For more than a decade, I have hosted an hour-long cable TV show on MSNBC. When I got my own show, I imagined it as something akin to the experience of first-time car ownership. I could drive wherever I wanted to drive; although I would have to obey the law, I just had to figure out where I wanted to go, push the pedal, and go. I could cover whatever I thought was most important, whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted.

I learned quickly, it doesn’t work like that. A cable-news show is powered by attention. It has no internal combustion engine to make it go. Yes, you can cover whatever you desire, night after night, but if no one watches it, the show will be canceled. This is what almost happened to me.

After a lot of trial and error, I now view audience attention as something like the wind that powers a sailboat. It’s a real phenomenon, independent of the boat, and you can successfully sail only if you harness it. You don’t turn the boat into the wind, but you also don’t simply allow the wind to set your course. You figure out where you want to go (in the case of my show, what you think is important for people to know), you identify which way the wind is blowing, and then, using your skills and the tools of the boat, you tack back and forth to manage to arrive at your destination using that wind power.

This essay has been adapted from Hayes’ new book, The Sirens’ Call.

This experience has given me a certain perspective on how attention functions. Every moment of my work life revolves around answering the question of how we capture attention. And it just so happens that the constant pursuit of others’ attention is no longer just for professionals like myself.

[Read: A ‘radical’ approach to reclaiming your attention]

Attention is a kind of resource: It has value, and if you can seize it, you seize that value. This has been true for a very long time. Charismatic leaders and demagogues, showmen, preachers, great salespeople, marketers, advertisers, and holy men and women who rallied disciples have all used the power of attention to accrue wealth and power. What has changed is attention’s relative importance. Those who successfully extract it command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes. The battle to control what we pay attention to at any given instant structures our inner life—who and what we listen to, how and when we are present to those we love—and our collective public lives: which pressing matters of social concern are debated and legislated, which are neglected; which deaths are loudly mourned, which are quietly forgotten. Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention. It is now the defining resource of our age.

The rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism. What had previously been regarded as human effort was converted into a commodity with a price. People had always “worked” in one way or another, but that work was not embedded in a complicated system that turned the work into a market good. This transition from “work” to “labor” was, for many, both punishing and strange. The worker, Karl Marx observed in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

This was the fundamental insight of Marx’s theory of labor and alienation: that a social system had been erected to coercively extract something from people that had previously, in a deep sense, been theirs. Even today, those words feel fresh. The sense of dislocation and being outside oneself. The inability, even amid what is ostensibly boundless choice and freedom—What do you want to watch tonight, babe?—to “develop freely” our mental energy. The trapped quality of the worker caught in a system he did not construct and from which he cannot extricate himself.

The epochal shift of industrial capitalism required what Marx described as the commodification of labor. Labor—what we do with our body and mind, the product of our effort and exertion—is quite an alienating thing to have turned into a market commodity. The transmutation of what had always been “work” or “things humans did for specific purposes” into “labor” as a category of activity with a price required an entire transformation of the structure of society and the daily experience of human life.

Indeed, to extract labor from a person, you need to compensate them through wages, coerce them, or use violence—such as the overseer’s whip—to force it out of them. All these methods have been used. But the extraction of our attention happens in a different way. People can be forced to work in all kinds of cruel and oppressive ways, but they cannot be forced to do it purely through the manipulation of their preconscious faculties. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to dig a ditch, you know you are being coerced. If someone fires a gun in the air, your attention will instantly shift to the sound even before you can fully grasp what’s happening.

This feature of attention—that it can be taken from us at a purely sensory level, before our conscious will even gets to weigh in—makes it a strange and powerful force. Attention is the stuff of consciousness itself, where we choose to place our mind’s focus at any given moment. And yet it can always be wrenched from us seemingly against our will by the wail of the siren, the bark of a dog, or the flash of a prurient image on our phone. The more competitive an attention market it is, the more it will select for involuntary methods of capturing attention. Think of Times Square with its blinding lights, or a casino floor or a supermarket checkout counter. More and more, our entire lives have come to resemble those spaces.

Centering attention as a resource and understanding both its existential primacy and its increasing social, political, and economic domination is the key to understanding disparate aspects of 21st-century life. Attention comes prior to other aspects of speech and communication that we associate with power—persuasion, argumentation, information. Before you can persuade, you must capture attention: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” Before you inform, insult, or seduce, you must make sure that your voice doesn’t end up in the muted background static that is 99.9 percent of speech directed our way. Public discourse is now a war of all against all for attention. Commerce is a war for attention. Social life is a war for attention. Parenting is a war for attention. And we are all feeling battle weary.

The trajectory of Elon Musk is a perfect fable for the attention age. By the third decade of the 21st century, Musk was the richest man on Earth. He had every material and financial resource, enough to purchase anything that the totality of human history up until that point could produce to be bought or owned by one man. And yet he was willing to trade it all for attention.

Not at first—for a good portion of his early career, Musk was relatively press shy. But then, like so many, he joined Twitter. He posted more and more, with greater degrees of pathetic desperation, until he made the most expensive impulse purchase in history, buying the platform for a wildly overvalued $44 billion.

Perhaps having realized how much he had overpaid, Musk then tried to back out, but facing a lawsuit from Twitter and a potentially disastrous trial, he was all but forced to complete the sale. Although he made all kinds of high-minded noises about free speech and diversity of viewpoints, it became immediately clear from his incessant, compulsive posting and trolling that what he really wanted was to be Twitter’s Main Character.

In becoming Twitter’s Main Character, though, he boosted vile and false conspiracy theories about a savage attack on the husband of the House speaker, mocked the notion that a mass shooter with literal swastika tattoos could possibly be a white supremacist, and consistently boosted racist posts about the inherent criminality of Black people and degrading tweets about trans people.

This did succeed in getting Musk attention: He was always one of Twitter’s top stories, and his antics even became a fixation of mainstream news coverage. But all of this was a bit much for many Twitter users. Crucially, advertisers began to pull back, and then flee en masse. By May 2023, seven months after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, Fidelity Investments estimated the platform’s total worth to be just $15 billion. To most observers, this looked as though Musk had lit nearly $30 billion on fire, but he had used it to purchase something: the world’s attention. It was more valuable to him than anything else.

When asked by a CNBC interviewer why he was constantly sending such tweets as “[George] Soros hates humanity,” Musk—with a little extra pause for effect—said, “There’s a scene in The Princess Bride—great movie—where he confronts the person who killed his father. And he says, ‘Offer me money. Offer me power. I don’t care’ … I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, then so be it.” Although it was cloaked in principle, what Musk was really saying was The attention is worth it to me. There is quite literally nothing I value more.

But if Musk was sent on this trajectory through sheer broken need, carried along by compulsion, in his brokenness he stumbled on the simple truth that to control the attention of others is to exert power. His pursuit of Twitter might have started as a form of addiction, but it has transformed into a strategy. His obsession with attention cost him billions of dollars in the beginning, but it has now helped him elect a president, positioned him to influence government policy, and increased his fortune.

And in this, Musk is an extreme example, but he is by no means alone. What you can see throughout his generational cohort is the same thirsty, grasping desire for attention: Silicon Valley billionaires starting their own podcasts, like the hosts of All In, or posting compulsively, like the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman. This age’s new plutocrats are obsessed, for understandable reasons, with attention.

If attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be. And here we come to a foundational question that is far harder to answer than we might like it to be. What do we want to pay attention to? If we didn’t have all the technologies and corporations vying for our attention, if our attention wasn’t being commodified and extracted, what would we affirmatively choose to pay attention to?

You hear complaints about the gap between what we want to pay attention to and what we end up paying attention to all the time in the attention age. Someone ambitiously brings three new novels on vacation and comes back having read only a third of one of them because she was sucked into scrolling through Instagram. Reading is a particular focus of these complaints, I find. Everyone, including myself, complains that they can’t read long books anymore. We have a sense that our preferences haven’t changed—I still like to read—just our behavior. And the reason our behavior has changed is that someone has taken something from us. Someone has subtly, insidiously coerced us.

But maybe we have multiple selves who want different things—a self who wants to read, a self who wants to scroll. There’s a tension here between different aspects of the self that can be hard to reconcile. We contend with what our superego wants (to go on vacation and read novels) and what our actual self does (scrolls through Instagram). As is so often the case, our revealed preferences are different from our stated ones. And who is to say what our real and true desire is?

So much of modern self-help is geared toward closing the gap between what we say we want and value and how we act. And here, in the instant-to-instant unfolding of our inner lives, we can imagine a similar project, at least at the individual level. The solution, to the extent that there is one, to alienation caused by this gap between what we pay attention to and what we want to pay attention to is to begin with the question of what we actually want. If you had full power over your own attention, a kind of X-Men-style hyperfocus that could, at will, always be directed on whatever you chose, for as long as you chose, what would you do with this superpower?

I have to say that I think most people would offer a fairly similar set of answers. I would focus on my family and friends, my hobbies and interests, things that bring me joy, personal projects—whether taking photos, gardening, or building a deck—that give me satisfaction.

We are not required to suffer under the current form of attention capitalism forever, or even for that much longer. We can create alternative markets for attention, alternative institutions, and businesses that create models different from those that now dominate. We can also create noncommercial spaces where we can pay attention to one another, our hobbies, and our interests and communities without that attention being captured, bought, and sold. And there is yet another path forward that is more radical than these other approaches, one that fundamentally relies on people voluntarily creating new alternatives: We can regulate attention.

If we look back to the labor movements of the 19th century, they came to advocate for two particularly rudimentary and fundamental forms of regulation: a ban on child labor and limitations on total hours worked. Neither of these restrictions seemed obvious and commonsense at the time, at least not to the titans of industry and politicians who fought them. Moving governments toward these goals took a tremendous amount of political mobilization, agitation, and persuasion.

[Megan Garber: The great fracturing of American attention]

What if we viewed attention in similar terms? It’s obviously not a perfect analogy, but a lot is similar. In the legal context, one of the biggest challenges is that attention is a difficult thing to regulate because in the United States it is so connected to, and difficult to sever from, speech. The First Amendment provides extremely strong speech protections, and any attempts to regulate attention—telling social-media companies how they can and can’t operate, for instance—inevitably raise profound First Amendment questions. But there are ways to regulate attention that plausibly sidestep the speech question by simply imposing non-viewpoint-specific limitations that apply across the board.

There are already bills in state legislatures and in Congress that would create legal age minimums for social-media platforms. Although the details vary, as a general matter this seems obvious and sensible. We as a society can say that children’s attention should not be sold and commodified in the aggressive and alienating fashion of current social-media networks. Just as 12-year-olds can’t really consent to a wage contract, we could argue they can’t really consent to the expropriation of their attention in the way that, say, Instagram exploits it.

But what about adults? What if we decided to apply the basic lessons of labor law to attention and simply impose limits on how much attention can be monetized from us? I am fully aware that heavy-handed regulation of attention markets, such as a cap on hours of use, would face steep political and legal opposition. But there’s another way to view efforts to regulate the marketing of our attention.

One of the earliest slogans pushing the eight-hour workday was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will.” It feels as if more and more of that leisure time is now taken from us, not willed by us. Our control over the space of our mind, stolen. Are we really spending the precious hours of our waking, nonworking lives doing “what we will”? Or has the conquering logic of the market penetrated our quietest, most intimate moments?

We don’t have to accept this. It does not need to be this way. We must use every tool and strategy imaginable to wrest back our will, to create a world in which we point our attention where we—the willful, conscious “we”—want it to go. A world where we can function and flourish as full human beings, as liberated souls, unlashed from the mast, our ears unplugged and open, listening to the lapping of the waves, making our way back home to the people we love, the sound of sirens safely in the distance.

This essay has been adapted from Chris Hayes’ new book, The Sirens’ Call.

Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.

Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.

While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.

To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.

In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.

After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.

In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.

“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.

Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.

Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.

But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”

[Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump]

Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”

The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.

Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.

Senator Bernie Sanders with Gabbard at his campaign rally in Gettysburg ahead of the Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, April 2016 (Mark Wilson / Getty)

But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Post reported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”

For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.

Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.

Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”

Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”

Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”

Gabbard at the Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024 (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)

[Tom Nichols: Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is a national-security risk]

Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”

Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda crowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”

Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.

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For weeks, Donald Trump has been exerting influence on events in the Middle East. After winning the 2024 election, he dispatched his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to help the Biden administration get the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage-release deal over the finish line. Now, a little more than 24 hours into his presidency, Trump has already begun to undo much of President Joe Biden’s decision making from the past four years, including on foreign affairs. I spoke with my colleague Yair Rosenberg, who covers both Trump and the Middle East, about the new president’s goals and approach to the region.

Isabel Fattal: What moves has Trump made on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office yesterday?

Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after inauguration, Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s February executive order that erected an entire sanctions regime against extremist Israeli settlers. This order allowed the administration to impose stiff penalties on violent settlers in the West Bank and anybody who supported them, and—as I reported in March—could have eventually applied not just to individual actors and organizations on the ground but also to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli army.

Biden’s executive order was seen as a sword of Damocles hanging over the settler movement. It effectively cut off some important people on the Israeli hard right from the international financial system, because if you’re under U.S. sanctions, a lot of institutions cannot touch you. The settler movement was so concerned about this that they pressed Netanyahu to lobby against the sanctions in Washington, and some members even took the Biden administration to court in the United States. All of that now goes away: not just the sanctions, but the executive order that created the entire regime. Trump is also reportedly expected to end the U.S. freeze on 2,000-pound bombs that Biden put in place during the war in Gaza, and impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its attempted prosecution of Israeli officials—something Biden resisted.

Isabel: Trump told reporters last night that he is “not confident” that the Gaza cease-fire will last, adding that “it’s not our war; it’s their war.” How durable is the cease-fire deal right now?

Yair: Trump is right to be skeptical. It’s not at all clear whether this is actually going to hold. The first of the agreement’s three phases, which we are in right now, is 42 days long. Israel is releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for 33 women, children, and elderly hostages in Gaza held by Hamas, some of them living, some of them dead. That part of the deal seems likely to continue according to plan.

But partway through this period, the two parties are supposed to negotiate for the release of the remaining male hostages, for whom Hamas is demanding a much steeper ransom than this already steep price. And if those negotiations don’t bear fruit, it’s entirely possible the war will resume, especially because hard-right politicians in Netanyahu’s government have already vowed to press on until Hamas is eliminated.

The question becomes: How committed are Israel and Hamas to actually getting this done? And how committed is Trump to keeping the cease-fire on the rails? From his comments, it doesn’t seem like he knows. He’s speaking like a spectator instead of an actor. So we have no idea what he intends to do.

Isabel: What would it look like for Trump to truly commit to keeping the cease-fire on track?

Yair: It would require his administration to make it more worthwhile for both sides to compromise and stick to the deal rather than capsize it. Most Israelis support the current deal, but the accord’s most bitter opponents are the hard-right politicians in the current Netanyahu government, making the cease-fire harder to sustain as time goes on. But the Israeli far right is also hoping to get many items on their wish list over the next four years, much like they did during Trump’s previous term. Among other things, they seek U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the removal of the sanctions we discussed, and backing for Israel in its ongoing war with Iran and its proxies. If Trump is committed to the continuation of the cease-fire—an open question—he could make clear that some of these benefits come with a price, which is calm in Gaza. And Trump, both in his previous term and in recent weeks, has shown that he is willing to offer incentives that Biden would not.

Hamas is even harder to influence, because they’re a messianic terrorist group. Fundamentally, they don’t seem to care about not just how many of their own fighters they’ve lost but also how many Gazan civilians have been killed in this war. For them, every casualty is either immaterial or an asset in a gruesome PR war against Israel. But they do have sponsors abroad—like Qatar, which hosts some of the group’s political leaders. The Qataris want to be on the right side of the next Trump administration, like any other state in the Middle East. And so Trump has the ability to put pressure on the Qataris, who can then push Hamas to compromise on what they’re willing to accept in the next hostage exchange.

These methods aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s true that the U.S. has some sway over events, but these countries and actors have their own national interests and make decisions based on their own internal politics. Americans on both the right and the left tend to overestimate the U.S.’s role in world developments. Frankly, if there were a magic button here, Biden would have pushed it already.

Isabel: What can we learn about Trump’s second term from how he has handled this cease-fire situation thus far? What does it tell us about how he might relate to the region?

Yair: The thing to understand about Trump’s approach to politics, as I’ve written, is that he has few if any core beliefs, which means that he is both incredibly flexible and easily influenced. Both domestic and international actors know that if they can give Trump something he wants, he might give them something they want. It doesn’t matter if they are a traditional U.S. ally or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re a democracy or not. It’s entirely about whether you are in his good books. So everybody is now scrambling to get on Trump’s good side, to make down payments on the things they hope the most powerful person in the world will then pay them back for. In a real sense, that’s what this cease-fire is—for Israel, for Qatar, for Egypt, it’s all jockeying for advantage by trying to give Trump a win now so he’ll give them a win later.

Expect the next four years to look a lot like this, with international actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and domestic actors such as American evangelicals and Republican neo-isolationists all playing this game of thrones, hoping to curry favor with the ruler now holding court.

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