Tulsi Gabbard Endorses Trump For President and is Set to Be Named Honorary Co-chair of His Transition Team
- The first Hindu American to serve in Congress, and a National Guard veteran, she has been helping the GOP presidential candidate prepare for his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Former Hawaii Congresswoman and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential bid. The first Hindu American in Congress and a National Guard veteran, announced on Aug. 26 at a National Guard Association gathering in Michigan. Trump “understands the grave responsibility that a president and commander in chief bears for every single one of our lives,” she said at the gathering.
The Michigan event marked the third anniversary of the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, “which killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 100 Afghans,” The Associated Press reported.
Along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Gabbard will be named honorary co-chair of Trump’s presidential transition team, the New York Times reported.
Before the Michigan event, Gabbard accompanied Trump to Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president laid wreaths in honor of three of the slain service members — Sgt. Nicole Gee, Staff Sgt. Darin Hoover and Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss. Gabbard is a National Guard veteran and has served two tours of duty in the Middle East before representing Hawaii in the U.S. House. She will be a guest moderator for Trump at his campaign town hall in Wisconsin on Aug. 29.
The AP notes that Gabbard’s endorsement “comes days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his independent White House bid and backed Trump, which the former president’s campaign touted as a significant development in battleground states.”
Speaking on Fox News, Gabbard told Laura Ingraham that she endorsed Trump because as commander-in-chief, he “values every single one of our lives” and has “the strength and the courage to exercise all means of diplomacy, meeting with dictators, allies, adversaries, partners in the pursuit of peace, recognizing that war is always and should always be a last resort.” While Trump has “proven that he is that commander-in-chief, Kamala Harris has proven she is not,” she added. “We are closer to the brink of nuclear war now than ever before, closer to World War III because of Harris and Biden and their policies.”
The news of the endorsement got a lot of traction on social media. “Bashar al-Assad blew up my parents’ home with a tank while they were still inside,” a user named ShadiaMartini wrote. “When I spoke out, he put out a warrant for my arrest. To see Tulsi Gabbard, an Assad cheerleader, celebrated by the right isn’t just disturbing — it’s sickening.”
Gabbard left the Democratic party in 2021 accusing it of being “under complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism.” But she has “long signaled some level of support for Trump, even while she sat in the U.S. House as a Democrat,” according to the AP. An outspoken critic of aid to Ukraine and U.S. military interventions overseas and has “often shared Trump’s approach toward the world in his post-presidency,” The Washington Post said. In 2019, she was the only lawmaker to vote “present” when the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his dealings with Ukraine.
Gabbard, who was briefly considered to be Donald Trump’s running mate, has been helping Trump prepare for his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The New York Times noted she was roped in the help Trump with the debate “partly because of her own performance in a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate” when she and Harris had “a memorable onstage encounter.” Additional “key qualities” she brings, The Times mentioned are that she’s “a woman, at a moment when Trump is for a second time facing a woman as his general election rival; and she’s a former House member, giving her policy experience.”
During the 2019 debate, Gabbard said Harris “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” the Associated Press reported at the time. She further accused Harris of having “blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so.” In her response on the debate stage, Harris attempted to dismiss Gabbard, saying, “I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches, or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor, but actually doing the work.” Gabbard later told the Associated Press that she was “surprised at how unprepared she was to respond to them. Just from, you know, I would imagine that you’d prepare before going into a debate,” she added. “And also that she made no attempt to deny them or frankly justify them if she was proud of those decisions.”
Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee spokesperson Alexis Floyd, told The Hill in a statement that both Gabbard and Trump have a lot in common. “They have both earned the praises of white supremacists and other extremists, celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and campaigned for dangerous election deniers,” the statement read. “Rather than focusing on earning the support of hardworking Americans, Trump is more fixated on winning the backing of extremists like Gabbard and RFK Jr. — and they’ll do nothing but weigh down his sinking ship of a campaign.”
(Top photo: Screenshot)