Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard steps into the intelligence world not as a career spy bureaucrat, but as a combat veteran who’s spent years blasting what she calls “the permanent war machine.” She has built her brand on two things at once: total skepticism of interventionist foreign policy, and total contempt for what she describes as a corrupt security establishment that lies to the public to protect itself.

Her message is blunt: America should defend itself, not wander around the world creating new enemies and pretending that’s “national security.” She’s argued for years that regime-change wars are sold with moral language but end in chaos, dead civilians, broken soldiers, and trillions burned for nothing except contractor profits and D.C. ego.

As Director of National Intelligence, she frames the job as two fights at once. Outward: protect the country, especially from terrorism, cyber operations, and great-power escalation. Inward: force the intelligence community to stop treating the American public like an adversary that needs to be managed. She talks constantly about transparency, declassification, and ending what she calls “weaponized narratives” pushed through the media.

Gabbard also leans into civil liberties in a way that makes traditional national security types grind their teeth. She warns about surveillance creep, politicized intel leaks, and intel agencies being used to frame domestic dissent as threat behavior. She portrays that as un-American and dangerous.

Critics on both sides say she’s naive about adversaries, too trusting of “America First” rhetoric from strongmen overseas, and too eager to assume U.S. agencies are the villain. Her supporters say that’s exactly why she’s there: to break an intel culture that they argue got used to never being told no.

Populist