Tulsi Gabbard resigns.

I'm Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 14 minutes.

A special day.

Quick hits.

1. BREAKING: A panel of federal judges ruled that Alabama cannot use a new congressional map in the 2026 midterms, finding that the map discriminated against black voters and was implemented too close to the election. Alabama is expected to appeal. (The ruling)
2. U.S. Central Command confirmed it had carried out “defensive strikes” in southern Iran, targeting missile-launch sites and boats attempting to lay mines. The incident comes as the United States and Iran negotiate a potential peace deal. (The strikes)
3. Secret Service agents exchanged gunfire with a shooter who allegedly shot at officers outside the White House. The suspect was killed, and a bystander was struck by gunfire and hospitalized. An investigation into the incident is underway. (The shooting)
4. The Orange County Fire Authority said that the risk of a catastrophic leak or explosion of a storage tank containing a toxic chemical had been avoided. The tank, located at an aerospace plastics facility, overheated and began leaking vapors last week, prompting the evacuation of thousands of people in the area. (The update)
5. Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical warning about the risks of artificial intelligence, writing that the technology could reduce humans to “mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” (The encyclical)
6. Texans will vote today in the Republican Senate runoff between Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. The winner will face Democratic nominee James Talarico in the general election. (The runoff)

Today’s topic.

Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation. On Friday, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard announced her resignation, effective June 30, to support her husband as he fights a rare form of bone cancer. Gabbard will become the fourth cabinet secretary to leave the second Trump administration, following former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who were fired, and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who resigned in April. President Donald Trump said that Principal Deputy DNI Aaron Lukas will serve as acting director when Gabbard officially departs. 

Back up: Gabbard is a military veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who is known for her anti-interventionist views. In 2022, she left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent before joining the Republican Party and endorsing Trump in October 2024. The Senate voted 52–48 to confirm her as DNI in February 2025. In the role, she led the U.S. intelligence community, a coalition of 18 agencies and organizations, and served as primary adviser to the president on intelligence impacting national security.

In a post on Truth Social, President Trump praised Gabbard, writing, “[She] has done an incredible job, and we will miss her.” He also shared a copy of her resignation letter, which read, “I must step away from public service to be by [my husband’s] side and fully support him through this battle,” adding that she will stay on until the end of June to ensure “no disruption in leadership or momentum.”

Gabbard maintained a tenuous relationship with the president and his key advisers during her time as DNI. She was reportedly at odds with the administration over its decision to attack Iran in February and was not included in pre-war deliberations. After the war began, she at times appeared to question the U.S. and Israel’s relationship, telling lawmakers in March that the countries had “different” objectives in the conflict. She was similarly sidelined from discussions and planning for the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. 

Several outlets reported that President Trump was likely to fire Gabbard before her resignation. The president was reportedly displeased with Gabbard’s refusal to publicly support attacks on Iran, dating back to a video she posted in June 2025 — prior to the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — warning that “political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” 

Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Michael Ellis is among the top candidates to replace Gabbard, along with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). President Trump has not given a timeline for nominating a replacement. 

Today, we’ll share views from the left and right on Gabbard’s resignation and tenure, followed by Executive Editor Isaac Saul’s take.

What the left is saying.

• The left says Gabbard’s resistance to foreign intervention conflicted with Trump’s initiatives. 
• Some criticize the outgoing director for not standing up to Trump.
• Others say Gabbard’s resignation could benefit her politically. 

In The Guardian, Mohamad Bazzi said “Gabbard was undone by her resistance to US foreign interventions and regime-change wars.”

“She repeatedly drew Trump’s anger for her handling of intelligence around Iran’s nuclear program and capabilities,” Bazzi wrote. “When Trump launched a new US–Israeli war against Iran, Gabbard was still largely sidelined from the most senior levels of American policymaking that would normally include someone in her role. She was kept out of White House planning meetings and absent from most of the administration briefings to Congress on the conflict because of her past opposition to US operations aimed at regime change.”

“In March 2025, Gabbard testified to Congress that US intelligence agencies continued ‘to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon’... But she also noted that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was ‘at its highest levels’ and ‘unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons,’” Bazzi said. “Under pressure from Trump, Gabbard changed her tune and declared that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon ‘within weeks to months.’ By that point, she had seemingly lost Trump’s confidence and within months, he began musing about replacing her. In the end, Gabbard could not overcome working for a boss who demands absolute loyalty, but offers little of it in return.”

In Bloomberg, Andreas Kluth said “Gabbard leaves without having spoken truth to power.”

“Gabbard is leaving for a good and noble reason: to stand by her husband, who has been diagnosed with an ‘extremely rare form of bone cancer.’ I wish them both the best,” Kluth wrote. “And yet, Gabbard’s departure must also be the occasion to take stock of so much that has gone wrong in the intelligence community that she was tasked to oversee, and by extension in the second administration of President Donald Trump generally. After all, she is leaving just a few months into an unnecessary American war against Iran that both the old Gabbard and the honest current Gabbard would have opposed.” 

“Trump was especially irked, it seems, that Gabbard, when under oath in Congress, had the nerve to restate the intelligence community’s assessment that Iran was not actively planning to build a nuclear weapon,” Kluth said. “And yet Gabbard never took the next obvious step and advised the president against attacking Iran. When pressed in Congress, she tried to dodge her responsibility, claiming that the president is ‘responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat’... On that occasion as on others, Gabbard betrayed herself. As a veteran of the Iraq war, she has long been against entanglements and wars of choice in the Middle East, or anywhere. In that she is not alone in the administration.”

In The Atlantic, Shane Harris suggested resigning might be “the best thing that ever happened to Gabbard’s career.”

“Because the president was not interested in Gabbard’s views on intelligence, she tried to get his attention in other ways. Gabbard accused former U.S. officials of mounting a ‘yearslong coup’ against Trump,” Harris wrote. “And she took revenge on Trump’s perceived political enemies by revoking the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials. None of this won the president’s public admiration, and it did lasting damage to the intelligence community.”

“Toward the end of her tenure, the most salient question to ask about Gabbard was: Why does she stay?… When I’ve posed the question to people who have worked with Gabbard in the legislative and executive branch, they tend to offer a simple explanation: She wants power,” Harris said. “Gabbard ran for president once, as a Democrat. If she decides to give it another shot, she has an opening among Trump supporters. The president’s decision to attack Iran is polling poorly among voters… Because Gabbard wasn’t involved in some of the president’s most unpopular decisions, she can’t easily be blamed for them. That gives her a strange credibility in an administration that prizes loyalty over candor.”

What the right is saying.

• The right views Gabbard’s exit as a turning point for the America First movement.
• Some say losing Gabbard represents a fracturing of Trump’s coalition.
• Others criticize the left’s response to the resignation.

In UnHerd, Michael Cuenco said the “resignation marks the end of America First foreign policy.”

“As [Gabbard] exits the administration, it’s clear that the White House has moved in favor of interventionism,” Cuenco wrote. “Gabbard’s warnings of nuclear disaster before the 12-Day War earned a rebuke from Trump. Recently, her refusal to support claims of Tehran’s nuclear capability in the lead-up to the American strikes on Iran in March struck a chord of disloyalty in the White House. These events no doubt helped ease the way for her decision to leave. These stances showed her actions were indeed born of conviction rather than mere political expediency.”

“Though she never ended up publicly disagreeing with Trump in the same outspoken way as fellow anti-war tribunes Joe Kent and Thomas Massie, she said enough to earn his ire. Just as the public — including Trump 2024 voters — is souring on an out-of-control foreign war and as the specter of another in Cuba looms on the horizon, Tulsi has headed for the exit,” Cuenco said. “The question now is who will lead the charge for peace and America First in an administration seduced by the thrill of war. After Gabbard’s failure in preventing Venezuela and Iran, the answer seems to be: nobody.”

In The Times, Katy Balls called the departure “a blow to the coalition of Trump 2.0.”

“Ever since Trump launched strikes on Iran, it has been Gabbard’s absence rather than her influence that has been the talk of Washington. There have been whispers — sometimes shouts — that she was on a collision course with the president,” Balls wrote. “Gabbard’s value to Trump was never just administrative. She embodied the strange breadth of his second-term coalition: a former Democrat, Iraq veteran and anti-war critic who had concluded that Trump, of all people, was the safest bet against conflict. Her appointment signalled to sceptical converts that there was room for them inside the tent. Her departure tells them something else.”

“Maga isolationists are nervous about what could come next if negotiations for a further ceasefire extension stall,” Balls said. “But while uncertainty reigns over the Iran war, Gabbard’s exit is seen as a sign of… the fracturing of the 2024 coalition,” Balls said. “The voters that took Trump to victory in the election were brought over the line by a promise of an end to political corruption (aka ‘drain the swamp’), an end to foreign wars (‘America First’), and a focus on the cost of living. Fast forward to now and Republicans are wondering what they have left to say to appeal to these voters come the midterms.”

In PJ Media, Matt Margolis criticized Democrats’ “hatred and attacks” in response to Gabbard’s announcement.

“[Gabbard is] leaving on her own terms, to be at her husband’s side as he battles bone cancer. I have no doubt it was a difficult decision, but she should be commended for making it,” Margolis wrote. “Yet rather than allow her a graceful exit, some Democrats couldn’t resist the opportunity to remind everyone exactly who they are. What does it say about a political party when a woman announces she’s leaving public service to care for her husband fighting cancer, and its first instinct is to pile on?”

“[Sen. Adam Schiff] couldn’t even get through a well-wish without turning it into an attack. He falsely accused Gabbard of politicizing intelligence, dismantling agencies, and weaponizing the intelligence community to pursue what he called ‘baseless election fraud claims,’” Margolis said. “Democrats spent years positioning themselves as the party of empathy, of basic human decency, of caring. What we’re watching in real time is something very different: a party so consumed by its hatred of Trump and anyone associated with him that it has lost the capacity for a moment of simple humanity.”

My take.

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• Gabbard is doing the admirable thing by supporting her husband, and I wish them the best.
• Her political career up to becoming DNI was confounding to watch.
• It’s hard to view her tenure in Trump’s administration as anything but a failure.

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: First and foremost, I’m wishing Tulsi Gabbard and her family well. 

It’s a well worn cliche in D.C. for a politician to “resign” when they are about to get fired, citing “family time” as their reason for stepping away, only for the real details to come out later. But this story doesn’t really feel like that. 

Yes, Gabbard was reportedly wearing thin with President Trump, and she was boxed out of meetings you’d expect the director of national intelligence (DNI) to attend. Yet this alone isn’t proof she was on her way out, and leaks about her potential firing could just as easily have been people inside the administration trying to hurt her as proof positive that Trump wanted her gone. Aside from one offhand comment, Trump never really seemed to have anything but nice things to say about Gabbard. He was even conciliatory about their differences on Iran. 

Plus, the family story actually adds up here: Gabbard and her husband have maintained a particularly close relationship throughout her political ascent, and he’s even filmed her on state visits (he’s a professional cinematographer). His diagnosis sounds serious and urgent, and her decision to leave her role to support him is admirable. 

As for her actual tenure in office, well, my judgment there is a bit different. Gabbard is one of the most confounding politicians I’ve ever covered. It’s difficult to imagine now, but she was the vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 to 2016. She dramatically, and understandably (given her worldview), resigned from that position to endorse Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, even selling “No War With Iran” T-shirts, describing her anti-interventionist policy as the defining issue of her presidential campaign. 

Her staunch anti-interventionism, informed by her service in the Iraq War, became too much for her to reconcile with the party establishment. Gabbard quit the Democratic Party altogether in 2022, and she quickly became a fixture of right-wing media. She was a regular speaker at conservative conferences, where she typically focused on how certain Democratic politicians had drawn us into conflicts abroad. In 2024, when Gabbard finally endorsed Trump, she delivered these remarks at a rally in Detroit, Michigan:   

This [Biden] administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before. This is one of the main reasons why I’m committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House, where he can once again serve us as our commander-in-chief. Because I am confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.

For good measure, she added that she was joining Trump’s ranks to stop Kamala Harris, who she claimed had retaliated against political opponents and undermined civil liberties as vice president. “We as Americans must stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power,” she said.

I’ve always been drawn to public figures who are willing to change their minds, and I often say there is nothing wrong with someone evolving politically. It’s easy to admire the consistent philosophical bent of politicians like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Rand Paul (R-KY), but it’s harder to support someone you trust when they suddenly diverge from a view you previously shared. I’m sure Gabbard has faced some unfair criticism simply for going from an establishment Democrat to an official in a Republican-led White House.

At the same time, Gabbard’s career arc feels less like an earnest political evolution than a story of duplicitousness or hypocrisy. She torched her relationships in the Democratic Party, citing her anti-war stance, and then the moment she became powerful enough to do something about U.S. interventionism — as DNI for the Trump administration — she suddenly abandoned her defining beliefs. 

Since Trump came into office, he’s been saber-rattling and starting new military engagements abroad. During the Venezuela invasion and the brouhaha with Greenland, Gabbard was M.I.A. On the heels of those conflicts, and as rumors swirled about a potential invasion of Cuba or Iran, Gabbard hardly let out a peep — and few (if any) reports indicated she was working to slow the administration down. 

Admittedly, she was in a delicate political position. She would probably have lost her job if she had stepped too far out of line and criticized Trump directly, and I think the smart long-game play for her anti-war agenda was staying in the administration. Yet, if she was playing the long game, she failed. After all, Trump launched the war in Iran — the very war Gabbard spent years fearmongering about Democrats pursuing — and she seems to not only have been unable to persuade him against starting it but failed to even be part of the deliberations. If she was indeed boxed out of the decision-making process, why then abandon her central issue to hold onto a role where she had no power anyway? Then, to make matters worse, once Trump launched the war, Gabbard dutifully started serving the public the same robotic pro-war talking points that were central to her criticisms of past administrations.

In other words: Her time as DNI looks bad, no matter how you look at it.

That’s also to say nothing of other low points of Gabbard’s tenure, like in July of last year, when she held a press conference announcing “new evidence” of an Obama administration conspiracy to subvert Trump’s 2016 victory. She alleged Obama laid the groundwork for a “years-long coup” and sent the evidence to the DOJ for a criminal referral; she then doubled down, saying “there is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.” 

Trump followed up the press conference by posting images of Obama in handcuffs, claiming he got caught “absolutely cold.” Investigative reporter Matt Taibbi wrote several pieces about the “new evidence” that overtly implied Obama could be in the crosshairs of an investigation and senior members of his team may actually face charges. We then endured a brief news cycle of Trump’s supporters and administration officials claiming Obama was going to end up in prison.

In reality, as I wrote in Tangle at the time, the “new evidence” was really a miniscule detail in a story we’d been over a million times before. Almost a year has passed since that press conference, and you may not be shocked to learn that nothing has come of it. No criminal charges have been advanced, no damning new evidence produced. President Obama and his other senior aides are all still walking free. Instead, the DOJ simply tried and failed to go after Comey, so it concocted a new reason to indict him. It was just a big invented piece of political theater — the kind of thing you might call “political retaliation and abuse of power.”

All in all, it’s hard to view Gabbard’s time as DNI as anything other than a failure. She failed to stop the administration from doing the very thing she devoted her entire political career to preventing (a large-scale war with Iran), and then she participated in exactly the kind of political retribution she said she endorsed Trump to stop. You don’t have to feel negatively about Trump or Gabbard to see those contradictions. So while I don’t think her resignation was another secret political ejection disguised as a family issue, I do think her tenure had run its course — and she has very little to show for it. 

Take the survey: What do you think of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s job performance? Let us know.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: We just bought a 2025 new-to-us car. The owner’s manual is only available online and the options/safety features are mind boggling. All these features must have added new manufacturing and long-term maintenance cost to car ownership. Is there any empirical evidence that the number of car accidents and/or deaths has decreased as the safety features have been added?

— Lynne from West Chester, OH

Tangle: Yes, evidence shows that fewer people per capita have died from motor vehicle crashes in the past 20 years — though that evidence is still new, should be qualified, and isn’t necessarily proof of causation.

According to the National Safety Council, motor-vehicle deaths have declined since 2006 from about 15.2 deaths per 100,000 people to 13.4 in 2023 (despite a bump during the pandemic). A few things stand out from a closer inspection of that data: First, deaths from collisions with fixed objects have declined, but vehicular collisions declined and then rebounded, while pedestrian deaths have risen over that time period. Second, almost the entirety of the decline came between 2006 and 2010, well before the most advanced safety features (like lane assist) became standard. 

The U.S. Department of Transportation credits the decline in motor-vehicle deaths prior to 2006, which can be traced all the way back to the 1980s, to airbag prevalence, seat-belt usage, and a reduction in drunk driving. The department also identifies unsafe roadways and pedestrian crossings as the factors that contribute most to motor-vehicle deaths. For comparison, the United States has far greater traffic deaths compared to European countries, which many experts attribute to differences in roadway designs.

Overall, the factor that appears to have had the greatest impact on road fatalities over the past twenty years is the economy — specifically, the impact of recessions on driver behavior. Decreased driving during the Great Recession caused fewer vehicles, and fewer heavy trucks in particular, to be on the roads, leading to what is still the lowest period of motor-vehicle deaths since World War II (2010–2014, when elevated unemployment rates correlated strongly with decreased deaths). Conversely, the Covid pandemic correlated with a spike in impaired driving, which then caused increased roadway fatalities.

Looking at all the evidence, the big takeaway is that safety features almost certainly contribute to fewer traffic deaths, even as the impact of the newest safety features is difficult to ascertain. Driver behavior and roadway designs have had larger measurable impacts in the last 25 years. Although, just as airbags and seatbelts required time to become cultural standards, backup cameras and lane assist may also require several years for their impacts to become measurable.

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Under the radar.

On Thursday, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told lawmakers that the Pentagon paused a $14 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan due to a review of munitions stockpiles, diverging from President Trump’s claim that he was delaying the sale as a “negotiating chip” with China. Following his trip to China earlier this month, Trump said he discussed the arms deal in “great detail” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, suggesting that he was still deciding on whether to approve the sale. However, Cao’s testimony implied that the Pentagon review was the source of the holdup. “We’re just making sure we have everything, but then the foreign military sales will continue when the administration deems necessary,” he said. The Hill has the story.

Numbers.

• 2004. The year Congress created the director of national intelligence (DNI) position.
• 8. The number of Senate-confirmed DNIs in the position’s history.
• 2. The number of Senate-confirmed DNIs appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term. 
• 33% and 39%. The percentage of U.S. adults who approved and disapproved, respectively, of Tulsi Gabbard’s performance as DNI in a September 2025 YouGov poll.
• 45% and 13%. The percentage of U.S. adults who approved and disapproved, respectively, of Gabbard’s decision to resign as DNI, according to a YouGov poll conducted on May 22. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we published an interview with parenting expert Emily Oster.
• The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was the Ukrainian drone footage from the front lines (warning: graphic content).
• Nothing to do with politics: Test your airplane etiquette with this flight behavior quiz.
• Our last survey: 1,972 readers responded to our survey on the Ukraine–Russia war with 47% saying they expect it to end within the next five years. “Sustained fighting might end, but low level conflict will likely continue,” one respondent said. “It will end when Putin dies,” said another.

Have a nice day.

Over Memorial Day weekend, an estimated 135,000 people visited Arlington National Cemetery to honor fallen U.S. service members. Among the weekend traditions is a 78-year-old ceremony carried on by the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, also known as “The Old Guard.” Each year, the regiment’s roughly 1,500 soldiers place American flags at every headstone in the cemetery — over 260,000 gravesites. The tradition began in 1948, when the Army named The Old Guard as Arlington’s ceremonial unit and began the flag-planting practice on Memorial Day. “For those who gave everything in service to our country, this is our way of showing that they will never be forgotten,” Staff Sgt. Jacob Holmes, a former Old Guard public affairs official, said. USA Today has the story.