Tulsi Gabbard and the Grift of a Thousand Faces

The ideological shapeshifting, MAGA survivalism, and anti-war branding that's defined the exhausting political career of someone who's treated principles like interchangeable Halloween costumes.

When you take a good hard look at Donald Trump’s Cabinet, one thing becomes abundantly clear very quickly: there is no shortage of grifters.

Pam Bondi spent years as Florida’s attorney general, a supposed law-and-order conservative, only to transform into Trump’s personal shield-bearer as his second attorney general during his second non-consecutive term — dropping investigations, bending the Justice Department into a loyalty operation, and proving beyond any reasonable doubt that her entire prosecutorial career was just a warm-up act for becoming the most expensive yes-woman in Washington.

Pete Hegseth sold himself to the American public as a warrior-patriot who would restore toughness and discipline to a military he claimed had gone soft — conveniently ignoring the sexual assault allegation hanging over his confirmation — and has since spent his tenure purging generals, tanking morale, and leaking classified war plans into a Signal group chat that included a journalist. The grift was competence cosplay.

There’s RFK Jr., who built a decades-long brand as the fearless independent crusader against corporate medicine and government health agencies, only to hand Trump complete control of the entire public health apparatus and sit there quietly while they gutted the CDC and FDA. The man who spent years warning you that the government would poison you is now the government poisoning you.

And then there is Tulsi Gabbard. I will be honest with you — and honestly, that is sort of the whole point of this newsletter — Tulsi Gabbard’s brand of grift is so exhausting and so transparent that I genuinely struggle to justify spending real intellectual energy reverse-engineering how her brain works. I seriously doubt this one is going to be long. Before I go any further, I want to say plainly and without any hedging whatsoever: I wish her husband Abraham a full recovery. A rare bone cancer diagnosis is devastating, and no amount of political disagreement changes that. But here at The Thinking Class, we call a thing a thing. And Tulsi Gabbard is a thing that needs to be called. So let’s be efficient about it.

To understand why Tulsi’s grift is uniquely cynical, it helps to look at someone like Marco Rubio first. Rubio is a grifter, no question. But at least he started off as a standard-issue Republican. When Trump came along and humiliated him on a national debate stage, calling him Little Marco until the nickname stuck like a tattoo, Rubio made a cold and rational calculation: if he wanted to maintain and extend his political career, he needed to hop on the MAGA train, because switching parties was never going to be an option. No Democrat was ever going to vote for Marco Rubio. His grift was survivalism. Ugly, yes. Cowardly, absolutely. But at least there was an internal logic to it.

Tulsi, however, is a different animal entirely. Her big national introduction was as a Democrat — anti-war, anti-establishment, the woman who dramatically resigned from the DNC to endorse Bernie Sanders, who went to Syria and met with Bashar al-Assad like she was running her own foreign policy operation, who sold actual “NO WAR WITH IRAN” t-shirts during the 2020 Democratic primary. She knew what MAGA was. She watched it up close. And she chose to step into that universe anyway, eyes wide open, which makes her grift not survivalism but something far more cynical. It is premeditated ideological abandonment dressed up as political evolution.

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But here is the thing — and this is what makes Tulsi’s ideological wardrobe changes particularly rich — the Democrat chapter was not even the beginning of the story. Before she was a progressive hero, she was working for her father’s anti-gay organization, which mobilized to pass a same-sex marriage ban in Hawaii and promoted conversion therapy. Her father, Mike, ran a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality and hosted an anti-gay radio show called, Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii — and young Tulsi was right there beside him, proudly touting that work on the campaign trail when she ran for the state legislature in 2002.

Then, once elected, she testified at a 2004 hearing against a civil unions bill and called anyone who saw a difference between civil unions and same-sex marriage “dishonest, cowardly and extremely disrespectful” — and for good measure referred to LGBTQ advocates as “a small number of homosexual extremists.” Then, when she ran for president in 2020 and all of this resurfaced, she released a video apology saying her views had “changed significantly.” Then she left the Democratic Party. Then she became an independent. Then she became a Republican. The woman has cycled through more ideological identities than most people cycle through streaming subscriptions, and with about as much genuine commitment.

What is remarkable is that grift appears to run in the family. Her father, Mike, the man who ran Stop Promoting Homosexuality and Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii, eventually left the Republican Party and became a Democrat himself. So the apple did not fall far from the tree — it just rolled in a different direction and kept rolling until nobody could track it anymore.

The woman was never cut out for American politics — and not for the reason you might think. It is not because she cannot lie. She can lie just fine; she passes that particular entrance exam with flying colors. The problem with Tulsi has always been that her lies never stayed consistent. From the moment she entered public life to the moment she submitted her resignation letter this week, the story kept changing. The positions kept shifting. The principles kept evaporating. Most successful grifters at least maintain the internal consistency of the con. Tulsi could not even manage that.

And resign from what, exactly? Oh right — as Director of National Intelligence. It is genuinely very easy to forget what her actual job was. And putting her name in the same sentence as the word “intelligence” has always carried a certain oxymoronic energy. But here we are, or rather, here we were.

The record of her tenure, such as it is, reads like a case study in irrelevance. She was quickly seen as ineffectual and out of place, conspicuously absent from both the administration’s public messaging on the Iran war and from the behind-the-scenes deliberations — which is a remarkable achievement for the person whose literal job is to be in the room when intelligence matters. Her own top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned in protest over the Iran war and said publicly that Iran posed no imminent threat. Gabbard’s response was so spineless that even MAGA commentators called it pathetic. She could not bring herself to endorse the war. She could not bring herself to oppose it. She just kind of stood there, warming a chair, which is apparently what the Director of National Intelligence does now.

When she finally did show up somewhere, it was at an FBI raid on a Fulton County election facility in Georgia — not because the DNI has any business being at a domestic law enforcement action, but apparently to “observe” and, in her own words, “say thank you to the FBI agents.” Trump himself later said he did not know why she was there. That is a remarkable sentence. The President of the United States did not know why his Director of National Intelligence showed up to an FBI raid. And yet somehow this was not the most embarrassing moment of her tenure.

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That honor belongs to the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March, where Senator Jon Ossoff told her directly — “False. You’re evading a question because a candid statement would contradict the White House.” And she just sat there. The woman who used to sell anti-war t-shirts could not muster a single coherent sentence about whether the war her boss started was legal or constitutional. Trump was reportedly so annoyed with her that he polled Cabinet members on whether to fire her. Let that land for a second: the most loyal-to-a-fault Cabinet in modern American history was quietly taking a vote on whether to show her the door.

Now, according to Gabbard, she is resigning because her husband Abraham has been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. And the timing of these things, as it so often goes with this crowd, is just always interesting. And again — a rare bone cancer diagnosis is serious, and we genuinely wish Abraham well. But these MAGAs have spent the last several years giving the rest of us every reason to question everything, even the things that deserve basic human decency and the benefit of the doubt. That is the corrosive gift they keep on giving — they have made skepticism the only rational default. So here we are, extending genuine sympathy and genuine side-eye simultaneously, which is an uncomfortable place to live and entirely their fault for putting us here.

Tulsi Gabbard came into the national conversation as an anti-gay activist’s dutiful daughter, reinvented herself as a progressive Democrat with a conscience, pivoted to independent truth-teller, then to MAGA loyalist, then to the nation’s top intelligence official, and is now exiting stage left just before the walls fully close in. Whatever you call that arc, intelligence is definitely not the right word for it.