With no one distancing themselves from the pack, the race for Donald Trump’s vice president pick is heating up as we get closer to June. Could former Hawaii U.S. House of Representative Tulsi Gabbard be the 1st woman to successfully run for vice president on a Republican ticket?
At one of the top politics betting sites, BetOnline (find out more with our BetOnline Review), Gabbard has the 5th-best odds (+900) to be Trump’s vice president pick. She trails Doug Burgum (+300), J.D. Vance (+450), Tim Scott (+475), and Marco Rubio (+600).
Gabbard is quite different than that group, and we don’t even mean because she’s a woman.
Gabbard has never run as a Republican before. She was a Democrat and even ran as a Democrat for the 2020 election before dropping out. She has been an independent since 2022, but she has been publicly supporting many Republican candidates in the last few years since her time in Congress for Hawaii ended.
Could she be an unorthodox solution for Trump’s choice of vice president? Let’s look at the unique political profile for Tulsi Gabbard, a potential key figure in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Who Is Tulsi Gabbard?
Tulsi Gabbard is a 43-year-old politician who was born in American Samoa before moving to Hawaii when she was 2 years old. She has Samoan and European ancestry, and she is the 1st Samoan-American to become a voting member in Congress.
Gabbard’s background could not be much different from Trump’s. She attended an all-girls boarding school for 2 years in the Philippines, has been of the Hindu faith since she was a teen, and she has served with the Hawaii Army National Guard, did a 12-month tour in Iraq in 2004, and is currently a lieutenant colonel with a California-based Army Reserve unit.
In the early 2000s, Gabbard dropped out of college to run for political office as a Democrat in Hawaii. At 21 years old, she became the youngest elected legislator in Hawaii history when she joined the Hawaii House of Representatives. Her military service prevented her from running for a 2nd term in 2004.
After a 2nd deployment to the Middle East in 2009, Gabbard ran for a seat on the Honolulu City Council and won by a slim margin. In 2011, she announced her intentions to run for a senate seat in Hawaii and in 2012, she won with 80.6% of the vote to become the 1st Hindu member of Congress.
She was reelected for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th terms in Congress with impressive margins again. She endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in the 2016 election, but he did not receive the party’s nomination.
In 2020, Gabbard became the 1st woman combat veteran to run for president, seeking the Democratic nomination in a crowded field that was eventually won by Joe Biden. Gabbard dropped out of the race in March 2020 and endorsed Biden for the 2020 election.
The Russian Asset Accusations
Even before Gabbard left Congress in January 2021, she was a controversial figure among Democrats as former First Lady and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton accused her of being a “Russian asset” in 2019.
Gabbard filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit against Clinton in January 2020, but it was later dropped. However, it was discovered that an apologist for Russian leader Vladimir Putin was the biggest individual donor to Gabbard’s Hawaii PAC. Gabbard has been outspoken in support of Russian interests before.
Since leaving Congress, Gabbard has done little to shake the “Russian asset” claim. Just as the war between Russia and Ukraine was breaking out in 2022, she was panned for making this tweet that was viewed as a pro-Russia view:
This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) February 24, 2022
Maybe Clinton was on to something all along? But an enemy of Hillary can always be a friend of Trump.
Gabbard’s Move to the Right
In 2022, Gabbard announced she was no longer a member of the Democratic party, changing her registration to an independent. She said on Twitter that the party had become an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.”
I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are… pic.twitter.com/oAuTnxZldf
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 11, 2022
The signs were there as Gabbard was a speaker at CPAC in 2022, a conference that is usually no man’s land for Democrats. She also filled in as a guest host for Tucker Carlson Tonight and became a frequent guest and paid contributor on FOX News, the right-wing news station.
Gabbard also started supporting Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms, including Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who she now contends with for vice president. She also supported Kari Lake in Arizona, a hardcore Trump supporter who may have a few screws loose.
Gabbard may be independent, but she is leaning heavily to the Republicans right now.
Could Trump Work with Gabbard?
On FOX News in March 2024, Gabbard was asked about running as Donald Trump’s vice president. Her response was “I would be honored to serve our country in that way and be in a position to help President Trump.”
Trump reportedly has her on his shortlist. But can they work together with her unique history?
It should be noted that in 2019 during Trump’s 1st impeachment in the House of Representatives, Gabbard only voted “present” as a form of protest vote for the “political zero-sum game.” She did not directly vote to impeach him, and he’ll likely appreciate that.
Gabbard started her political career heavily opposed to gay marriage. She has changed her position a few times depending on where she was in her political career. But after recently supporting the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida that would ban gender and sex talk in schools by citing “woke indoctrinate”, it is safe to say she can flip the switch with ease to align with the Republican’s stance on LGBT issues. She likely has been aligned all along, but you don’t win seats as a Democrat by being against gay marriage.
Gabbard’s New Image
But as a Republican? Gabbard can say just about anything to please Trump, and it would not look out of character for her since she’s left Congress and revamped her image. Democrats like Clinton who never believed she was legitimate in the 1st place can probably only laugh at this point.
Whether she’s a Manchurian candidate and asset for the Russians would definitely be put to the test if she ended up being Trump’s VP pick. But the only time the Republican party ran a woman as vice president was the disastrous choice of former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin by John McCain in 2008.
They may not want to go down that route again, and it’s not like Gabbard is hugely popular with female voters or independents. She received 2 delegates and finished 7th in the Democratic primaries in 2020.
