Behind Tulsi Gabbard’s Exit: How Trump’s Spy Chief Was Slowly Pushed To The Margins

Last Updated:May 25, 2026, 14:04 IST

Gabbard’s tenure was marked by growing tensions over Iran, clashes with intelligence establishment and an increasingly visible exclusion from Trump’s core decision-making circle.

When Tulsi Gabbard resigned as America’s Director of National Intelligence on Friday, the official reason was personal: her husband’s diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer.

But behind the personal reason for her exit lay a larger political story, one that reflected the growing disconnect between Gabbard’s anti-war worldview and the direction of Trump’s administration.

Gabbard entered the administration as an outsider who had built her political identity around opposing regime-change wars, attacking the Washington establishment, and warning against American military intervention overseas. Yet she eventually found herself serving as intelligence chief during some of Trump’s most aggressive military actions — including operations involving Iran and Venezuela — while reportedly being excluded from many of the decisions shaping them.

By the final months of her tenure, the contradiction had become difficult to ignore. On paper, Gabbard oversaw all 18 US intelligence agencies. In practice, many of the administration’s most consequential national security decisions appeared to be made without her.

Unusual Choice For Intelligence Chief

Gabbard was never a conventional intelligence chief.

A former Democratic congresswoman from Hawai’i, Army reservist, and the first Hindu elected to the US Congress, she spent years positioning herself against bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington.

She opposed the Obama administration’s Syria policy, criticised prolonged US military interventions abroad, and in 2020 condemned Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani as “unconstitutional" and a “dangerous escalation".

Her political shift began during the Biden years, when she increasingly broke with Democrats over issues ranging from Ukraine to identity politics and foreign intervention. In 2022, she formally left the Democratic Party, accusing it of being controlled by an “elitist cabal of warmongers".

Over the next two years, Gabbard reinvented herself within conservative media circles, emerging as one of the most visible anti-interventionist voices aligned with Trump’s “America First" movement. She formally joined the Republican Party and endorsed Trump in 2024, a political and ideological shift that ultimately brought her into his administration.

For Trump, who had long accused sections of the intelligence establishment of working against him, Gabbard offered something valuable: outsider credibility. She openly criticised the so-called “deep state", distrusted parts of the national security bureaucracy, and came without longstanding institutional loyalties to the intelligence community.

But the very positions that made her politically useful would later place her increasingly out of sync with the administration’s evolving foreign policy posture.

How Did Iran Become The Biggest Turning Point In Her Tenure?

The Iran conflict exposed perhaps the clearest divide between Gabbard’s worldview and the administration she served.

Before Trump moved ahead with strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in 2025, Gabbard drew backlash inside the administration after posting a video warning that the world was “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before".

According to CNN, the remarks angered Trump and White House officials.

CNN also reported that before the strikes, Trump directly asked Gabbard whether she would resign if he moved ahead with military action against Iran. She reportedly assured him she would stay.

The divide widened further in March 2025, when Gabbard testified before Congress that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, directly contradicting claims being advanced by several US and Israeli officials at the time.

Trump publicly dismissed her assessment. “She’s wrong," he said days before launching missile strikes against Iran.

The fallout appeared to deepen her exclusion from the administration’s inner decision-making structure. According to CNN, Trump increasingly relied on a smaller national security circle centred around CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine during the Iran and Venezuela operations.

Losing Influence Inside The Administration

As disagreements over foreign policy deepened, reports of internal friction around Gabbard also began surfacing more frequently.

Her relationship with the CIA became particularly strained.

According to CNN, Gabbard believed CIA Director Ratcliffe was bypassing her and communicating directly with Trump on key matters. She also reportedly objected to CIA officers being part of her security detail because she did not trust the agency.

Her office denied broader claims of distrust, insisting she remained grateful to her protective team. But tensions inside the intelligence establishment appeared difficult to conceal.

Her relationship with the wider intelligence community was markedly strained, with several staffing changes inside her office and repeated clashes with both the FBI and the CIA over jurisdiction and oversight. Her decision to move production of parts of the President’s Daily Brief away from the CIA to her own office proved especially contentious.

Politically too, Gabbard appeared increasingly out of step with some of the administration’s more hawkish voices. A New York Times report said she was closer to Vice President JD Vance’s more restrained foreign policy instincts, while figures such as Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller pushed for a tougher strategic posture.

Why Gabbard Shifted Focus From Foreign Policy To Trump’s Internal Battles

As her role in major foreign policy and military decisions appeared to shrink, Gabbard increasingly took on issues closely aligned with Trump’s domestic political priorities, particularly his long-running attacks on the intelligence establishment and claims surrounding past elections.

She declassified documents linked to the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election to help Trump, arguing that the Obama administration had “manufactured" evidence against him. She also revoked the security clearances of dozens of national security officials connected to earlier Russia-related investigations.

Her involvement in a ballot-related FBI operation in Fulton County, Georgia, generated even greater controversy.

The Director of National Intelligence traditionally oversees foreign intelligence coordination, not domestic law enforcement activity. Yet Gabbard was physically present when FBI agents executed a search warrant linked to 2020 election ballots. She later told congressional intelligence committees that Trump himself had requested her presence at the scene.

CNN reported that while there, Gabbard even put Trump on the phone with some of the FBI agents involved in the operation.

The episode alarmed several former intelligence officials, who warned that her involvement risked weakening long-standing safeguards meant to keep US intelligence agencies separate from domestic political investigations.

Did Tulsi Gabbard Ultimately Change, Or Did Washington Change Her?

One of the most striking aspects of Gabbard’s tenure is how dramatically her political identity evolved after entering government.

The politician who once condemned military escalation against Iran ultimately found herself defending presidential war powers during a conflict involving the same country.

The anti-establishment critic who built her brand attacking the intelligence apparatus ended her tenure presiding over it, while struggling to meaningfully reshape it.

That contradiction increasingly fuelled the perception that Gabbard had been brought into the administration less to direct foreign policy and more to politically reinforce Trump’s distrust of the intelligence establishment.

For a time, the arrangement worked for both sides.

Trump gained an outsider figure who challenged the credibility of institutions he viewed with suspicion. Gabbard gained a powerful platform at the centre of national security policymaking.

But once the administration moved deeper into military confrontation abroad, the ideological overlap that had initially united them began to fracture.

By the end of her tenure, Trump still appeared to personally like Gabbard. After her resignation, he praised her publicly and said she had done an “incredible job".

Yet the larger reality surrounding her time in office had become increasingly difficult to ignore: one of Washington’s most prominent anti-war political figures had spent much of her final months in government watching America’s biggest national security decisions unfold from the sidelines.

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