assad while serving as a Democratic member of Congress. Contrary to the Washington cliché, there’s every reason to think that Gabbard really does want to spend more time with her family. But the Iran war likely made leaving an easier choice.

 

It’s surprising that Gabbard lasted this long in her job. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as DNI in Trump’s first term, has assumed the unofficial—and unenviable—role of chief intelligence adviser to a man who operates on gut instinct.

 

Because the president was not interested in Gabbard’s views on intelligence, she tried to get his attention in other ways. Gabbard accused former U.S. officials of mounting a “yearslong coup” against Trump. She railed against the so-called Russia Hoax and attempted to undermine the conclusion, by a bipartisan Senate committee, that Russia had indeed interfered in the 2016 presidential election. And she took revenge on Trump’s perceived political enemies by revoking the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials. None of this won the president’s public admiration, and it did lasting damage to the intelligence community. Gabbard’s decision to place politics ahead of objectivity has deterred intelligence analysts from making assertions that might run counter to the administration’s preferred storylines, current and former officials have told me.

 

To bolster her baseless claims, Gabbard declassified U.S. intelligence material—sometimes over the objections of the CIA—and publicly misrepresented what those documents actually said. Gabbard’s claim to have “uncovered weaponization” in the intelligence community gave Trump another dubious talking point in his unrelenting campaign of political revenge. Gabbard fired two senior intelligence analysts after they wrote an assessment that contradicted Trump’s efforts to link Venezuela’s president to a criminal gang. Trump’s tortured claims played a role in justifying his attack on Venezuela—a supreme irony for the supposedly anti-interventionist DNI.

 

By law, it was Gabbard’s responsibility to advise policy makers on life-and-death decisions and help them make sense of the torrent of intelligence that streams into U.S. spy agencies every day. Instead, she made her position a platform for promoting distortions and undermining public confidence in the very institutions she’d sworn an oath to lead.

 

The ODNI has long been a weak agency. It never really fulfilled the mandate that was set out for it two decades ago, when Congress tried to correct the failures that had led to the 9/11 attacks by creating another layer of bureaucracy on top of the already-unwieldy intelligence community. “Gabbard’s tenure has demonstrated just how easily an organization like ODNI that lacks clear mission and impact can become overly politicized and move away from the kind of objectivity and truth-seeking required for good intelligence work and U.S. national security,” William Walldorf, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University and a senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities, told me.

 

Toward the end of her tenure, the most salient question to ask about Gabbard was: Why does she stay? She had suffered the humiliation of being shut out of the big meetings and dismissed by the president, only to see the United States bogged down in a new war. When I’ve posed the question to people who have worked with Gabbard in the legislative and executive branch, they tend to offer a simple explanation: She wants power (and they don’t mean that as a compliment). Former congressional staff described her to me as the most ambitious person they’d ever met in Washington. American and foreign intelligence officers told me that she is unfailingly charming and warm in person; in less flattering language, they called her calculating, cautious, and keenly aware of the importance of cultivating her image. In every sense, then, a natural politician.

 

Gabbard ran for president once, as a Democrat. If she decides to give it another shot, she has an opening among Trump supporters. The president’s decision to attack Iran is polling poorly among voters. Gabbard remains admired among formerly MAGA-friendly media influencers who have lost patience with the president and feel that he has betrayed his pledge to not lead the nation into wars of choice. The podcaster Joe Rogan, who called Trump’s war on Iran “nuts,” is a friend of Gabbard’s, and he recently praised her as “amazing” and “the same person on air, off air”; he concluded succinctly, “She’s cool as fuck.”

 

Because Gabbard wasn’t involved in some of the president’s most unpopular decisions, she can’t easily be blamed for them. That gives her a strange credibility in an administration that prizes loyalty over candor. Being an outsider in the Trump administration may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Gabbard’s career.