Tulsi Gabbard and the Art of the Political Grift

Trump's DNI isn’t declassifying the truth — she’s depleting her last shred of credibility.

Sometimes when I sit down to write about a political figure, the process can take anywhere from thirty minutes to fifteen hours. That’s just the writing. The editing? Forget it. Once Grammarly or whatever editing assistant I’m using gets involved, it can turn into a marathon of revisions and rewrites.

But not this time.

Tulsi Gabbard is such a flagrant and well-documented political grifter that I didn’t need a deep dive, a FOIA request, or a late-night research binge to pull this together. She practically grifted the article into existence.

I remember back in 2019 when Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. At the time, I thought, “Damn, that’s harsh.” If you don’t have receipts, why throw out Cold War-level accusations like that? And at first glance, Gabbard looked like a fresh, interesting figure. New to the national scene. Youthful. Charismatic. Photogenic. She had just enough anti-war seasoning to attract disillusioned progressives and a few crossover libertarians. She said all the right things — just enough to be dangerous, never enough to be held accountable.

But the thing about political grifters is that the mask eventually slips. And Tulsi’s mask didn’t just slip — it got caught in the woodchipper of her own contradictions.

Her job now — as Director of National Intelligence — isn’t some noble appointment. It’s her last political hustle. She has burned every bridge she ever stood on. The left doesn’t trust her. The right will tolerate her until she outlives her usefulness, which — judging by how quickly she’s sprinting through MAGA talking points — should be any minute now. Like every attention-starved media shape-shifter before her, she has no core beliefs. She has vibes. And those vibes are “whatever Trump needs me to say right now.”

And right now? He needs her to run cover for his Russia problem. Again.

Gabbard recently declassified what she claims is “bombshell intelligence” proving that the Obama administration staged a coup by rigging the 2017 intelligence assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election. That would be the same assessment affirmed by all major intelligence agencies, validated by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, and reaffirmed under Trump’s own appointees. But that’s the thing about Tulsi — she doesn’t do truth. She does performance.

What she’s engaging in here is a textbook example of post hoc ergo propter hoc—Latin for “after this, therefore because of this.” She’s implying that because the intel assessment came out shortly before Trump took office, and because Trump had a meltdown about it, it must have been part of a coordinated coup. That’s not analysis. That’s astrological thinking with a security clearance.

A Tulsi Gabbard supporter outside the 2019 CNN Democratic presidential debate in Detroit | Susan J. Demas

Even Fox News barely knows what to do with this, which is saying something. Meanwhile, CNN analysts are calling her declassified “revelations” cherry-picked, and intelligence veterans are openly wondering whether she’s deliberately undermining U.S. credibility to score points with a president whose understanding of geopolitics is one half Tom Clancy novel, one half Reddit thread.

And let’s talk about why she’s doing this. Not because she uncovered some shocking new intelligence — what she released has been in Republican talking points since 2017. No, she’s doing it because Trump needed someone to say it. She’s the intel community’s equivalent of a dentist on cable news shilling ivermectin. And like any good grifter, she’s packaging tired lies in shiny new rhetoric, hoping no one notices that the expiration date passed two administrations ago.

This is classic argumentum ad populum — appealing to the MAGA masses by parroting what they want to hear, not what’s true. It’s Trump’s favorite move, now performed by someone with better posture and less visible flop sweat.

And while we’re on the subject of performative garbage, we need to talk about how this whole “deep state Obama coup” farce is functioning as a shield — a perfectly timed distraction just as Trump’s Justice Department is meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell for the second time under partial immunity. That’s right — some of the same MAGA dead-enders who want you to believe Gabbard’s recycled talking points are groundbreaking truth-telling are also out here treating a convicted child sex trafficker like she’s Joan of Arc.

Let’s not sugarcoat this: Anyone helping draw attention away from Ghislaine Maxwell is protecting a sex offender. Period. There is nothing redeemable about Maxwell. There is no “deeper truth” she’s being persecuted for. She trafficked children for a billionaire predator and partied with half of Washington and Wall Street while doing it. And Tulsi Gabbard, knowingly or not, is giving her cover by flooding the media cycle with a flaming pile of Russia-gate revisionism soaked in gasoline and wrapped in a MAGA flag.

And here’s the part that really lets the air out of Tulsi’s whole performance: even some of the MAGA-adjacent manosphere brocasters — you know, the guys who think podcasting is a personality and masculinity is a brand — are starting to side-eye the bullshit. When Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz start raising eyebrows about this being a distraction tactic, it’s not because they’ve suddenly developed a moral compass. It’s because the grift is too obvious even for them to ride without getting meme burn.

These are guys who believe being skeptical of everything except testosterone supplements and conspiracy theories makes them intellectuals. They spend half their shows laughing about how dumb liberals are and the other half arguing that maybe we need strongmen after all — but even they are looking at Tulsi’s intel cosplay and going, “Wait … this feels like a fake story inside another fake story.”

They’re not brave. They’re brand managers. And if Gabbard’s performance is so transparent that even the shirtless motivational speakers of YouTube are backing away slowly, that’s your sign this charade is in its final act.

If that sounds harsh, good. It’s supposed to. Gabbard is a special kind of bullshit artist—cool under pressure, unfazed on camera, and fully aware of the performance she’s putting on. Unlike some of Trump’s other cable news liabilities (looking at you, Pam Bondi), Gabbard rarely flinches. She knows how to hold a poker face while gaslighting an entire press pool. But don’t mistake that composure for credibility. A liar with good posture is still a liar.

And folks in her home state of Hawaii? They’ve been calling this out for years. Long before she was running interference for a man who hoards classified documents like Pokémon cards, Hawaii reporters were documenting her ideological shape-shifting, performative centrism, and calculated breaks with the Democratic Party. They knew the grift before it went national.

And it is a grift. All of it. She sued Hillary Clinton for defamation, dropped the suit quietly when it wasn’t winning her any delegates, then did an ideological backflip straight into the arms of the people who once called her a terrorist sympathizer. This isn’t policy evolution. This is Benedict Arnold meets QVC.

And like all grifters, she’ll eventually overstay her welcome. The MAGA base is already wired for betrayal narratives. She’s useful now, because she’s reading from the right cue cards. But the minute she deviates — or God forbid, reminds them she’s not actually white — they’ll toss her in the same pile as every other Trump staffer who went from “truth-teller” to “deep state traitor” in under a week.

So enjoy this last political con job, Tulsi. Because the grift only works until the rubes get bored, or until someone shinier shows up. You can ride the wave of outrage for a while. You might even score a book deal. But make no mistake: this is your last act. And it’s not a triumph. It’s a cautionary tale.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Read the original column here.

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