Kremlin defender Tulsi Gabbard is the US’s new spy chief, while the US and Russia are holding peace talks without European and Ukrainian officials at the table. The vibe has officially shifted. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Russian President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at the G20 Summit in Osaka in 2019. Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: How did Trump shift U.S.-Russia relations?
It's officially been a month now, and to his credit, President Trump waited almost an entire month before doing a 180 on U.S.-Russia relations. Trump had a nice long phone call with Vladimir Putin about a week ago. Ukraine was not invited.
My call was perfect.
And then on Tuesday, Trump blamed Ukraine for being invaded by Russia. And then to top it off, on Truth Social yesterday, he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator without elections. Shortly thereafter, on that same website, Trump called himself a king. Totally cool, normal stuff. But you might be old enough to remember the United States being on Ukraine's side of this war.
On Today Explained, we're getting used to this new normal, being BFFs with Russia. And we're going to start with the person Trump has put in charge of U.S. intelligence, a Russia sympathizer with no intelligence experience to speak of, named Tulsi Gabbard.
Chapter 2: Who is Tulsi Gabbard and why is she leading U.S. intelligence?
On this week's episode of Net Worth and Chill, I'm chatting with internet sensation and everyone's favorite Philly influencer, Bran Flakes. He's a social media maverick and content creator turning viral moments into cold, hard cash. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on the Your Rich BFF YouTube channel.
So what is the actual State of the Union?
This was like the Donald Trump show, and he was going to throw red meat to the people who love him anyway.
I'm Preet Bharara, and this week I'm joined by historian Joanne Freeman, columnist Frank Bruni, and commentator Jonah Goldberg on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet. We discuss Trump's address to Congress and how the country is holding up just two months since Inauguration Day. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Today Explained.
Vladimir Putin got his start as a spy, and now our top spy in the United States has a soft spot for Vladimir Putin. In fact, some people sincerely believe she's a straight-up Russian operative.
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Chapter 3: What is Tulsi Gabbard's background?
That is a charge that's been leveled against her. She's a favorite of the Russians. She once sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million for saying something along those lines.
I will not stand quietly by as Hillary Clinton or anyone else tries to smear my character.
I think that goes too far, but she has expressed sympathy for... Putin's dilemma.
You hear President Biden say, well, this is Putin's war. This is Putin's fault. It's Putin who's the one who's solely responsible. Well, the United States and some of these European NATO countries are fueling this war.
And for dictators like Bashar al-Assad, the former dictator of Syria.
Do you think Assad is our enemy? Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.
She has called for a pardon for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal surveillance of Americans. You've celebrated Snowden as, quote, brave whistleblower. So she sounds more like a progressive politician sometimes than a establishment spy chief. And I think she would say that's kind of the point. We need a different perspective on top of the American intelligence system.
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Chapter 4: How did Tulsi Gabbard's political views evolve over time?
Steve Kahl is a senior editor at what I'm told is a leading magazine, The Economist, and he's here to help you understand who's just been put in charge of U.S. intelligence and how that might shift the course of U.S. foreign policy.
Well, she grew up in Hawaii in somewhat unusual circumstances. Her parents were members of a religious community called the Science of Identity Foundation, which was derived from the Hare Krishna branch of sort of meditation and yoga teaching.
And the community that her parents belonged to and that she had considerable exposure to as a child was led by a charismatic guru named Chris Butler, who was a former surfer and college dropout who had lived on the streets as a Hare Krishna follower, but then started his own community.
So one of Chris Butler's most adamant views, at least in the 80s and 90s, was an opposition to homosexuality, which he regarded as an abomination, but also to the establishment of rights for gay and lesbian couples. And as a teenager, Tulsi Gabbard found herself on the streets of Honolulu protesting alongside her parents against the establishment of gay marriage rights in Hawaii.
Don't open the door to weird marriages. Don't let homosexuals force their values on the people of Hawaii. Vote yes on the marriage amendment.
And it was in that time when she was very young, I think just 20 or 21 years old, that she and her father simultaneously ran for public office in Hawaii. She was elected to the state legislature and her father was elected as a city councilman initially. So she was in politics. But she decided after 9-11 that she wanted to join the military.
I enlisted in the army because of the horrific terrorist attack on September 11th and volunteered to deploy to Iraq in 2005, where I served in a medical unit.
And she has described this experience of war as transformational in her outlook on the American government, on American power.
I mean, it was something every day that we all experienced firsthand, the terribly high human cost of war. We have to honor our servicemen and women by only sending them on missions that are worthy of their sacrifice.
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Chapter 5: Why did Tulsi Gabbard align with Donald Trump?
She did eventually come back to politics after establishing her military career as a part-time reservist, and she found an opening first on the Honolulu City Council, and then in 2012, a seat in Congress, one of the four that Hawaii has opened up.
I'm Tulsi Gabbard. I approve this message. I'll work to end tax loopholes, end the war in Afghanistan now, protect Medicare and Social Security.
She arrived in Washington, and Nancy Pelosi took her under control. her wing. She was seen as maybe the next Obama, another Hawaiian politician, a woman of color, military career, what's not to like, good speaker, telegenic. Come on, man. And then very quickly, as these things go in Washington, it kind of started to come apart.
Partly, she didn't play the game, and she started to pick fights with the leaders of her party, including Barack Obama, who she called out for not being sufficiently tough on Islamic terrorism.
Our administration refuses to recognize who our enemy is. And unless and until that happens, then it's impossible to come up with a strategy to defeat that enemy. We have to recognize that this is about radical Islam.
So, by the time the 2016 presidential cycle arrived, She was starting to drift away from the party that had embraced her. What you can see by 2016 is the beginnings of what some people have called the horseshoe shape of American political populism, where the farther you go to the left, the closer you get to the MAGA right.
By 2019, she's still a Democrat, and she can be critical of Donald Trump in public.
What is happening right now is a very clear consequence of having a commander in chief who doesn't know what he's doing.
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Chapter 6: What are Tulsi Gabbard's initial tasks as a spy chief?
She was already part of the MAGA conversation. She knew Tucker Carlson went on his show on Fox News, and she won praise from some ardent Trump supporters. in the manosphere and podcasting landscape and so forth. And so she, in 2022, she left the party to become an independent.
I can no longer remain in today's Democratic Party. It's now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.
And in 2024, She campaigned with Donald Trump and then she endorsed him.
I invite you to join me in doing all that we can to save our country and elect President Donald J. Trump and send him back to the White House.
And then finally, toward the end of the campaign, she announced that she was becoming a Republican.
I'm proud to stand here with you today, President Trump, and announce that I'm joining the Republican Party.
Good for her. How does she go from becoming a Republican to becoming one of the most important players in our intelligence community, if not the most important player?
Well, you know, it really is a puzzle because Donald Trump could have nominated her to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs or something, and everyone would have said, oh, what an innovative choice, and she would have gotten confirmed with no difficulty. Instead, he named her the top spy of the U.S. system. Now, She has no experience of these bureaucracies.
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Chapter 7: How does Tulsi Gabbard view U.S.-Russia relations?
She has not been an intelligence analyst or a synthesizer of complicated information. Indeed, a lot of her takes over the years on the foreign policy questions that she was most interested in were a bit garbled or a bit puzzling in different ways. She sometimes aligned herself with misinformation and propaganda that was coming out of Russia or serious dictatorships.
she seemed kind of an uncritical thinker. She clearly had strong policy views, but she would select facts as if she was just cruising the internet and making her arguments out of what she found. And so it left me initially, as I was working on her biography, kind of puzzled, like, why this job? But the answer reveals itself in her own speaking and writing and her own convictions.
And she brought some of this even to her confirmation hearing.
Chuck Schumer admitted a few years ago, quote, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
And so this is, in fact, why Donald Trump, I think,
is attracted to her leadership and why she's aligned with Donald Trump's agenda in the intelligence community, which is that her first job includes carrying out two executive orders that the president signed fairly early on that basically designate the director of national intelligence for a period of a couple or three months to conduct a review of people who are disloyal and to take disciplinary action against them, people who had
quote-unquote weaponized intelligence in the previous administration or who were otherwise unreliable politically. And so she's going to lead that review. And what you can say is that she's motivated to do it. She thinks there is a really deep-seated problem in the intelligence communities that she will now have the power to do something about.
So those are her first tasks from her boss. But obviously a big part of her job will be countering U.S. adversaries. China comes to mind. Russia historically would have come to mind. But what does putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our national intelligence say about Russia? where we're heading with Russia and about what Trump wants to accomplish with Russia.
Well, she never appeared to regard Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the United States. She tended to express herself indirectly about this by criticizing the democratic elites for demonizing Putin. And she would mock them for calling him the new Hitler. And she blamed NATO for provoking Putin.
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