Though many political commentators had long criticized Tusli Gabbard as a conservative, which masks herself as a Democrat to garner greater public support, her leaving the Democratic Party in 2022 made that crystal clear to anyone still doubting. Two years later, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Gabbard to serve in his adminstration as Director of National Intelligence.

Since leaving the Democratic Party, she has become close to Trump and has made her way into his inner circle, appearing with the candidate on the campaign trail. She joins the likes of Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who has been nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense, South Dakota Governor Kirsi Noam, who Trump plans to place in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, and most recently, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a Trump loyalist who has been nominated to Attorney General.

“Wokeness” drove Tulsi Gabbard from the Democratic Party

In a video posted across her social media profiles, when she announced her departure from the party, Gabbard said, “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” Much of the criticisms lodged at Democrats as “wokeness” relates to the party’s support of transgender youth and immigrants. For progressives in the party, these efforts do not go far enough, but Gabbard, on the other hand, has had enough.

Her critique is similar to that being heard across cable news as pundits and party members attempt to determine why the Democrats lost so categorically to Trump. Some have pointed to the Democrats going woke, but the criticism rings hallow when considering that Harris made very few attempts to highlight LGBT issues and moved further to the right on immigration, abandoning the Dreamers and many undocumented people that the Democrats had at a maximum, paid lip service to in past elections.

Support from Anti-LGBTQ legislation

Particularly shocking for many party members was her support of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill. For Gabbard, the Florida law “bans government and government schools from indoctrinating woke sexual values in our schools to a captive audience.” What exactly “woke sexual values” are is not disclosed by Gabbard, who only warmed up to the idea of same-sex marriage in the early 2010s. Before embracing a more LGBT-friendly position, Gabbard had been a proponent of electroshock and conversion therapies for minors which the medical community has categorically debunked as a way to alter a person’s sexual orientation.

Though, for many who have been following Gabbard’s trajectory, her support for the homophobic legislation did not come as such a surprise since. During her time in Congress, she has introduced transphobic bills that have failed to garner any traction within the party.

Gabbard shares GOP’s anti-immigrant sentiment.

Accusations of Gabbard’s reactionary tendencies have been exacerbated recently after she echoed the criticisms of many far-right commentators on the topic of immigration. Gabbard managed to offer her support without directly praising Donald Trump and his administration’s cruel actions to limit immigration from Central and South America. These opinions diverge significantly from Democrats of all stripes, who have celebrated the return of some pre-Trump immigration policies that make it slightly easier for those seeking asylum to have their claims heard.

Tusli Gabbard has described herself as a “hawk on terrorism” who is opposed to regime intervention.

This view creates conflicts as the US government has named various regimes as sponsors of terror, like Iran, for example. Donald Trump and the more isolationist factions of the GOP want the US to keep its status as a global hegemon but believe that must be done out of the public eye as it draws criticism to be spending so much money abroad when conditions for the voters are deteriorating. In recent years, Gabbard has changed her tune on Russia, calling out its abuses and warning that a nuclear option should be avoided and fought against by all Russians. Gabbard, like many others from progressives to those of a more conservative leaning, believes that a negotiated ceasefire between Europe, the United States, and the Kremlin is the only way to end the conflict in Ukraine.