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Tulsi Gabbard may be the biggest loser from Matt Gaetz' nomination imploding [1]

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Date: 2024-11-26  

Most of us experienced a fair amount of Schaedenfreude when Rep. Matt Gaetz was forced to give up his bid to become Donald Trump’s attorney general. We all knew that Trump intends to use his second term to gain revenge against those who—horrors!—tried to hold him to account over the years. He wants the Justice Department to be his primary agent in that mission, and Gaetz seemed made to order for that task.

On the face of it, the spectacular implosion of Gaetz’s nomination makes him last week’s biggest loser. But as I note on my Substack, someone else may wind up a bigger loser than Gaetz in the long run. Namely, Tulsi Gabbard. After morphing from progressive Democrat to MAGA darling, Gabbard was richly rewarded with a nomination as Director of National Intelligence. Never mind that she is at best a useful idiot for the Kremlin, and is a bit too cozy for comfort with dictators. However, I believe that with Gaetz out of the way, Gabbard could be in for a well-deserved rough ride in the Senate.

How’s that, you ask? Well, conventional wisdom held that as noxious as Trump’s nominees have been, we couldn’t go nucular on all of them. Supposedly, with most of the attention focused on Trump’s two most offensive nominees, Gaetz and Robert Kennedy Jr. tying up the oxygen, Gabbard and others could slip through the cracks.

But that assumed Gaetz would actually get a hearing. However, four or five Repubs (depending on the source) publicly declared they wouldn’t vote for him, and several other Repubs were privately skittish about him at best. NBC reported that close to half of the Senate GOP was wary about voting for him, while North Dakota’s Kevin Cramer told The New York Times that several of his colleagues weren’t just “no,” but “’hell no’” on his nomination. With those numbers, it was clear Gaetz’s nomination was DOA.

That’s really bad news for Gabbard. She already faced bipartisan concern over her willingness to parrot Russian propaganda. Indeed, when Russian state media got footage of her repeating Kremlin BS, it used Gabbard’s comments as evidence that they were the ones telling the truth. That’s a big reason why Russian state media danced a jig at Gabbard’s nomination—not something you want to see.

Gabbard may also have to explain her willingness to defend another thug, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. I had long thought Gabbard’s championing of Wikileaks as an agent of “necessary change” was the moment that she hit bottom; she’s been dead to me since that moment. But apparently she did far worse far earlier. In 2015, while then-Rep. Gabbard was on a fact-finding trip to Syria in the early days of its civil war, she actually had the nerve to ask three girls who had been burned by an Assad air strike if ISIS had attacked them. This was one of many pieces of disinformation from Damascus that has Middle East Institute fellow Charles Lister nervous about Gabbard becoming DNI.

Gabbard’s tendency to give succor to disinformation has triggered bipartisan opposition to her nomination. But until Gaetz imploded, it didn’t look like she’d get the full-on grilling she deserved. Now, without Gaetz as insulation, she might be asking for it in the Senate. And I suspect she may lose another piece of insulation before January in Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth. In case you missed it, Hegseth was investigated in 2017 for sexual misconduct—and paid hush money to his accuser.

For more on why I think Gabbard ought to be quaking in her boots, check out my Substack, Loud, Liberal, Christian. If it’s in your budget, consider a paid subscription; it helps support my work, especially since I’m trying to make more money from my writing now that I’ve moved.

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