DO NOT INVITE: Why Donald Trump offboarded Tulsi Gabbard

That another Donnie angel would be cast out of St PETERSBURG – the nickname for the Washington swamp around Donald Trump that is the living embodiment of the Peter’s Principle – was inevitable. The only question was who? The smart money was on either Kash Patel, whose self-aggrandising behaviour had started to grate on the self-aggrandiser-in-chief, or Tulsi Gabbard, whose anti-war stance was increasingly at odds with the Trump administration’s moves. Turns out, it was the honorary desi who went first as Gabbard, an avid surfer, found herself offboarded.Now her departure was inevitable, with aides openly joking that DNI, the acronym for Director of National Intelligence, ought to stand for Do Not Invite.Since Trump came to power, the administration has walked back on every MAGA promise made during election season. China was supposed to be contained, but Beijing is now flexing its muscles more than ever. Instead of stopping America from playing global policeman, Uncle Sam is involved in direct conflicts with numerous foreign powers and indirect ones with its own allies. The Russia-Ukraine war shows no signs of abating. And the idea of peace in the Middle East lies in such pieces that the conflict has expanded from Israel vs Axis of Resistance to engulf the entire region, rattle global markets, and remind the world that Iran can play gatekeeper for global energy needs by strengthening its hand over the Strait of Hormuz.The gulf between Trump’s actions and Gabbard’s worldview made the latter’s position untenable. Perhaps her fate was sealed last June when, less than two weeks before Operation Midnight Hammer, she posted a video in which she said “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers”. The post appeared shortly before the US struck Iran’s nuclear sites in an operation almost borrowed from the plot of Top Gun: Maverick.While the official reason for her departure is her husband’s bone cancer diagnosis, numerous reports state that Gabbard was pressured to depart, with White House officials increasingly unhappy with her actions.Tulsi, who shares her name with the protagonist of a wildly popular Indian family TV series, has had a rather improbable American political journey.From Hawaii’s strange ideological archipelago, where she grew up around the Science of Identity Foundation, a little-known spiritual movement with Hare Krishna roots and a history of controversy, to the Iraq war, where she served in uniform and built the veteran’s authority that would later inoculate her against the usual charges of armchair anti-interventionism. She entered Congress as the first Hindu member of the House, carried the Bhagavad Gita into her swearing-in, surfed through Democratic politics with the serenity of someone who looked as if she had been assembled by a casting director for “post-partisan America”, and then gradually revealed herself to be something far harder to classify: socially slippery, foreign-policy heretical, gun-toting enough to unsettle liberals, anti-war enough to unsettle hawks, and anti-woke enough to charm the right. She was ambitious enough to understand that in American politics, the fastest route from obscurity to mythology is to become impossible to place.Gabbard resigned as DNC vice-chair in 2016 when she accused the party of gaming the system against Bernie Sanders to favour Hillary Clinton. She also earned major MAGA brownie points for her criticism of the Obama-era investigation into Russiagate and her dismantling of Kamala Harris in the 2019 DNC debate. In time, Trump would handpick her for the Director of National Intelligence role and pay her the highest epithet that can exist in MAGAland: “She’s like hotter than everybody.”Despite the title of Director of National Intelligence, the role is less powerful than it sounds and largely requires one to coordinate America’s intelligence community and brief the president on what goes on in the agencies. Gabbard entered that job with an unusual handicap: she was not an intelligence lifer, had little institutional support inside the world she was supposed to run, and arrived with a long record that made both Democrats and old-school security hawks suspicious of her judgement. As Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer, explained to the Washington Post: “She had no role anymore. If you don’t have the president’s ear, if you don’t have his trust, you can’t be effective. That’s intel chief 101 in Washington.” All of Washington’s intelligence agencies have their tricks, and the DNI’s are coordination, access and trust. With Trump marching to his own tune, the role became redundant.Gabbard was selected for her non-interventionist America First ideology, and those instincts were at odds with Trump’s actions in Iran and Venezuela. According to a CNN report, when Trump’s national security team hobnobbed at Mar-a-Lago to watch US operations in Venezuela, Gabbard was miles away in Hawaii.Even inside the intelligence world, things were hardly smooth. Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe reportedly had a fraught relationship, with Gabbard feeling Ratcliffe was going around her directly to the president. She became isolated even inside her own office, surrounding herself with a small circle of advisers. In Washington, that is rarely a sign of strength. It is usually the moment when the music has stopped and the character has not yet realised there is no chair left.Earlier, Joe Kent, another Trump appointee, resigned as head of the National Counterterrorism Center. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, another Gabbard ally, also stepped down, thinning the anti-war coalition within MAGA.For better or worse, one of the planks in MAGA that brought many disparate conservatives together was their anti-war plank. The likes of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard and the America First wing had convinced themselves, thanks to the actions of Trump 1.0, that the Bush-Cheney ghost wandering in the Republican Party would finally be buried.Carlson was the loudest of the lot, framing the Iran escalation not as an American war but as someone else’s war being billed to America. “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war,” he said, a line that captured the deepest fear of the anti-war right: that America First had once again become Israel First with better branding.Bannon’s warning was less moral and more political. “We can’t do this again. We’ll tear the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq,” he said, speaking for the MAGA faction that believed Trump’s mandate was to close the imperial tab, not open a new one.Kent turned dissent into resignation. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” he wrote, making him the rare Trump official who did not just grumble from the sidelines but walked out of the machinery itself.The problem was that Trump’s anti-war rhetoric was always more instinct than doctrine. He hated Iraq because it looked foolish, Afghanistan because it ended in humiliation, and “endless wars” because they made America look like a country that could neither win nor leave. As evidenced by the messaging from the White House, Trump likes the idea of war and winning, often sharing videos of enemies being bombed.While the others who were anti-war were outside the establishment, Gabbard was very much part of Trumpworld.During his reality TV days, Trump loved to say, “You’re fired,” and these days the phrase seems reserved mostly for people with XX chromosomes. Gabbard is the fourth and perhaps the highest-profile woman appointee to leave Trump’s Cabinet.Kristi Noem, as head of Homeland Security, bore the brunt of the administration’s ham-handed immigration crackdown and the broader chaos around DHS. Her $220 million border-security advertising campaign featuring herself did not help her cause. Trump told Reuters he had not signed off on it: “I never knew anything about it.” In a White House where only one person is allowed to be the face of power, Noem had become a branding problem.Attorney General Pam Bondi’s fall was about the Epstein files and Trump’s revenge machine. The Epstein issue had become radioactive inside MAGA because the base expected revelation, not redaction. Bondi had helped raise expectations, but what followed was confusion, disappointment and a sense among Trump loyalists that the great unmasking had somehow turned into bureaucratic fog. At the same time, Trump reportedly felt she was not moving quickly enough to prosecute critics and adversaries whom he wanted to face criminal charges. In Trumpworld, loyalty is never enough if it does not produce punishment. Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s departure was less ideological and more scandal-driven. She resigned as Labor Secretary amid misconduct allegations and questions about her leadership of the department. The official language around exits in Washington is always soft. People pursue private opportunities, spend time with family, or seek new challenges. But the message was simple: she had become more trouble than she was worth.Gabbard’s exit belongs to a fourth category. Noem failed the optics test, Bondi the revenge-delivery test, Chavez-DeRemer the scandal-survival test, and Gabbard the obedience test.Despite all this, there are numerous members of the Cabinet with XY chromosomes who are sticking by despite failures, controversies and public embarrassments. That does not mean every woman left for the same reason. It means Trump’s court has a familiar rhythm: women are useful as symbols until they become liabilities, and once they become liabilities, they rarely get the same long rope as the men.Perhaps the failure of the entire experiment was summed up in a jibe from Iran, which has really upped its meme game amid the war with Israel and America. Writing from its embassy account in Armenia, it wished Gabbard’s husband a “swift and complete” recovery, praised her for “speaking truths about Iran that Trump hated”, and said it was a pity that she worked for a government which had “sidelined America” and become “a proxy for Israel”.It was a brutal little diplomatic garland, delivered with the precision of a soap-opera twist. Tulsi Gabbard, who shares her name with Indian television’s most famous bahu, learned the hard way that in a Washington family drama, the patriarch is always right, dissent is betrayal, and even the favourite daughter-in-law can be written out between episodes.Kyunki DNI bhi kabhi invited thi.