Former Democratic presidential candidate and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has had an unpredictable political career.But ending up as President Donald Trumps director of national intelligence was still, to many, a surprising twist.Gabbard has never worked in the intelligence bureaucracy. But her skepticism of US foreign intervention, forged during National Guard deployments overseas, and her distrust of the deep state make her a natural choice for a White House that wants to rein in US military operations worldwide and radically shrink the federal government.Gabbard was a rising star in the Democratic Party for much of the 2010s, going from a featured speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention to a long-shot presidential candidate in 2020. Eventually she broke with the party establishment over policy positions on Syria and Russia, first endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, then leaving the party altogether in 2022, to finally endorsing Trump and joining the Republican Party in 2024.Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with the Economists senior editor Steve Coll about Gabbards long, strange trip, from growing up in a spiritual community in Hawaii, to her military deployment to Iraq, to her tumultuous time on the national political stage. Coll has written a long profile of Gabbard, and has published many books about US intelligence and foreign policy, including Ghost Wars, The Bin Ladens, and Directorate S.Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Theres much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.Steve, America has a new spy chief. What makes Tulsi Gabbard different from, say, all the ones that preceded her?Many things, actually. She is an unorthodox choice in part because she doesnt have any direct experience in the intelligence world, and in part because of her unorthodox views about American power in the world and the deep state.I think youre being gentle and nice about it. Some people out there think that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian operative. Well, that is a charge thats been leveled against her. She once sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million for saying something along those lines. I think that goes too far. [S]hes aligned with Donald Trumps agenda...to conduct a review of people who are disloyal and to take disciplinary action against them.But she has expressed sympathy for Putins dilemma and for dictators like Bashar al-Assad, the former dictator of Syria. She has called for a pardon for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal surveillance of Americans. She sounds more like a progressive politician sometimes than an establishment spy chief. And I think she would say thats the point we need a different perspective on top of the American intelligence system.It sounds worth better understanding how an overhauled intelligence chief might further change our relationship with Russia. So lets better understand Tulsi Gabbard. Where does she get her start?She grew up in Hawaii in somewhat unusual circumstances. Her parents were members of a religious community called the Science of Identity Foundation, which was derived from the Hare Krishna branch of meditation and yoga teaching. The community that her parents belonged to and that she had considerable exposure to as a child was led by a charismatic guru named Chris Butler, who was a former surfer and college dropout who had lived on the streets as a Hare Krishna follower, but then started his own community. Some of its former members have described it as a cult. They have described him as an authoritarian figure and that he was worshiped to the extent that people prostrated themselves when he came into the room or regarded his food scraps as relics.And how does she get into politics?Her parents created a path into politics when she was a young woman. One of Chris Butlers most adamant views, at least in the 80s and 90s, was an opposition to homosexuality, which he regarded as an abomination, and also to the establishment of rights for gay and lesbian couples. And as a teenager, Tulsi Gabbard found herself on the streets of Honolulu protesting alongside her parents against the establishment of gay marriage rights in Hawaii. It was in that time when she was very young, just 20 or 21 years old, that she and her father simultaneously ran for public office in Hawaii. She was elected to the state legislature and her father was elected as a city councilman initially. Then 9/11 happened. She decided after 9/11 that she wanted to join the military. She initially joined the Hawaii National Guard, and then she was deployed to Iraq and went to a base north of Baghdad in 2005. Insurgency was all around them. She has described this experience of war as transformational in her outlook on the American government, on American power. She eventually became a lieutenant colonel who became disillusioned by the wars that America fought after 9/11, particularly, in her case, Iraq. She did eventually come back to politics, first on the Honolulu City Council. And then, in 2012, a seat in Congress, one of the four that Hawaii has, opened up. She won the Democratic primary and she was immediately embraced by the national Democratic Party. At the Democratic convention that summer, they gave Tulsi Gabbard a coveted speaking spot. She arrived in Washington and [then-House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi took her under her wing. She was seen as maybe the next Obama, another Hawaiian politician, a woman of color, military career whats not to like? Good speaker, telegenic. Then very quickly, as these things go in Washington, it started to come apart. Partly, she didnt play the game. And she started to pick fights with leaders of her party, including Barack Obama, who she called out for not being sufficiently tough on Islamic terrorism. And so by the time the 2016 presidential cycle arrived, she was starting to drift away from the party that had embraced her. She decided to resign from the Democratic National Committee and to endorse Bernie Sanders for the 2016 campaign. And that decision just kept pulling her to the left of the party. What you can see by 2016 is the beginnings of what some people have called the horseshoe shape of American political populism, where the farther you go to the left, the closer you get to the MAGA right.It feels like a progression a lot of American voters have gone on, where they voted for Obama and then they moved toward Bernie and then they ended up voting for Donald Trump a couple of times.Yes, thats absolutely right. By 2019, shes still a Democrat and she can be critical of Donald Trump in public, although she met with him in the fall of 2016 after he was elected, when he was auditioning members of his first administration. In any event, she was already part of the MAGA conversation. She knew Tucker Carlson, went on his show on Fox News, and she won praise from some ardent Trump supporters in the manosphere and podcasting landscape and so forth. Nonetheless, she stayed in the Democratic Party with the ambition that she then exhibited in 2019, which was to run for president as an heir to the Bernie wing of the party. And she really had a rough time of it. She never came out of single digits. She wasnt really able to raise much money. She was attacked by Hillary Clinton and others as being a tool of foreign powers. And after that she paused her own campaign and endorsed Joe Biden. But she was clearly no longer interested in the partys leadership, and they were no longer interested in her, a relatively short time after her being such a rising star. How does she go from becoming a Republican to becoming one of the most important players in our intelligence community, if not the most important player? Well, you know, it really is a puzzle, because Donald Trump could have nominated her to be secretary of Veterans Affairs or something, and everyone would have said, What an innovative choice! And she would have gotten confirmed with no difficulty. Instead, he named her the top spy of the US system. As director of national intelligence, she has two jobs. One is to edit and filter what secret information the president and his top Cabinet gets every morning. Thats the most important part of the job. The second, also important, part is that she oversees the 18 sprawling American spy agencies from the CIA to the eavesdropping National Security Agency to others. She sets strategy, kibitzes about their budgets, and otherwise sets a direction for the intelligence community. She has no experience of these bureaucracies. She has not been an intelligence analyst. Indeed, a lot of her takes over the years on the foreign policy questions that she was most interested in were a bit garbled or a bit puzzling in different ways. She sometimes aligned herself with misinformation and propaganda that was coming out of Russia or Syrias dictatorship. She seemed an uncritical thinker. She clearly had strong policy views, but she would select facts as if she was just cruising the internet and making her arguments out of what she found. So it left me initially, as I was working on her biography, puzzled. Like, why this job? But the answer reveals itself in her own speaking and writing and her own convictions. And she brought some of this even to her confirmation hearing.And so this is, in fact, why Donald Trump, I think, is attracted to her leadership and why shes aligned with Donald Trumps agenda in the intelligence community, which is that her first job includes carrying out two executive orders that the president signed fairly early on that basically designate the director of national intelligence for a period of a couple or three months to conduct a review of people who are disloyal and to take disciplinary action against them, people who had weaponized intelligence in the previous administration or who were otherwise unreliable politically. Shes going to lead that review. And what you can say is that shes motivated to do it. She thinks there is a really deep-seated problem in the intelligence communities that she will now have the power to do something about.So those are her first tasks from her boss. But obviously a big part of her job will be countering US adversaries. China comes to mind. Russia historically would have come to mind. But what does putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our national intelligence say about where were heading with Russia and about what Trump wants to accomplish with Russia?Well, she never appeared to regard Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the United States. She tended to express herself indirectly about this by criticizing the Democratic elites for demonizing Putin. She would mock them for calling him the new Hitler. She blamed NATO for provoking Putin. So in that sense, she was aligned with President Trumps assessments of Putin as someone he could do business with, someone he should try to do business with. Perhaps there are people around President Trump who see grand strategy in this. They might say that US policy has driven Russia and China closely together, complicating Americas great power position, and that the US has to pull one of those two away, and Russias the better choice. That seems to be the hypothesis that has brought hawks and noninterventionists together in this early period of the Trump administration. But for Tulsi Gabbard, I dont hear anything on the chessboard like that. I think she just has an instinct that the elites have gotten it all wrong and that Vladimir Putin has been unfairly maligned.See More: