You know President-elect Donald Trump is over the target with his Cabinet nominations when the same talking heads who helped the Democrats lose the election are losing their minds over his choices. Again and again, voters told pollsters that they want less immigration, lower consumer prices, and fewer wars for “democracy.” Unlike Democrats and their NGO and media allies, Trump listened to these concerns, garnering a commanding mandate at the ballot box, and now he’s setting about delivering on what he promised with a Cabinet friendly to this agenda.
Case in point: Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump has nominated to serve as Director of National Intelligence, the officer responsible for compiling the Intelligence Community’s findings and conclusions and funneling them to the president. Gabbard has spent her career advocating for peace through strength, carving out the nuanced middle ground between the left’s preference for weakness and the right’s warmongering.
Gabbard, a veteran of the war in Iraq and the first Samoan-American elected to Congress to represent Hawaii, has staked her entire political life on getting the United States out of forever wars—and keeping us out. When she ran for president in the Democratic primary in 2020, she said, “There is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace.”
It was consistent with her profile as a lawmaker. Gabbard became known for what might look like two contradictory impulses, but in fact presaged the kind of nuanced foreign policy that would later be embraced by Trump: She was staunchly antiwar and anti-interventionist but also vocal in her warnings about the dangers of Islamist terrorism and the need to protect American citizens from our avowed, rather than imagined, enemies.