May 22, 2026
Tulsi Gabbard is out. After a controversial 15-month stint, she just resigned as President Trump’s director of national intelligence.
This is another important Cabinet-level job that will be vacant at a time when the United States is involved in a war with Iran and, of course, as tensions with China continue. The DNI is the head of all the U.S. government intelligence agencies. This is a critical role, especially since intelligence gathering plays an important part in U.S. national security, not only within the borders of the United States but protecting us from threats around the world.
Gabbard submitted this resignation letter to the president this morning, saying she’s leaving because of her husband’s bone cancer diagnosis.
Now, what’s interesting about Tulsi Gabbard is before she joined the Trump administration, she was a House representative for the state of Hawaii and a Democrat. In fact, she ran to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. She served in the National Guard and was deployed to Iraq. During her time in the House and as she ran for president, she was veheently opposed to foreign intervention by the United States and was certainly against the United States starting foreign wars.
While she didn’t say it in her resignation letter, it’s pretty clear having that anti-war position became a very difficult thing for Gabbard to sustain, especially since her boss, President Trump, launched that operation in Venezuela and this war with Iran. But reported tensions between the Trump administration and Gabbard started long before this war.
In March of 2025, Gabbard testified under oath in front of Congress saying, according to the intelligence agencies she oversees, Iran was not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. Trump lashed out, saying, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having a weapon.”
And then in June of 2025, Gabbard posted this video to her social media page that reportedly enraged President Trump.
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After that, we didn’t see Gabbard very much, unlike other Cabinet secretaries like Pete Hegseth or Scott Bessent, who we see all the time. But Gabbard tried to get back in Trump’s good graces. She released a report she said outlined the “Russia hoax” against President Trump during his first term, and then we saw her physically present during an FBI raid of the election office in Fulton County where boxes of ballots were seized. Her presence there was completely unprecedented, but the president said he sent her there to investigate his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. So far, we’ve heard nothing about that investigation.
Gabbard says she will leave her job as DNI on June 30. President Trump said Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas will serve as acting director of national intelligence.
Read Gabbard’s resignation here.
See Gabbard’s video from 2025 here.
Read Trump’s response here.
