Former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), who considers Tulsi Gabbard a “friend” from when they served together in Congress, raised the alarm in a column for MSNBC that in accepting Donald Trump’s nomination to be director of national intelligence, would be making a “grave mistake.”
Specifically, Rose wrote, Gabbard — whose nomination triggered immediate criticism from experts for her lack of qualifications to oversee the intelligence community — is allowing her foreign policy views, which broadly emphasize criticism of American power and sympathy for dictators abroad, as a way to back the “reckless” MAGA agenda and its leader.
“We served together in Congress — and I don’t want to be overly mean here — but the thing that disappoints me about her is not that she’s antiwar; it’s the fact that she has used that cause as a vehicle to get behind a reckless individual and a reckless movement,” wrote Rose, who represented Staten Island in Congress from 2019-21. “Trump is not antiwar. His administration will lead us down a path of abandoning our allies. It will be so incredibly erratic that it will likely drag the U.S. into war. That will cause serious harm to our young men and women in uniform and Tulsi has made a grave mistake by aligning with Trump.”
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The selection of Gabbard is part of an even broader problem, Rose argued. Trump “thinks this is a movie,” and is selecting people he finds to be compelling entertainers over people who are qualified to run major parts of the executive branch — another key example of this being the nomination of Fox News personality Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon, he said.
And this, whatever else Trump might say to the contrary, puts us at greater risk of global conflict, warned Rose.
“Trump says he doesn’t want to drag us into war,” he wrote. “But decisions like naming Hegseth as defense secretary or John Ratcliffe, a contributor to Project 2025, as the CIA director are exactly the kinds of moves that won’t walk us back from the brink of war but actually bring us much closer — and that’s what scares me.”