Tulsi Gabbard quit the Democrat Party over its warmongering and race-baiting, and the left never forgave her.
Now a pack of ambitious Republicans is circling 2028 like buzzards over a midterm wreck.
And Gabbard just made one choice that could sink the donor class’s comeback plan.
Tulsi Gabbard Wants a Seat at the Table, Not a Spot on the Ballot
Tulsi Gabbard, who ran President Trump’s intelligence agencies until the summer, isn’t planning a 2028 campaign of her own if JD Vance gets in the race.
A person who knows her thinking told the Washington Post that Gabbard wants a hand in the next presidential cycle and would like to work alongside the Vice President if he launches a bid. The two haven’t talked about it yet, according to that source.
That’s a small item buried deep in a long Post story about Republicans sizing up the post-Trump field. But it says plenty about who is lining up where.
And the timing matters. The GOP took a beating in the midterms, and a crowd of would-be nominees decided the frontrunner suddenly looked mortal.
The Post reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) are all weighing a run at the nomination. Donors keep nudging Secretary of State Marco Rubio to jump in too, even though Rubio has said, “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
Vance still leads early primary polling and the betting markets. He hasn’t decided whether to run.
A Combat Veteran Who Walked Out on the Warmongers
Gabbard’s road to this moment runs straight through the party she left behind.
She served three deployments with the Army, won a House seat in 2012, and climbed all the way to vice chair of the Democrat Party’s national committee. She quit that post in 2016 to back Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, and the party bosses never let it go.
During her 2020 presidential run, Clinton suggested Gabbard was a “favorite of the Russians.” The smear followed her for years.
In October 2022, Gabbard had enough. Her parting statement charged that the Democrat Party sat “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism.”
Notice what came first on her list. War and race. Neither charge has aged poorly.
She endorsed Trump in August 2024 and joined the Republican Party that October. On Election Day, Trump became the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote, and a coalition stocked with former Democrats like Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr helped carry him there.
But her time inside the administration didn’t end the way her supporters hoped. Gabbard stepped down as Director of National Intelligence over the summer, citing her husband Abraham Williams’ diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer.
West Wing officials told the Daily Mail her exit also tied back to a deeper split over the war with Iran. The paper reported she had clashed with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and often went missing from Oval Office deliberations on military action, and Trump himself indicated back in March that she differed with him on Iran.
So the neoconservatives who pushed the President into that fight froze out the one senior official who had built a whole career warning against wars just like it.
The MAGA Heavyweights Are Choosing Vance
Gabbard isn’t the first big name to plant a flag.
Erika Kirk took over Turning Point USA after her husband Charlie’s assassination, and at the group’s AmericaFest gathering in December 2025, she told thousands of cheering activists, “We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible.”
That’s Turning Point’s army of young volunteers lined up behind a man who hasn’t even declared.
Donald Trump Jr has sat in Vance’s corner from the start. The day after his father picked Vance in 2024, Don Jr told the New York Post there was a “very high chance” Vance would become president in 2028. When a story later claimed Don Jr was gearing up for his own run, he shot it down and pointed to his support for Vance.
And the President has dropped hints of his own. According to the Washington Post, Trump told donors during an Oval Office meeting, “At the end of the day, we need to elect JD.” He later brushed off the report, but he has floated a Vance-Rubio pairing more than once.
Put those names side by side, and a picture comes into focus. The Trump family, the movement Charlie Kirk built, and the converts who crossed over from the Democrat side are all landing in the same spot.
The Donor Class Wants Its Party Back
But the crowd circling Vance comes from a very different neighborhood in the party.
Cruz was the last man standing against Trump in the 2016 primary, and he refused to endorse him from the convention stage in Cleveland, telling delegates to “vote your conscience.” Now he’s courting donors who’d love to rewind the clock to the pre-Trump GOP, the one that sold voters amnesty for illegal aliens, trade deals that shipped factory jobs to Communist China, and wars with no exit plan. Cruz has opposed Trump’s tariffs and taken shots at the restraint wing Vance leads, which puts him squarely in the neoconservative lane.
Kemp brushed off Trump’s demands to take a harder look at Georgia’s 2020 count, then crushed Trump-backed David Perdue in the 2022 governor’s primary. DeSantis took Trump on directly in 2024 and packed it in right after Iowa.
The establishment donors steering toward these men want something specific. They want a nominee who treats the America First years as a detour.
That’s where Gabbard’s choice cuts deepest. She left one party because its leadership put war and racial grievance ahead of ordinary Americans, and now she’s siding with the one 2028 prospect who warned against the war his own administration fought.
The midterm numbers back her up. Only 37 percent of voters in NBC News exit polling called the military action against Iran the right decision. And even among the 63 percent who called it the wrong one, roughly one in seven still voted Republican, a sign the frustration ran straight through the GOP’s own coalition.
Maybe this reads too much into one anonymous source. Gabbard hasn’t spoken with Vance about any of it, and a confidant’s description of her plans isn’t a press release.
But anonymous sources cut both ways. The same Post story leaned on a strategist working for an unnamed Vance rival, and nobody in the Washington press corps blinked at that.
Democrats Already Know What They’ll Say About Her
Expect the left to reach for the old playbook the minute Gabbard’s name shows up next to Vance’s.
Democrats and their media allies pushed the Russia smear once, and critics dragged it right back out during her 2025 confirmation fight by combing through her past statements on Syria and Ukraine. A Democrat House majority with fresh subpoena power won’t need much prompting to dust it off again.
And they’ll pair it with the same racial scorekeeping she called out on her way out the door. A party busy celebrating its new socialist stars has no reason to drop the habit now.
Ronald Reagan used to explain his own switch with one line: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”
Gabbard made the same trip six decades after Reagan did. The question now is whether the party she joined is about to leave her behind too.
Sources: The Washington Post, “Potential Vance challengers smell blood in the water after brutal GOP losses”; PoliAlert; ABC News; Associated Press; Fox News; Los Angeles Times; The Hill; Fox 5 Atlanta; Daily Mail (via Irish Star and The Yeshiva World); The Independent; Newsweek; Vanity Fair (via ABC News); NBC News exit polls