2025-01-27
18 分钟Ms. Gabbard grew up in a secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement and has made a dizzying journey from conservative to liberal darling to Trump ally.
Charles I'm Charles Homans.
I'm a reporter for the New York Times on the politics desk,
and also for the New York Times Magazine.
This week turns out to be a pretty interesting week of hearings for Trump administration officials.
And my colleague Elizabeth Williamson
and I wanted to write a story that really explains the pretty remarkable
and to many bewildering political history of Tulsi Gabbard,
who is up for confirmation as Donald Trump's director of national intelligence.
She's a pretty singular figure in American politics right now,
and no one disputes that she's a very unusual choice
for one of the most sensitive roles in government.
A few things that are really interesting about Tulsi Gabbard, you know,
one is she grew up in a very secretive sect of the Hare Krishna movement in Hawaii,
which has come under a lot of scrutiny over the years,
mostly because of the relationship that the group's leader has with his followers.
Some who have left it have called it a culture.
The second thing, once Gabbard was in Washington as a congresswoman,
she moved over the course of about 10 years
from a rising star in the Democratic Party to the Bernie movement,
an ally of that party's left to not a Democrat at all.