Tulsi you later, failed traitor!

Lie with dogs, and you're likely to get fleas.

Or, in Tulsi Gabbard's case, ally yourself with Donald Trump and get driven out of the role in which you staked your entire political career. 

In the wake of Gabbard's announcement last week that she is stepping down in her role as the Director of National Intelligence to take care of her cancer-stricken husband, there can be no denying that she has been on the outside looking in for months due to her history of being vocal in support of American noninterventionalism. In fact, Donald Trump himself began polling his senior staff in early April to determine whether there was a suitable replacement for Gabbard, a sign that she would be the next to go. This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision; Gabbard had been slowly irking Trump in the kind of way that gets a person a one-way ticket directly out of the administration. From The Guardian: 

As early as last June, Trump became irritated by a video Gabbard recorded warning about the horrors of nuclear war after a visit to Hiroshima. Trump felt the video would scare people and that she should not speak in unnecessarily graphic terms.

Weeks later, Trump publicly contradicted Gabbard after she testified to lawmakers that Iran had not decided to build a nuclear bomb. “She’s wrong,” Trump told reporters, before authorizing strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz.

Gabbard then became the target of White House officials’ ire after she revoked the security clearances of 37 people, including congressional aides, before the West Wing had checked whether they could do so.

In the fallout, Gabbard’s allies accused the CIA of trying to manufacture a pretext to bring about her ouster, until the White House mediated a truce.

In short, Gabbard made the tragic mistake of not being MAGA enough for this administration. Because to be fully onboard, you have to have a Stephen Miller-level of empathy, that is, how should we say, nonexistent. Trump hates it when his minions acknowledge actual history that is then used to make him look bad. It doesn't matter that Gabbard was correct in her assessment of Hiroshima or Iran's nuclear capabilities; what matters is that those assessments differed from how Trump wanted them announced. Trump hates it when there are any sort of public disagreements among his staff because he wants the authoritarian perk of never being corrected. When he has to go on the record and correct something someone in his cabinet said (even if they said the factually correct thing), that irks him like no other. Once Gabbard began making this a habit, it was only a matter of time before she was on her way out the door. The only surprising thing about any of this was that she was allowed to go out on her terms rather than be canned via a social media post, which has been Donald Trump's de facto method of termination over the past few months.

Gabbard was, in a word, insiduous. There's a reason why Bernie Sanders latched onto her; both of them made a name for themselves by constantly undermining the Democratic Party. Gabbard did it in an effort to be the Rand Paul of the left. She wanted to be seen as the great Democratic anti-interventionalist and would go out of her way to criticize the foreign policy of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden. She was seemingly on the rise with the Democratic Party and was even named vice-chair of the DNC in 2015. However, she had a bizarre infatuation with brutal Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad that seemed to be at the center of her entire political existence. She met with Donald Trump at Trump Tower shortly after he was elected in November of 2016, urging him to have the United States end its "illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government." Gabbard famously made an unsanctioned visit to Syria in 2017 during a time that the US had cut off diplomatic relations with the country due to Assad's brutal response against the uprising in the country. It got to the point where many of us following her career began calling her "Tulssad" due to her being seen as an open Assad apologist at a time when it was clear he was resorting to war crimes to quell the uprising in his country. 

Fortunately, her ill-fated 2020 run for president made it clear once and for all that she was no friend to Democrats. At no point was she competitive, and the only reason she ran was to blunt the momentum of a then-surging Kamala Harris after the first Democratic primary debate. She did so during the second debate, making it clear that she was only in the race as a spoiler. After that debate, she consistently complained about not being invited to the televised debates despite never polling above 2 percent. Then, of course, there was the famous Hillary Clinton observation in October of 2019 that Russia and the Republicans were grooming a woman to run as a third-party spoiler candidate. Clinton never mentioned Gabbard by name, but the shoe fit, and Gabbard immediately denied the accusation, going so far as to sue Clinton for defamation in January of 2020. She eventually dropped the lawsuit and the race in mid-March, having only won two delegates from her birth island of American Samoa. Since she had already resigned from Congress to pursue her failed presidential run, Gabbard was out of a job and on the outside looking in of the Democratic Party. 

So it should have come as no surprise that Gabbard would go all Benedict Arnold by becoming a Republican. She did it the way all turncoats do: gradually and very much in the public eye. She became an independent in 2022 after she claimed that the Democratic Party no longer accepted free speech or respected the rule of law. But of course, we all knew that she was only an "independent" until opportunity bore itself for her to go full MAGA, which it did in 2024. She officially endorsed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris (shocking!) in August of that year and announced she would be joining the GOP at a Trump rally in late October. When Trump won a second term, it was no surprise that Gabbard was in the running for a high-profile position, and with her constantly denying that Russia intervened in the 2016 election, it became obvious that she would have a role where she could run interference for Donald Trump when it came to his foreign entanglements. Before ultimately ruffling Trump's feathers, Gabbard used her role as Director of National Intelligence to successfully parrot Russian talking points by denying they were the aggressors in their invasion of Ukraine. She was bizarrely involved in the Fulton County FBI search that is still trying to manufacture evidence that Donald Trump won the state in 2020. Since she was sidelined from the foreign policy work the DNI is expected to do, she found the only way to stay in Trump's good graces was to investigate his demented conspiracy theories. While it may have saved her job in the interim, there simply wasn't enough there for her to keep her position long term. 

Good riddance to bad rubbish, as we say. Tulsi Gabbard got what she deserved. She was always a cosplaying Democrat, trying to be a contrarian to somehow stay relevant. But the lowly Hawaiian Democrat got greedy. She got overly ambitious. She thought she could blow up the Democratic Party from the 2019-2020 debate stage. When that failed, the mask was off. Her transition to being a Republican may have seemed gradual, but that was her only option after leaving Congress. Being part of the Trump administration was something she had wanted since 2016. Yet when she finally made it to the mountaintop, she still didn't have what it took to go full MAGA. To say, "Yes, sir" to whatever Trump said, no matter how wrong it was. Ultimately, Tulsi Gabbard was unable to become a true Republican because she never learned that you never upset the boss by speaking the truth. Had she learned that, she would still be in her position today. 

Fortunately for all of us, she never learns.