It’s not just that Gabbard is no conservative. It’s that, when it comes to preserving America’s national interests abroad, Gabbard reliably lines up in opposition.
I understand that the New Right favors the maximalization of transgression over ideological consistency and, therefore, has a soft spot for former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. I get that they may believe that bringing her aboard the Trump campaign appeals to its most transgressive elements – after all, she dismantled Kamala Harris during a debate, although that effect was limited to Democrats paying attention to and participating in a Democratic primary. But that is all that I find comprehensible in the news that Gabbard will serve in an advisory role to the former Republican president, as reported by the New York Times.
According to a quote provided by Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, the former president “does not need traditional debate prep.” He’s just that good. Still, Trump “will continue to meet with respected policy advisers and effective communicators like Tulsi Gabbard, who successfully dominated Kamala Harris on the debate stage in 2020.”
Indeed, the Trump camp seems to remember only that Gabbard “dominated Kamala Harris,” but they don’t quite recall how she did it. If the Republican presidential ticket were to adapt Gabbard’s strategy — in which the former congresswoman castigated Harris for putting too many people in jail for quality-of-life violations and fighting to “keep a cash bail system in place” — it would conflict with Trump’s claim that he, unlike Democrats, will not coddle criminals.
If the benefits of Gabbard’s association with the Trump campaign are hard to discern, the reputational costs are not. It’s not just that Gabbard is no conservative. It’s not merely that Gabbard is no Republican. It’s that, when it comes to preserving America’s national interests abroad, Gabbard reliably lines up in opposition.
Following in the footsteps of Nancy Pelosi, Gabbard offered herself up as a propaganda coup for the aptly nicknamed “butcher of Damascus,” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, only to land a critique of her domestic political opponents. There, she lent legitimacy to a Baathist regime that was slaughtering its citizens wholesale (occasionally, with chemical weapons) while propping up the nascent ISIS caliphate. “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” she told MSNBC in 2017. To the best of my knowledge, Gabbard has still not seen convincing evidence of Assad’s complicity in war crimes. She’d have to start looking for them first.
When Gabbard isn’t defending the blood-soaked Assad regime, if only out of admiration for its anti-Western posture, she was propagandizing on Vladimir Putin’s behalf. “Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria,” she said. “Putin did.” That was, at the time, a restatement of Moscow’s claim that all anti-Assad rebels — reformers and Islamists alike — were criminals and terrorists. It was a false justification for Russia’s support of Assad’s crimes against humanity, including the bombing of hospitals and maternity wards and providing air support for starvation campaigns targeting entire cities. Gabbard regurgitated it uncritically.
Gabbard positions herself as constitutionally anti-war. But, in practice, she is anti-war only if it’s the West and its partners who are defending themselves. America’s anti-democratic peer competitors, its rogue state enemies, and the constellation of terrorist groups in orbit around them all can act with impunity against their enemies. It seems that it is only when the forces of democracy strike back that Gabbard evinces the “anti-imperialism” she claims to advocate. It’s only when the West stands athwart the expansionist ambitions of its enemies that she becomes concerned by the risk of a global conflagration. It’s not the aggression that’s the problem; it’s America’s response to aggression that is wholly intolerable.
Years ago, I wrote that Gabbard’s reliable oikophobia would remind voters what a far-left foreign policy really looks like, and not in a way that reflects poorly on the party she abandoned over its failure to cede U.S. interests overseas to its competitors. The Trump campaign has shown me how wrong I was.