Tulsi Gabbard is the director of national intelligence, tasked with overseeing the many intelligence agencies in the US. Although she tried desperately to suck up to Trump when it became clear that he was not happy with her for some reason, it was not enough for her to keep her job and today Trump fired her. You can read the twists and turns of her weird political journey here, where, like so many others, she sacrificed what she said were her strong principles in order to kowtow to Trump.
As usual, this kind of news is released on a Friday evening in the hope that most people will not be paying attention.
The White House forced Gabbard to resign, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a source familiar with the issue. Fox News was first to report Gabbard’s exit, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Trump was asking cabinet members last month whether he should replace Gabbard, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
…Gabbard already seemed marginalized last June, when Trump endorsed Israel’s decision to attack Iran before the US joined the war by ordering the bombing of the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities.
The decision was a public repudiation of Gabbard’s earlier testimony on Capitol Hill that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Trump seemed to add insult to injury by declaring he did not care what she said, and dismissing her assessment as “wrong”.
Within weeks, Gabbard made a public effort to get back into the president’s good graces by calling for Barack Obama and several top national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted, alleging that they had conducted a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely depict Russia as interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s side.
She is the fourth woman that Trump has fired, following Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
The big mystery is how FBI director Kash Patel still has a job. Patel is an incompetent grifter and clown. He should thank his lucky stars that he is male, since Trump seems to give men more leeway.
Patel may come to envy Gabbard, since she reached her exit from office without (known) scandals or indictable crimes.
Kash Patel is a master of shamelessness, blame-deflecting, and obsequious toadying. The fact that he’s male does help, though that might be partly or completely canceled out by being non-white. Having the slightest bit of integrity or openly displaying independent thought gets you kicked out eventually, even if said integrity or independent thought falls in line with general conservative ideology. As long as he doesn’t screw that up, I expect he’ll ride out the term.
As for Tulsi Gabbard, she’s a very strange person… but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there was little to no corruption (and if there was a little bit of corruption, it might have been purely out of ignorance) and nothing truly scandal-worthy during her stint at DNI, just the usual level of incompetence. She doesn’t strike me as a grifter, just an honest but ambitious idiot.
Every one of his cabinet is impeachable and casually fireable just on the surface of what they do. In his past administration, he did a lot of firing some of it just for the lulz. So you have hit the nail on the head: they have assigned XX chromosomes to her.