Tulsi Gabbard's transition from Democrat to high-profile role with Trump's 2024 campaign team
Tulsi Gabbard, who once ran for president as a Democrat, is taking on a prominent role as part of former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign team.
On Thursday, she will moderate what Trump's campaign is calling a "town hall" with him when he visits La Crosse in battleground Wisconsin.
Gabbard publicly endorsed Trump on stage in Michigan earlier this week, and joined his presidential transition team along with fellow former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"This administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before," Gabbard said. "This is one of the main reasons why I'm committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House, where he can, once again, serve us as our commander in chief."
Trump called Gabbard an "amazing person" and that he looked forward to working with her.
Gabbard, a military veteran who represented Hawaii in Congress for eight years, has also been aiding Trump as he prepares for his first debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10. Gabbard debated Harris and President Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, and made headlines at the time for taking aim at Harris' record as a prosecutor.
Since leaving the Democratic Party in 2022 to register as an independent, Gabbard's adopted several views that align with those held by Trump and his Republican allies.
That includes opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders; criticism of the criminal indictments against Trump; and statements railing against the so-called deep state and "woke" ideologies of the Democratic Party.
Gabbard, an anti-interventionist when it comes to foreign policy, has accused President Joe Biden's administration of stoking tensions around the globe -- describing Democrats as a "cabal of warmongers" when she became an independent.
"This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia's border," she wrote of the Russia-Ukraine war on X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022.
She also shared false information alleging U.S. involvement in Ukraine biological weapons laboratories. Her comments received pushback from the likes of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican, who described her comments as "treasonous lies" that were "parroting false Russian propaganda."
The State Department, around the time such claims were being spread, said the Kremlin was intentionally proliferating "outright lies that the United States and Ukraine are conducting chemical and biological weapons activities in Ukraine."
The year Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard made multiple appearances on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox to discuss the conflict, clips of which were aired on Russian-state media.
After leaving the Democratic Party, she campaigned for election-deniers in the 2022 midterm cycle, including Arizona's Kari Lake and New Hampshire's Don Bolduc -- both of whom were defeated.
During an event for Bolduc, she compared President Biden (who she endorsed in the 2020 primary after bowing out of the race) to Adolf Hitler.
In 2023 comments to Fox's Jesse Watters, Gabbard continued to make comparisons to Hitler as she said Biden and the party's focus on diversity was similar to the "geneticist core principles embodied by Nazism and Adolf Hitler."
More recently, she's accused Biden of weaponizing law enforcement to go after his political opponent after Trump was indicted on federal charges stemming from his handling of classified material and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) earlier this year, she suggested, like many Republicans have, that the criminal charges against Trump were an effort to interfere in the 2024 election.
"The Democrat elite and their cronies are using our criminal justice system to prosecute and distract the Republican presidential candidate in the midst of his campaign," she said.
After Biden dropped out of the race, Gabbard turned her focus toward Harris -- though asserted a larger "deep state" was at work in the federal government.
"Biden's out, Kamala is in. Don't be fooled: policies won't change. Just like Biden wasn't the one calling the shots, Kamala Harris won't be either. She is the new figurehead for the deep state and the maidservant of Hillary Clinton, queen of the cabal of warmongers. They will continue their efforts to engulf the world in war and taking away our liberty," Gabbard claimed on X.
