Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, stayed loyal to Donald Trump until the end – and nurtured the president’s grievances against his political enemies. Last year, she accused Barack Obama and several of his top national security officials of leading a “treasonous conspiracy” to highlight Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In January, Gabbard showed up at the scene of an FBI raid in Georgia where officials sought ballots from the 2020 election, even though her role is mainly focused on foreign intelligence.
On Friday, Gabbard submitted her resignation to Trump, saying she would leave her post on 30 June, so she could support her husband after he was recently diagnosed with cancer. News reports quickly emerged that the White House had forced Gabbard to resign. The Guardian reported last month that Trump had privately asked cabinet members whether he should replace her from the post that oversees 18 US intelligence agencies.
Despite her loyalty and attempts to cozy up to Trump by promoting his conspiracy theories about past elections, Gabbard was undone by her resistance to US foreign interventions and regime-change wars. She repeatedly drew Trump’s anger for her handling of intelligence around Iran’s nuclear program and capabilities. Last June, when Trump supported Israel’s surprise attack against Tehran before Washington briefly joined the 12-day war by bombing several of Iran’s nuclear facilities, he pressured Gabbard to change her assessment of how close Iran was to producing a bomb.
In January, as Trump’s national security team finalized its plan to depose and abduct Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and bring him to New York to stand trial, Gabbard was excluded from the planning, reportedly because of her past opposition to US operations aimed at regime change. Around that time, Gabbard posted photos on Instagram of herself practicing yoga on a beach in Hawaii, where she had lived before moving to Washington. (“My heart is filled with gratitude, aloha, and peace,” she wrote.)
By late February, when Trump launched a new US-Israeli war against Iran, Gabbard was still largely sidelined from the most senior levels of American policymaking that would normally include someone in her role. She was kept out of White House planning meetings and absent from most of the administration briefings to Congress on the conflict. In March, one of Gabbard’s top aides, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a longtime Trump supporter, publicly resigned in protest of the Iran war.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter, which was widely shared on social media. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent’s resignation stunned the Trump administration and it left Gabbard even more isolated within the president’s orbit for her anti-interventionist views. Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and his top advisers pitched him to a war-weary American public as the “candidate of peace”, who would end global conflicts that started under Joe Biden’s administration, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza. “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Trump declared in his election victory speech in November 2024.
But Trump abandoned that pledge soon after he returned to office, as he ordered the US military to bomb seven countries last year: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Venezuela. On 28 February, Trump launched his joint war with Israel against Iran, which spiraled into a regional conflagration as Tehran retaliated against US military bases and other targets across the Middle East. Iran also closed off the strait of Hormuz, through which more than a fifth of the world’s oil supply passed each day, raising gas prices for Americans and disrupting the global economy. The US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on 8 April, but negotiations for a more permanent truce have been deadlocked – and Trump has repeatedly threatened to restart the war.
Throughout her time as one of his top advisers, Gabbard has been an inconvenient reminder that Trump – the “America first” president who built his brand on opposing foreign military interventions – unleashed a war that so far has failed to topple the Islamic regime that took power after Iran’s 1979 revolution. And Trump’s deceitful case for waging war against Iran echoes past US conflicts started by his predecessors, especially the manipulated intelligence that George W Bush used to justify the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
Since last June, Trump and other US officials have variously claimed that Iran was weeks (or months) away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb. “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon,” Trump said during a meeting with congressional leaders in March.
But the UN’s nuclear watchdog and independent experts, along with US intelligence officials, repeatedly said that while Tehran had increased its supply of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade, there was no evidence it had taken steps to actually produce a weapon. In March 2025, Gabbard testified to Congress that US intelligence agencies continued “to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. She added that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader at the time, “has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”. (Khamenei was assassinated by a US-Israeli attack on 28 February, and Iranian officials quickly installed his son Mojtaba as the new supreme leader.)
Gabbard’s testimony last year was in line with most US intelligence assessments that Iran was not racing to build a bomb. But she also noted that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was “at its highest levels” and “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons”. That part of the Iran crisis was largely instigated by Trump, who during his first term unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal that had been negotiated in 2015 among Tehran and six world powers. In 2018, Trump tore up the agreement brokered by the Obama administration and reimposed US sanctions that crippled the Iranian economy.
The 2015 deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium at low levels, enough to operate power plants but not to produce nuclear weapons. After Trump backed out of the agreement and the Biden administration could not strike a new deal, Iran began to enrich uranium up to 60% purity – not far from the 90% level required for a nuclear device.
Aside from Gabbard’s testimony, other US intelligence assessments last year found that Iran was up to three years away from being able to develop a nuclear warhead and deploy it on a missile. But Trump was furious last June after reporters asked him about Gabbard’s earlier testimony to Congress, which cast doubt on his claims that Iran was close to producing a weapon. “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one,” Trump told reporters on 16 June, days before he ordered a US attack on Iran’s major nuclear facilities.
Under pressure from Trump, Gabbard changed her tune and declared that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon “within weeks to months”.
By that point, she had seemingly lost Trump’s confidence and within months, he began musing about replacing her. In the end, Gabbard could not overcome working for a boss who demands absolute loyalty, but offers little of it in return.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University
