Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme. Titans of business and media are throwing themselves at his feet as supplicants. He has obliterated long-standing norms, unashamedly soliciting payoffs from corporations with business before the government. (The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount, whose parent company needs Trump’s approval for a merger, is mulling a settlement of one of his groundless lawsuits.) Steps that even his allies once dismissed as unthinkable, such as freeing the most violent, cop-beating January 6 insurrectionists, have again reset the bar of normalcy.

These displays of dominance have convinced many of Trump’s critics and supporters alike that his second term will operate in a categorically different fashion from the first. Where once he was constrained by the “deep state”—or, depending on your political priors, by the efforts of conscientious public servants—Trump will now have a fully subdued government at his disposal, along with a newly compliant business and media elite. He will therefore be able to carry out the sorts of wild policy objectives that failed to materialize during his first term.

The earliest indications, however, suggest that this might prove only half true. Trump has clearly claimed some territory in the culture wars: He is now dancing with Village People in the flesh, not merely to a recording of the group’s most famous track. And when it comes to getting away with self-dealing and abuses of power, he has mastered the system. But a politician and a party that are built for propaganda and quashing dissent generally lack the tools for effective governance. As far as policy accomplishments are concerned, the second Trump term could very well turn out to be as underwhelming as the first.

Trump has promised a grand revolution. At a pre-inaugural rally, he announced, “The American people have given us their trust, and in return, we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” He branded his inauguration “Liberation Day,” labeled his incoming agenda a “revolution of common sense,” and boasted, “Nothing will stand in our way.” After being sworn in on Monday, he signed a slew of executive orders in a move that has been termed “shock and awe.”

[David A. Graham: The Gilded Age of Trump begins now]

Those orders fall into a few different categories. Some are genuinely dangerous—above all, the mass pardon of about 1,500 January 6 defendants, which unambiguously signals that lawbreaking in the service of subverting elections in Trump’s favor will be tolerated. Others, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization and freezing offshore wind energy, will be consequential but perhaps not enduring—that which can be done by executive order can be undone by it.

What’s really striking is how many fall into the category of symbolic culture-war measures or vague declarations of intent. Trump declared a series of “emergencies” concerning his favorite issues, just as Joe Biden had. His order declaring an end to birthright citizenship seems likely to be struck down on constitutional grounds, although the Supreme Court can always interpret the Fourteenth Amendment’s apparently plain text as it desires. He is re-renaming a mountain in Alaska—which, in four years’ time, could be renamed yet again, perhaps after one of the police officers who fought off Trump’s insurrection attempt. He has ordered the federal government to officially recognize only two genders, male and female. “You are no longer going to have robust and long drop-down menus when asking about sex,” an incoming White House official said. Ooooh, the federal intake forms will be shorter!

Meanwhile, Trump has already scaled back many of his most grandiose day-one promises from the campaign. Broker an end to the Ukraine war before taking office? He has “made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election,” The New York Times reports. Ask again in a few months. Bring down grocery prices? Never mind.

Trump’s supporters probably realized that some of his campaign pledges were hyperbolic. Even by realistic standards, however, Trump seems unprepared to deliver on some of his biggest stated goals. Take his signature domestic policy. Trump loudly promised throughout the presidential campaign to impose massive global tariffs once he took office. And yet, even that proposal remains theoretical. Trump’s executive order on trade instructs, “The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Trade Representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures,” and then proceeds to issue more solemn calls for study of the matter.

Presidents don’t always come into office with fully formed plans, but Trump doesn’t even have concepts of a plan, or any way to resolve fundamental tension between his belief that foreign countries should pay tariffs and the reality that tariffs raise prices for Americans. Another White House document announces, “All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.” What measures? We can be fairly sure that there is no secret plan waiting to be unveiled.

None of this is to say that Trump will accomplish nothing. At a minimum, he will restrict immigration and sign a regressive tax cut. But even his policy successes will likely sow the seeds of a thermostatic backlash in public opinion. Americans favor mass deportation in the abstract, but their support dwindles when they contemplate specifics. An Axios poll found that strong majorities oppose separating families, employing active-duty military to locate undocumented immigrants, and using military funds to carry out immigration policy. Even some high-level Trump allies have warned that mass deportations will cause immediate economic disruption.

Trump’s fiscal agenda is where the desires of his wealthy benefactors, the preferences of his voters, and economic conditions will clash most violently. The previous two Republican presidents to take office—George W. Bush in 2001, and Trump in 2017—inherited low inflation and low or falling interest rates. Both were able to cut taxes and raise spending without facing any near-term economic costs. In his second term, Trump faces an economy that, while growing smartly, is still plagued with high interest rates relative to the pre-COVID norm. If Trump revises the old playbook of cutting taxes now and worrying about the cost later, he may discover that “later” happens right away.

One answer to the dilemma would be to pay for tax cuts with deep cuts to social spending on the poor, a staple of past Republican budgets. Yet Trump’s strength with low-income voters turns that maneuver into another potential source of backlash. Last month, The Washington Post’s Tim Craig interviewed low-income Trump voters in a poor town in Pennsylvania who earnestly believe that he will not touch their benefits.

[Russell Berman: What Trump can (and probably can’t) do with his trifecta]

Meanwhile, some of Trump’s most prominent backers refuse to acknowledge that any tough choices await. In a recent interview, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presented Marc Andreessen, one of the Silicon Valley billionaires hoping to influence Trump’s domestic agenda, with concerns that Elon Musk’s plans to cut the budget would alienate voters. In response, Andreessen insisted that the very suggestion reflected “absolute contempt for the taxpayer,” repeating versions of the line rather than engaging with the problem. Musk himself recently reduced his goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget to a mere $1 trillion. When the brains of the operation are picking arbitrary round numbers and then revising them arbitrarily, one begins to question their grasp on the challenge they face.

Whether Trump pays any political price for failing to deliver on unrealistic promises—or for succeeding at delivering on unpopular ones—is an open question. Political difficulties won’t generate themselves. They will require an energetic and shrewd opposition. And a major purpose of Trump’s maneuvers to intimidate corporate and media elites is to head off a backlash by gaining control over the information environment.

One of Trump’s greatest strengths as a politician is to constantly redefine his policy goals so that whatever he does constitutes “winning.” The success of this tactic reflects the degraded intellectual state of the Republican Party’s internal culture. The conservative movement rejected institutions such as academia and the mainstream media decades ago, building up its own network of loyal counterinstitutions that would construct an alternate reality. This has helped Republicans hold together in the face of corruption and misconduct that, in a bygone era, would have shattered a governing coalition. (Today, Watergate would just be another witch hunt.) But the impulse to disregard expertise and criticism has also disabled Republicans’ ability to engage in objective analysis. The past two Republican administrations accordingly both ended in catastrophe, because the president had built an administration of courtiers who flattered his preexisting beliefs, whether about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq or COVID and the economy.

[George Packer: The end of democratic delusions]

None of those pathologies has disappeared. To the contrary, the MAGA-era GOP has grown more cultlike than ever. The rare, feeble attempt to steer Trump away from bad decisions is usually buried in obsequious flattery. The Trump presidency will be, by definition, a golden age, because Trump will be president during all of it. But it is a measure of his allies’ decrepitude that, whatever positions he ultimately lands on, they are prepared to salute.

Trump has struck fear into his party and America’s corporate bosses. His inauguration was a display of mastery, a sign that none will dare defy his wishes. But a leader surrounded by sycophants cannot receive the advice he needs to avoid catastrophic error, and to signal that his allies can enrich themselves from his administration is to invite scandal. In his inaugural spectacle of dominance and intimidation, Trump was planting the seeds of his own failure.

The Atlantic has hired Griff Witte as a managing editor to lead its growing politics and accountability team. Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes in an announcement, shared below, that Witte’s “experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.”

Witte is currently the senior politics and democracy editor for The Washington Post, and in his 23 years at the paper has reported from across the United States and in more than 30 countries, including as bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad, Jerusalem, London and Berlin.

The Atlantic has announced a number of new writers at the start of the year: Caity Weaver as a staff writer, who will begin with The Atlantic next month and comes from The New York Times Magazine; staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, both recently of the Post (see their first report, “The Tech Oligarchy Arrives,” from Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday); and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner.

Below is the announcement from Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

We’re very happy to let you know that Griff Witte is joining The Atlantic as a managing editor. Griff, who is currently the senior editor at The Washington Post in charge of political and democracy coverage, will be leading our growing politics and accountability team. As many of you know already, Griff is a journalistic force, who has led his 50-person team at The Post with energy, creativity, smarts and ambition. His experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.  

Griff comes to us after a storied, 23-year run at The Post, where he spent much of his time as a foreign correspondent. As a stalwart of the foreign desk, he covered insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, wars in Gaza, the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, the return of autocracy in central Europe, and the dawn of the Brexit era in Britain. His reports on refugees crossing into Europe, and on hate-preachers radicalizing followers in Britain, were recognized, respectively, by the National Press Foundation and the Overseas Press Club. In between international postings, Griff served as the newspaper's deputy foreign editor and guided prize-winning coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his new role for us, Griff will help build and lead our coverage of politics and democracy, with a special focus on government accountability and investigations. In addition to his own impressive track record of reporting stories on these broad beats, Griff has earned the admiration of his reporters for his ability to edit the sort of complicated, scoop-driven, and otherwise revelatory stories that will be critical to our mission as we try to cover and explain the actions of the Trump Administration. Griff is highly collaborative and fearless, qualities that will serve The Atlantic well in the months and years ahead.

Griff’s decision to join The Atlantic represents an intergenerational homecoming, of sorts. His father, the legendary artist Michael Witte, illustrated covers and made other art for The Atlantic in the 1980s (and if we’re lucky, we'll get him drawing for us again).

Witte will report to deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum and work closely with deputy editor Juliet Lapidos and other editorial leaders.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

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.