Tulsi Gabbard
Tulsi Gabbard is a former Democratic congresswoman turned Trump-aligned Republican who broke every mold Washington had, and keeps breaking new ones as U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
Who Is Tulsi Gabbard?
Tulsi Gabbard was born on April 12, 1981, in Leloaloa, American Samoa, and raised in Hawaii. She made history in 2012 as the first Hindu elected to the U.S. Congress and the first Samoan-American voting member of the House of Representatives. She served four terms representing Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district before running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
After years of friction with the Democratic Party establishment, she famously sued Hillary Clinton for defamation and clashed openly with party leadership over foreign policy, Gabbard left the Democrats in October 2022 and joined the Republican Party. That pivot landed her in Donald Trump’s orbit, and in 2025 she was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in the Trump administration, one of the most powerful intelligence roles in the U.S. government.
She is a U.S. Army Reserve officer who served combat tours in Iraq and Kuwait, which gave her outsized credibility on national security issues, and an outsider’s willingness to challenge Pentagon orthodoxy. That combination of military service, spiritual practice, and sharp ideological zigzagging makes her one of the most Googled political figures in America.
Her public persona is visually distinctive: she almost always appears in white clothing and has a signature streak of lighter hair, both of which have sparked relentless online curiosity. Add in two marriages, a well-documented Hindu faith, and a role at the center of U.S. intelligence, and it’s easy to see why the questions never stop.