It was a moment of triumph.
At a rally in Honolulu in 2002, Tulsi Gabbard wore an orchid lei as she celebrated her victory as the youngest-ever member of the Hawaii State Legislature. She had dropped out of community college to run, and Gabbard, then 21, was embarking on what would become a dizzying political journey from anti-gay conservative to Democratic Party star to a celebrity in President Donald Trump’s world.
Gabbard, who grew up in a fringe spiritual movement and was a darling of the Left during her early years in Congress, has ricocheted across nearly the entire ideological spectrum of American politics, fuelling questions about what she stands for and truly believes. Gabbard, 43, is now the President’s choice to oversee the nation’s 18 spy agencies as the director of national intelligence.
In what is likely to be a rocky confirmation hearing on Thursday, senators from both parties are certain to ask about her trip to Syria in 2017 to meet Bashar al-Assad, the country’s dictator who has since been deposed. They are also expected to question her parroting of Russian falsehoods about Ukraine and her lack of relevant experience for the job.
In Hawaii, colleagues, friends and critics debate whether the spiritual movement Gabbard grew up in — the Science of Identity Foundation, a secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement vehemently opposed to same-sex relationships and abortion, and deeply suspicious of Islam — was a motivation for her policy stances. In Washington, some colleagues say she was more influenced by a military deployment to Iraq during one of the most brutal periods of the insurgency. Others attribute her ideological arc to ambition.
No one disputes that Gabbard is an unorthodox choice for one of the most sensitive roles in government. Her nomination has alarmed national security officials of both parties, and Trump has privately told allies that hers is the cabinet confirmation he is most worried about.
Gabbard’s defenders consider her unconventional background and views to be an asset.
“She’s not reflexively willing to go along with conventional thinking,” said Bernard K. Hudson, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism who informally advised Trump on national security during the campaign and the transition.
Other intelligence experts find her selection baffling.
“I’m all for disruption — I’ve been a disrupter — but I don’t know how you blow up what you don’t understand,” said Susan M. Gordon, who was the nation’s No. 2 intelligence official during Trump’s first term until her resignation in 2019. “At a time when the world is on fire, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want the best the world has to offer.”
Childhood
Gabbard was born in American Samoa and raised in Hawaii, where she was home-schooled by her parents, who were longtime Science of Identity disciples and teachers.
The group was established in 1977 in Hawaii by Chris Butler, a college dropout, surfer and yoga teacher who split from but still reveres the Hare Krishna movement. Gabbard has called Butler her “gurudev”. Butler and his disciples have said they have no affiliation with any organised religion, but the foundation now says it is rooted in Vaishnavism.
While its exact numbers are not publicly known, the group claims adherents in Hawaii, California, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. Its stated purpose is to share the science of yoga and other practices to optimise the well-being of followers. The foundation also owns real estate, health food stores and an array of other ventures.
Gabbard attended a school run by Science of Identity disciples in the Philippines for a time, worked in her youth in one of the group’s health food stores, married a fellow disciple and has employed several in her political operation.
The group’s followers have contributed volunteers and money to Gabbard’s campaigns over the years. In turn, she has channelled campaign-related contracts to vendors linked to the foundation, according to Honolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit news outlet.
Some critics call Science of Identity a cult, in part because Butler, 77, demands total obeisance. His followers cook, clean and drive for him. Previous disciples talk about competing to wear his castoff clothing and eat his leftovers, and a few have sprinkled his toenail clippings in their food.
Anita van Duyn, a former retail entrepreneur who left Science of Identity in 1994 after more than a decade in the group and knew Gabbard as a young woman, has written a letter to members of Congress warning that Gabbard is “under the complete influence of” Butler, who she said “harbours ambitious political goals”. Van Duyn, who lives with her wife in California, said she had left the group because Butler “used his disciples like puppets only for his personal gains”.
Like other critics, she could not say specifically what Butler’s political agenda was, although in 1977, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that he secretly backed a slate of unsuccessful candidates for Congress and state office in Hawaii the previous year. He did not respond to requests for an interview.
In a statement, Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for Gabbard, characterised questions about Gabbard’s religious background as “Hinduphobia”. She also sought to distance Gabbard from Science of Identity, claiming that “she has never and doesn’t have affiliation” with the organisation. “Smearing her as being in a cult is bigoted,” she wrote in an email.
In the past, Gabbard has spoken positively of her experiences with Butler’s group and disputed critics who call it an abusive cult. “I’ve never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody,” Gabbard told The New Yorker in 2017. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people.”
In the article, Butler praised her as an accomplished “student of mine”.
Democratic star
Gabbard began her political career in the Hawaii statehouse echoing the condemnation of abortion and “homosexual extremists” shared by Butler and her father, Mike Gabbard, then Hawaii’s most vocal anti-gay crusader. In 1998, Mike produced a TV ad with Gabbard and her four siblings, who equated gay marriage to marrying one another, or the family dog.
Gabbard had been in the statehouse only a year when the Iraq war began in 2003. She joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, left her legislative position and in 2005 deployed to Camp Anaconda, in Iraq’s Sunni triangle. In a period when the area was the epicentre of Sunni militant resistance to the US occupation, Gabbard witnessed the flow of casualties in and out of the camp’s hospital, an experience that gave her an unsparing view of the insurgency’s toll on American soldiers.
Gabbard later cited her service as shaping her opposition to American involvement in what she calls “regime-change wars”. After a second deployment to Kuwait, she returned to Honolulu and won a seat on the City Council in 2010. Two years later she sought the blessing of Hawaii’s Democratic governor at the time, Neil Abercrombie, to run an underdog campaign for Congress.
Abercrombie and his wife, Nancie Caraway, a political consultant, had been repelled by the Gabbard family’s campaign against gay marriage. But Gabbard, who has apologised for those views, assured the couple that she had changed during her military service, when she saw how other countries repressed their citizens’ personal freedoms.
“I believed her, my wife believed her, and I went out and raised money for her and campaigned for her,” Abercrombie said in an interview. So did several big Hawaii donors and Emily’s List, a powerful funder of Democrats who support abortion rights.
Science of Identity volunteers plastered Hawaii’s Second District with campaign signs backing her and disciples contributed to her campaign, as they would in later years. Gabbard also attracted funding from major Democratic donors and from members of the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group supportive of the Narendra Modi government, which has emerged as one of her strongest defenders.
Gabbard won handily. Telegenic, a veteran and the House’s first Hindu member, she arrived in Washington in 2013 and was soon a Democratic star. She grew close to the liberal commentator Van Jones, befriended Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and posed with a surfboardfor Vogue.
But she found herself at odds with the leadership of her party over foreign policy, an area where she had strong convictions. Although her aversion to “regime-change wars” was common on the Democratic Left, she also opposed American support for the Arab Spring uprisings against authoritarian governments in Egypt, Libya and Syria.
In her new position she sought a connection with Modi, whom she visited twice in 2014, in New York and in India. Sunil Khemaney, an adviser whom van Duyn described as one of Butler’s most trusted disciples, accompanied Gabbard on the India trip. Modi later sent a personal gift and the general secretary of the BJP to Gabbard’s wedding to Abraham Williams, a fellow Science of Identity disciple and photographer who documents her public appearances.
Defending a dictator
In June 2015, Gabbard joined a congressional delegation to visit refugees from the conflict in Syria in a camp on the Turkish-Syrian border.
Meeting several young girls who had been badly burned in an aerial bombing of the camp, she asked them, “How do you know it was the Russians and Assad who did it, and not the ISIS?” recalled Mouaz Moustafa, an activist with the Syrian Emergency Task Force who coordinated the trip. But the Islamic State did not have an air force.
Moustafa later told reporters he was so mortified by Gabbard’s question that he did not accurately translate it. Gabbard has denied that the conversation occurred.
Later that year, during a congressional visit to Paris after a wave of Islamic terrorist attacks, Gabbard said on CNN: “If Assad is removed and overthrown, ISIS, al Qaida, Al Nusra, these Islamic extremist groups will walk straight in and take over all of Syria.”
Advisers close to Gabbard watched with alarm as what they considered her reasonable questions about US policy in Syria hardened into a defence of the Assad regime.
In early 2016, Gabbard quit her post on the Democratic National Committee and formally endorsed Bernie Sanders for President, enraging the party’s pro-Hillary Clinton establishment.
Gabbard’s next stop was Trump Tower. Shortly after Trump won the 2016 election, he told The Wall Street Journal that he favoured fighting the Islamic State in Syria rather than deposing Assad. Soon afterwards Stephen K. Bannon, then one of Trump’s top advisers, invited Gabbard to Trump Tower to discuss Syria and other foreign policy issues with the President-elect.
If her sudden entrance into Trump’s orbit shocked her Democratic colleagues, it was only a prelude to her surprise visit with Assad two months later.
Joining Team Trump
In 2019, Gabbard embarked on a quixotic Democratic campaign for President that effectively ended her relationship with her party. The pivotal moment came in October that year, when Hillary, in a podcast interview, implied that Gabbard was “a Russian asset”.
Hillary provided no evidence for the claim, and Gabbard sued her for defamation. She dropped the lawsuit four months later, but the clash earned her sympathy on the Right.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Gabbard blamed the US and Nato for provoking the war by ignoring Russia’s security concerns and suggested the US was culpable for the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany in September 2022.
In October of that year, Gabbard debuted The Tulsi Show, an online TV show and podcast, and in the first episode announced that she was no longer a Democrat. Days later she endorsed a slate of far-Right Republican candidates known for their false claims that the 2020 election had been stolenfrom Trump.
“Tulsi’s foreign policy and Trump’s foreign policy have been in line basically as long as they’ve been in public,” said Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and CIA paramilitary officer.
But in the run-up to her hearing, Gabbard has struggled to explain views that rile some conservatives on the intelligence committee considering her nomination. One concern is her defence of Edward Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor, now a Russian citizen, who leaked highly classified documents about mass surveillance techniques to The Guardian and The Washington Postin 2013.
“She is a shape-shifter,” said Abercrombie, the former Hawaii governor. “She’s going to shape-shift for those Republicans on the committee, and they’re not going to give her a hard time,” he said.“You watch.”
New York Times News Service