Tulsi Gabbard has the most to lose from Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth running aground in the Senate

With Gaetz no longer taking up oxygen, it's becoming more likely that Gabbard will be in for tough sledding in the Senate--a prospect which would zoom exponentially if Hegseth tanks as well.

Tulsi Gabbard at a Turning Point Action event in Detroit (image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)

On the surface, Matt Gaetz was the biggest loser of the week in politics. When Donald Trump tapped him as his nominee for attorney general, it was clear that Trump intended Gaetz to be his hired gun in his campaign of retribution against those who had the temerity to do their jobs and attempt to hold him to account over the years. But Gaetz was forced to withdraw his bid when it became apparent his nomination faced a humiliating defeat in the Senate.

In the wake of a House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz alleging that the now-former congressman from the Florida Panhandle had engaged in staggering misconduct—possibly criminal—NBC News reported that at least five Republicans had already decided to vote against Gaetz on the Senate floor. The New York Times put the number of hard nays at four.

While it was beyond dispute that Gaetz had lost more than the three Republican votes he could afford to lose if he wanted to be confirmed, both outlets reported that a number of Republicans had already quietly decided to reject Gaetz’ nomination. NBC reported that anywhere from 20 to 30 Republicans—close to half of the Senate GOP caucus—had serious misgivings about voting for Gaetz, while North Dakota’s Kevin Cramer told the Old Grey Lady that enough of his colleagues were “a ‘hell no’” on Gaetz to put his nomination on life support.

Apparently Gaetz was banking on Trump’s sans-culottes bludgeoning Republican Senators into line much like they bullied his House colleagues into opposing Trump’s second impeachment. That’s the only way to explain why he resigned his safer-than-safe House seat shortly after breezing to a fifth term. Now he has no intention of running in the special election for his own vacancy, and the near-certainty that the full Ethics report will be leaked could potentially kibosh his rumored run for governor in 2026 before it starts.

By any standard, Gaetz is now the definition of a dead loser. But believe it or not, one of Trump’s nominees may have lost a lot more than Gaetz. Namely, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, newly minted Republican Tulsi Gabbard. How’s that, you ask? Well, with attention no longer focused on Gaetz, Gabbard could potentially be in for a rough ride when her nomination comes before the Senate. And said ride could get even rougher given the increasing likelihood that Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth’s bid to become secretary of defense will implode before January.

Conventional wisdom in the immediate wake of Trump’s impending return to the White House held that the Democrats as well as the few Republicans who still have spines couldn’t go DEFCON 1 on all of Trump’s nominations. As Chris Cilizza put it, “If all you do is yell, you lose your voice.” But that assumed Gaetz would last long enough to get a hearing. As we now know, his nomination didn’t even last for a week.

All of this probably ought to have Gabbard quaking in her boots. After all, with Gaetz no longer tying up most of the available oxygen, Gabbard is likely to face a lot of time in the barrel. When Trump announced her as his pick for intelligence chief, officials across the spectrum were alarmed that Trump would even consider picking someone who is at best—AT BEST—a useful idiot for Russia. While no evidence has emerged that she has collaborated with Russian intelligence, her willingness to parrot Kremlin propaganda is reason enough to raise concerns about her fitness for the post.

For instance, while most of us see Ukraine as fighting for its freedom against Russian aggression, Gabbard would have us believe that the United States and NATO caused the war by pushing for Ukraine to join NATO and ignoring Russia’s “legitimate security concerns.” She has also claimed the Biden administration operated secret biological research labs in Ukraine that were capable of releasing dangerous pathogens.

According to The Times, she really started aping Russian propaganda during her stints as a guest and frequent guest host on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Russian state media frequently picked up Gabbard’s comments, especially when she parroted their own propaganda. Putin’s media mavens then used it to bolster their claims that they were the ones telling the truth—classic astroturfing. Small wonder that Russian state media danced a jig when Gabbard was nominated.

When American adversaries are cheering a president’s pick for his administration, that’s a bad look, to put it mildly. But that may not be Gabbard’s worst moment. According to The Independent of the UK, that came while Gabbard was still representing Hawaii outside of Honolulu’s inner ring in Congress. In 2015, while on a fact-finding mission to Syria in the early days of the Syrian civil war, Gabbard spoke with three girls who had been horribly burned in an airstrike by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Gabbard actually had the gall to ask them if ISIS had bombed them. This question was so appalling that the girls’ translator, pro-democracy activist Mouaz Moustafa, didn’t even translate it. He knew ISIS had never got his hands on jets, and was certain Gabbard knew it as well. He later admitted that he deliberately mistranslated Gabbard’s questions because he wanted to “get these girls away from this devil.”

I had initially thought Gabbard had bottomed out when she claimed WikiLeaks “spurred some necessary change”—and its willingness to expose innocent third parties to identity theft be hanged. She’s been dead to me ever since. Indeed, I decided then and there I could not even consider supporting her then-bid for president, and would even consider voting third-party in the off-chance she got the Democratic nomination. But it turns out that she revealed herself as morally bankrupt long before then—when she had the nerve to suggest that three teenage girls were lying when they claimed their own government attacked them.

This was one of many times in which Gabbard parroted pro-Assad propaganda. Middle East Institute fellow Charles Lister spent many years debunking this and other claptrap Gabbard promoted. He told The Independent that Gabbard’s willingness to deny Assad’s butchery of his own people made the prospect of her becoming intelligence chief “genuinely alarming.” Lister added that Gabbard’s views on that war sounded like something you’d see from “Assad’s personal office, or Teheran or Moscow—not Washington.” To put it mildly, that isn’t something you want to see from the person responsible for advising the president on intelligence matters. One of my close friends suggested that Gabbard was the most dangerous Trump nominee—even more so than Gaetz or Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Suddenly, that assessment looks rather kind.

And yet, it was entirely possible that Gabbard might escape tough questioning for her willingness to coddle some of the worst people in the world simply because Gaetz, Hegseth and possibly RFK Jr. would tie up most of the Democrats’ ire. Now that Gaetz is out of the picture, it’s more likely that Gabbard will face a full accounting for this line.

The chances of Gabbard getting a full-on grilling zoomed exponentially with the prospect that at least one other Trump nominee might not last until January. In case you missed it, Trump’s transition team got word that Hegseth was investigated for sexual misconduct in Monterey, California in 2017. The allegation was concerning enough that White House Chief of Staff-in-waiting Susie Wiles and Trump’s lawyers summoned Hegseth for a meeting. According to Vanity Fair, Hegseth maintained the affair was consensual. But Hegseth’s version became far less credible when it emerged he’d paid his accuser hush money—after denying he’d done so. It’s hard for me to see any scenario in which Hegseth survives at this point, and it’s at best 50-50 whether he’ll even be in the picture by the time the new Republican-controlled Senate convenes. It’s hard to believe that Hegseth, who retired as a major in the Minnesota Army National Guard, doesn’t know that security clearances get denied for far less than this.

Reading a report by The Washington Post on Trump’s approach to filling his second administration, it’s surprising that more land mines haven’t gone off besides Gaetz and Hegseth. Trump hasn’t relied on the FBI to vet potential appointees, even those whose jobs involve matters of national security. Instead, he has relied on his campaign lawyers to vet appointees when he conducts any vetting at all. That probably explains why Hegseth’s sexual misconduct case broadsided the transition team. And it may also explain why Trump had no qualms about picking Gabbard despite the well-documented concerns about her willingness to give succor to conspiracy theories.

Gabbard has undergone one of the most opportunistic political morphs I’ve ever seen. When she left the Democratic Party, her idea of being “independent minded” meant endorsing MAGA Republicans and chest-beating election deniers. While in Congress she blasted Trump for being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” not once, but twice, by 2024 she sounded like a dark-skinned version of Laura Ingraham or Marjorie Taylor Greene. That opportunism may have seemingly gotten her well rewarded with the prospect of being the first person of color to be the nation’s intelligence chief. But now that she has lost one piece of insulation and is likely to lose another, it may well come back to bite her. And it will be well deserved.

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