The Ballad of Tulsi Gabbard: Spy Chief and Shapeshifter

By the time the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, the whole thing had started to feel like some kind of hallucinatory fever dream, like watching a room full of lobotomized weasels cheerfully set the house on fire.

There she was, standing at the podium, sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi, a woman whose qualifications for America’s top law enforcement job include being famous for refusing to prosecute Trump in Florida and a stint as a Fox News talking head. But Bondi wasn’t the story. The story was Tulsi, the strange, slithering political chameleon who had just been handed the keys to America’s entire intelligence apparatus, despite having about as much experience in espionage as a guy who binge-watches Jason Bourne movies.

Tulsi, the former anti-war Democrat, the one-time Bernie Sanders ally, the isolationist MAGA nationalist, the Hindu supremacist with ties to a bizarre cult, the Assad apologist, the Snowden defender-turned-sellout, the fierce critic of the CIA who now runs it. The shapeshifter. The contradiction.

How did we get here? How did Tulsi Gabbard go from the edges of left-wing politics to the highest echelons of Trump’s right-wing power structure?

The answer is both obvious and grotesque: because in 2025, nothing makes sense anymore.

The Many Lives of Tulsi Gabbard: A Political Acid Trip in Reverse

To understand Tulsi Gabbard is to understand political opportunism in its purest, most distilled form.

She started as a social conservative in Hawaii, born into the Science of Identity Foundation, a shadowy offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement that preaches a mix of Hindu nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and deep, festering Islamophobia. The group’s leader, Chris Butler, has been described as a paranoid, power-hungry guru who controls his followers with cult-like discipline.

Tulsi was one of those followers. She opposed gay rights, abortion, and everything else that smelled vaguely progressive. Then, as she climbed the political ladder, she shed her old skin and rebranded herself—first as a moderate Democrat, then as a progressive. She backed Bernie in 2016, quit the DNC in a fury, and started ranting about the "rigged system."

That’s when the Steve Bannons of the world started paying attention.

Trumpism, at its core, isn’t about ideology—it’s about hatred of the establishment, hatred of expertise, hatred of the carefully controlled “rules” of Washington. Tulsi fit right in, because like Trump, her only real conviction was her conviction that she was meant for power.

She cozied up to Modi’s Hindu nationalist regime, she flew to Syria to meet with Assad, she parroted Russian talking points about Ukraine, she called Snowden a hero—and then, the moment Trump handed her a job, she backtracked and said he "broke the law."

She is not a politician—she is a machine built for survival.

Now, she’s running America’s spy agencies, even though she’s never spent a day in one, and the people whose job it is to vet these things know she’s a security risk in high heels. But none of that matters. Because this isn’t about national security. It’s about loyalty.

The Democrats Bungle the Fight: Attacking the Wrong Thing, Like Always

If the Democrats were a real opposition party, they would have hammered Gabbard for her long history of Islamophobia, her support for genocidal regimes, her connections to a cult, her deep-seated authoritarian tendencies.

But instead, they decided to attack her over Edward Snowden—a man who, inconveniently, was right about everything.

The argument was so stupid it bordered on performance art. Senate Democrats, led by the utterly uninspiring Michael Bennet, spent most of Gabbard’s confirmation hearings trying to get her to denounce Snowden as a traitor—because, apparently, defending the National Security Agency’s illegal mass surveillance program is what passes for Democratic “resistance” in 2025.

Gabbard, being Gabbard, refused to answer. Because she never answers anything directly. She just smiles, dodges, and moves on to the next grift.

And just like that, the Democrats handed her an easy win. Instead of exposing her as an unhinged, right-wing zealot with a deeply disturbing past, they let her play the righteous outsider, the same game Trump plays so well.

It was a textbook case of how Democrats keep losing to Trumpism. They pick the wrong battles, fight them in the wrong way, and end up strengthening the very people they’re trying to defeat.

And so, Tulsi was confirmed.

Mitch McConnell’s Pathetic, Inevitable Fall

The only Republican who voted against Gabbard was Mitch McConnell, which was about as impactful as an old turtle throwing a tantrum at a rave.

McConnell’s downfall is poetic justice of the highest order. He spent his entire career rigging the system for Republicans, packing the courts, protecting Trump, enabling fascism—and now, his own party won’t even listen to him.

He could have ended Trump in 2021—all he had to do was whip a few extra votes for impeachment, and Trump would have been permanently banned from office. But he flinched. He thought he could outmaneuver the monster he helped create.

Now, he’s powerless. His old colleagues fear Trump more than they respect him, and when he tried to block Tulsi, not a single one of them stood with him.

If the McConnell of 2016 had been watching the McConnell of 2025, he probably would have called for his own resignation.

Welcome to the Madness: Gabbard is in Charge of Spying on You Now

So now, we live in a country where Tulsi Gabbard—Islamophobe, authoritarian, cult-adjacent political con artist—oversees all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies.

She now controls a $100 billion budget, has access to the deepest secrets of the American empire, and answers only to Donald Trump—a man who, at this point, is basically a vengeful old game show host with nukes.

It didn’t have to be this way. But this is what happens when a country lets its institutions rot from the inside out.

Trump and his goons aren’t geniuses—they’re just ruthless, shameless, and willing to bulldoze through a system that was never designed to stop people like them.

And now, we get to watch the **slow-motion collapse of American intelligence under the leadership of a woman who once said that Assad "wasn’t the enemy" and that Snowden was a hero, then wasn’t, then was, then wasn’t again.

The shapeshifter is in charge now. Sleep tight, America.