Trump Rebukes Tulsi Gabbard on Iran

President Donald Trump directly rebuked Tulsi Gabbard, his own director of national intelligence, during a Q&A with reporters on Friday afternoon amid reports that she’s an increasingly irrelevant figure within his administration.

After being asked by MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard about why he was considering a strike on Iran given his expressed opposition to the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, Trump stated that Iran had gathered “a tremendous amount of [nuclear] material.”

“What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community has said they have no evidence that they are at this point,” followed up Hillyard.

“Well, then my intelligence community is wrong. Who in the intelligence community said that?” shot back Trump.

“Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard,” observed the reporter.

“She’s wrong,” replied Trump matter-of-factly.

The commander-in-chief’s dismissal of Gabbard comes just a few days after Politico reported that Gabbard was on the outs.

From its story on Trump’s disillusionment with his intel chief:

At 5:30 a.m. on June 10, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard tweeted a cryptic, three-minute video warning that “political elite and warmongers” are “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers” — and that the world is “on the brink of nuclear annihilation.”

Trump saw the unauthorized video and became incensed, complaining to associates at the White House that she had spoken out of turn, according to three people familiar with the episode — two of them inside the administration and all granted anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics.

“I don’t think he dislikes Tulsi as a person … But certainly the video made him not super hot on her … and he doesn’t like it when people are off message,” one senior administration official told the outlet.

Vice President JD Vance, the leading isolationist voice inside the administration, sent an unprompted statement to Politico at the time that read: “Tulsi Gabbard is a veteran, a patriot, a loyal supporter of President Trump, and a critical part of the coalition he built in 2024.”