Well, the good news is...

Among the many insane picks for Trump’s cabinet – the junk science lover RFK Jr at HHS, the ax-throwing Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth at Defense – Tulsi Gabbard at DNI was up there for me as one of the most frightening appointments.

I’ve long had issues with Gabbard, and have written about them extensively.

Just superficially, it made no sense to me that you’d make a former congresswoman with practically no background in intelligence work the Director of National Intelligence.

But worse, the background she DID have made her a terrible pick for such an important post.

If anything marked her stay in Congress, it was her inability to distinguish our enemies from our allies, and truth from fiction, repeatedly promoting Russian propaganda.

In 2022, she endorsed one of Russia’s primary justifications for invading Ukraine, a debunked conspiracy that the US was funding dozens of biolabs in Ukraine, with the intended purpose of creating deadly bioweapons to use against Russia.

In fact, the labs are public, designed to target the spread of infectious diseases, and both the US and Ukraine have signed a treaty vowing never to produce or use bioweapons. But Tulsi hopped right on the story to bolster her pro-Russian bonafides.

She’s lamented that defending Ukraine jeopardizes global security by antagonizing Russia – god forbid.

She also repeatedly bought former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s propaganda as he lied again and again about using chemical weapons on his own people. She disputed the Pentagon’s findings that in fact he had, and refused to blame him for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people, including many children.

“There’s responsibility that goes around, Wolf [Blitzer].” HUH?

Even worse, without consulting Congress, she met with Assad in Syria and then promptly went out to spread his talking points to western audiences.

She championed Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who jeopardized national security by releasing millions of classified documents, and refused during her hearings to call them traitors.

Her bad judgment was so notorious, in fact, that nearly 100 former nat sec officials signed a letter warning against nominating her for DNI.

"Several of Ms. Gabbard’s past actions call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus," the letter said, in part. "Following her trip to Syria, for example, Ms. Gabbard aligned herself with Russian and Syrian officials."

But in Trump’s nominating spree, in which he handed Cabinet positions out like party favors as a thanks for campaigning for him, Gabbard inexplicably survived, thanks largely to the Republican Senate’s light touch – or, as some might say, failure to do their job.

The good news is, in the months that followed, her relevance inside the administration seemed imperiled from the start.

During Elon Musk’s DOGE dominance, she attempted to subvert his directive telling federal employees, including those in her charge at DNI, to justify their jobs by listing five things they’d accomplished in the past week.

Gabbard told her staff not to respond. Trump ultimately defended Musk’s email.

Then, after visiting Hiroshima, she took it upon herself to make a very odd, very ominous video warning that an escalation of the Russia/Ukraine war could end in nuclear annihilation, once again performing more Russian propaganda. The unsubtle subtext was to ward Trump and MAGA off more intervention, but the video was “deeply weird and creepy,” as Tim Miller correctly put it.

A scathing New York Times report revealed how that went over at the White House:

“Mr. Trump berated Ms. Gabbard for the video, according to two people briefed on the conversation. He said that her discussion of nuclear annihilation would scare people and that officials should not talk about it.

Mr. Trump’s displeasure with the video laid bare months of his skepticism of Ms. Gabbard and frustrations with her. The president and some administration officials viewed her overseas travel, as the video exemplified, as being as much about self-promotion of her political career as it was about the business of government, multiple officials said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics of the administration.

After the video was posted, the president also told Ms. Gabbard that he was disappointed in her, and wished she had used better judgment, according to one of the two people briefed on the conversation. He told Ms. Gabbard that he believed she was using her time working for him to set herself up for higher office. Mr. Trump told Ms. Gabbard that if she wanted to run for president, she should not be in the administration, one of the people briefed on the meeting said.”

Now, in the wake of Trump’s threats to involve the US in the conflict between Israel and Iran, Gabbard’s irrelevance has been even more pronounced.

In March, she testified that Iran was NOT building a nuclear weapon and that the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had not authorized the nuclear weapons program.

Trump was recently asked about that. “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.”

“Well, then, my intelligence community is wrong,” Trump said. “Who in the intelligence community said that?”

Gabbard’s testimony apparently didn’t make it up to the White House. When told it was Gabbard, he scoffed, “She’s wrong.” He repeated the sentiment another time, saying he didn’t “care what she said.”

Just a day before the US struck Iran’s nuke facilities, she changed her story entirely, saying, Iran COULD produce nuclear weapons “within weeks.” She blamed the “dishonest media” for taking her sworn testimony to Congress out of context.

Then, after US airstrikes, official photos released by the White House of the Situation Room, where his cabinet discussed and initiated US intervention in Iran, Gabbard was nowhere to be seen. When pressed on this, the White House insisted she was in fact there.

It’s all very demeaning and humiliating for someone in a high post who should be especially relevant as foreign policy and national security takes center stage. But clearly Tulsi is out of favor in the White House.

If she didn’t care so much about climbing the political ladder or staying in Trump’s good graces, she would resign immediately. If she doesn’t have the confidence of the president, and if he’s actively undermining her, she should certainly take her services elsewhere. But I wouldn’t expect that any time soon. It’s more likely Trump finally tires of her and pushes her out.

Whatever you think of our involvement in Iran, Gabbard’s judgment has never been good – she’s proven over and over again that she’s frighteningly susceptible to propaganda and the persuasions of the world’s worst actors. And I’d put her eventual and craven support of Trump in the same bucket of awful judgment.

I for one am glad if she’s not a relevant part of our national security apparatus. She never should have been.