Do we like Tulsi Gabbard?
Our score: 4 out of 10. Real good sits beside real harm: military service and a 2019 apology on one side, biolab claims rated false and a part in the Fulton election raid on the other.
Gabbard was born in American Samoa and moved to Hawaii as a toddler, then was homeschooled for most of high school. She won a seat in the state legislature at 21 and enlisted in the Hawaii Army National Guard, deploying to Iraq as a medical specialist in 2004 to 2005 and to Kuwait in 2008. Congress came in 2012, and she became the youngest force in her party's anti-war corner.
The part she'd rather you forgot: in her twenties she campaigned against same-sex marriage with a group her father founded. In 2019 she put out a video saying her views had changed, and that denying LGBTQ people basic rights means “denying their humanity.” She says serving in Iraq and Kuwait started the shift, which is a fair account of a real turnaround, even if some LGBTQ+ readers will want to see more than a video.
Her politics then went on a long walk. She quit as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to back Bernie Sanders, ran for president in 2020 on an anti-war platform, then left the party in 2022, saying it was run by “an elitist cabal of warmongers, driven by cowardly wokeness”. She signed on as a Fox News contributor, endorsed Trump, and later ran his intelligence agencies.
Now the harm check. In March 2022 she posted a video claiming there were 25 to 30 US-funded biolabs in Ukraine researching deadly pathogens, and PolitiFact rated the claims false: the US funds threat-reduction programs there, not secret weapons labs. Mitt Romney accused her of “parroting false Russian propaganda”, and she hit back that he should resign. Her defenders say she was asking about real, acknowledged labs; the reporting says her sources only confirmed those.
She went back to it on the way out. In June 2026 her office released documents on US funding for more than 120 labs in over 30 countries, and Ukraine's Foreign Ministry called the allegations baseless. Conservative activist Laura Loomer accused her of “directly peddling Russian government propaganda”, and Russia's foreign ministry spokesperson welcomed the release. That is a strange fan club for a US spy chief.
The year's other stoush was Fulton County. Gabbard turned up at the FBI's January 2026 search of an election office, and said in a letter that Trump personally directed her to observe it and that she did not interfere. Democrats questioned whether it strayed into domestic law enforcement. Separately, an intelligence whistleblower alleged she withheld intelligence for political reasons, and Democrats called for her to resign. She has denied it, and no finding is on the record in what we read.