Tulsi's Holy War

The Director of National Intelligence isn’t just politicizing the spy agencies—she’s turning loyalty to Trump into a matter of faith.

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Earlier this month, the top U.S. intelligence official stood before a partisan crowd and did something no predecessor had ever done.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, didn’t spill secrets. She didn’t brief Americans on global threats or reveal what keeps her up at night. Instead, she fused political retribution with divine purpose, invoking God, praising Trump, and framing his “deep state” enemies as ungodly.

Gabbard’s theocratic remarks on July 12 have gotten little attention, but they are especially alarming as the DNI has escalated her language against Trump’s enemies. On Friday, she accused Obama administration intelligence chiefs of a “treasonous conspiracy” surrounding the 2016 election.

Faith isn’t new in the American intelligence community. CIA Director Bill Colby was known as the “warrior-priest.” Mike Pompeo attended weekly Bible study while at Langley and raised concerns when he invoked God and faith in his first address to employees. However, spy bosses have understood the risks of intertwining religion with national security in full public view. For the most part, they kept their personal beliefs to themselves. Gabbard blew through that unspoken guardrail.

Speaking at Turning Point USA, the nation’s leading conservative youth organization, she vowed to declassify a Biden-era memo she claims directed intelligence agencies to target vaccine-wary parents and others as “domestic violent extremists.”

“Here I am, Lord, send me.”

—Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, invoking Isaiah before a partisan rally

“We have to expose their tactics and the playbook of the deep state so that we, the people, can make sure this never happens again,” the DNI said. “I can attest personally that in my work as the director of national intelligence, the deep state is fighting us every step of the way.”

As DNI, Gabbard is responsible for overseeing the 18 agencies that make up the $100 billion U.S. intelligence community. But this is not impartial oversight—it’s retribution and partisan score-settling.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, condemned Gabbard for “breaking decades of precedent to attack her own workforce and weaponize American intelligence at a political rally.”

But Gabbard was just getting started. Her life’s mission, she said, was to serve “God’s children” and be “pleasing to Him.” She enlisted the cheering crowd to become “joyful warriors,” safe in the knowledge that with God, “all things are possible.”

As I wrote over on SpyTalk, she cast public service—and implicitly, allegiance to Trump—not as a duty grounded in the Constitution or the rule of law, but as a divine calling.

“It is inspired by God's unconditional love that we are charged to live and lead, and serve in a reflection of His love for all of us with this eternal gratitude in our hearts for the blessings and the freedoms that He has and continues to bestow upon every one of us,” she said.

The DNI wasn’t urging her audience to volunteer in soup kitchens or work with disadvantaged children. She was casting the MAGA cause as sacred.

In Gabbard’s telling, by electing Trump, Americans chose to uphold their God-given freedoms: speech, worship, privacy, and the right to bear arms. The “deep state,” by contrast, seeks to strip those blessings away. “The deep state fought so hard to try to stop us from even having the freedom to choose who we wanted as our president and commander-in-chief,” she said. The not-so-subtle implication is that opposing Trump isn’t just unpatriotic. It’s ungodly.

The DNI serves not only as overseer of the intelligence community but as the president’s top intelligence adviser. It’s a job that demands analytical integrity, impartiality, and the courage to speak truth to power. Gabbard must present unvarnished assessments to the president, even when—especially when—they’re politically inconvenient.

A DNI in spiritual battle with the ungodly forces of the “deep state” cannot speak truth to power. That risks further chilling dissent inside the intelligence community, distorting threat assessments, and turning intelligence into a weapon for tribal warfare.

We’ve already seen warning signs. Gabbard fired the heads of an intelligence panel that produced a report that contradicted statements the Trump administration has used to justify deporting Venezuelan immigrants. Trump has made clear he has no interest in intelligence that challenges his views. When told Gabbard’s testimony contradicted his belief that Iran was on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon, he replied, “I don’t care what she said.”

There's a good reason previous intelligence leaders, regardless of their personal beliefs, had kept religion out of their official remarks. When divine sanction enters the national security conversation, accountability and impartiality exit.

If Gabbard believes her actions are “pleasing to Him,” what oversight body can tell her she’s wrong?

It’s true that Gabbard’s faith, like her politics, adapts to her audience. Just months earlier, during a March trip to India, Gabbard described her spiritual grounding in Hinduism: “In the best of times and the worst of times, I turn to the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita,” she said. “They give me strength, peace, and great comfort.”

Gabbard was raised in Hawaii by followers of Chris Butler, a college dropout who formed the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna offshoot that critics and some former members have described as a cult. She has referred to Butler as her “guru dev,” or spiritual master.

But on the stage at Turning Point USA, it wasn’t Krishna she invoked, but the Prophet Isaiah, quoting Biblical scripture she knew her young conservative audience would instantly recognize. When facing a tough day, she said, it becomes an opportunity for her to declare, in the words of Isaiah 6:8, “Here I am, Lord, send me.”

This political shape-shifting is nothing new. Elected to Congress in 2012 at the age of 31, she was hailed as a rising star in the Democratic Party. As the first Hindu in Congress, Gabbard swore the oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita. “The Supreme Lord, Sri Krishna is the reservoir of all happiness,” she said in 2018.

Gabbard has reinvented herself so many times that it’s hard to know which version of her is the real one. Appointed as a DNC vice chair and given a speaking slot at the 2012 convention, she resigned to endorse Bernie Sanders. In 2020, she ran for president, then endorsed Joe Biden after dropping out of the race. Two years later, she left the Democratic Party, denouncing its “anti-white racism” and “cowardly wokeness,” and began campaigning for Republicans. In 2024, she completed her turn to Trump’s GOP by endorsing his presidential bid.

What a difference four years make.

It’s tempting to dismiss Gabbard as an opportunist. She is the ultimate political chameleon: a onetime progressive Democrat who embraced MAGA, Trump, and now Christian nationalist themes.

Telling people what they want to hear has been Gabbard’s political superpower. It may have earned her the job of DNI. But it also makes her a dangerous choice for it.