The Problem with Tulsi: Why She’s Trump’s Least Suitable VP Pick

Having secured the Republican nomination in all but name, former President Donald Trump, his inner circle, and outside observers in the media and elsewhere have shifted their focus to the next steps he needs to take on the road to the GOP convention in Milwaukee this July. Steps such as building out his fundraising operation and expanding his donor outreach in order to reduce President Joe Biden’s significant cash advantage, establishing field offices and other campaign infrastructure in battleground states, making overtures to Republicans who cast their ballots for Trump’s rivals in the primaries, even continuing to prepare for his four criminal trials, the first of which began April 15 in Manhattan.

But the biggest step Trump takes before the convention will be naming his running mate. Speculation about whom the once and potential future president will select has consequently ramped up in the last few weeks. Numerous names have been bruited about, from the obvious to the implausible, from prominent to obscure, from big states and small ones, from those in high office to those in none. Squint and you can see almost any of them occupying the Naval Observatory. Any of them, that is, except Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, who is by some distance the worst of all those Trump is supposedly considering for vice president.

Not that the prospect of a hire blowing up in his face has ever stopped Trump. And so Gabbard, by all accounts, is in contention for the Republican Party’s No. 2 spot. Trump has said so publicly and privately. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham included Gabbard in a group of possible vice presidents during a February interview of Trump, instead of shooting down the idea, he replied, “All of those people are good. They’re all solid.”

According to a recent New York Times article, after meeting with her at Mar-a-Lago, Trump “made clear to advisers that she should be on his list of options” — a list that otherwise is dominated by more conventional choices, any of whom would be a less farfetched alternative even for someone as unconventional as the 45th president.

It contains, for example, several of Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) barely made a noise in the primary and in addition to being an old white guy comes from a reliably red state that is both small and in no danger of falling to Biden. But he’s wealthy, can fundraise, wouldn’t overshadow Trump, and is unlikely to stand in the way of Trump’s anointed MAGA successor should Trump win. Nikki Haley also comes from a small and reliably red state, South Carolina. Disaffected and Never Trump Republicans rained money upon her as the last woman standing in the primary. Like Burgum, she’d help Trump on the cash front. As a woman and minority, her demographic advantages are evident. Yet her standing with Republicans tanked as the race went on, and her identity as the avatar of the Bush-McCain-Romney GOP the base despises might cause it to revolt should Trump choose her. Not to mention that she categorically ruled out being vice president.

Kristi Noem and Sarah Huckabee Sanders are both female governors. Noem has a plus in her looks, Sanders in her tenure as White House press secretary. Both represent reliably red states (South Dakota and Arkansas, respectively) that are small and add nothing to Trump’s electoral coalition. Young, Hispanic, and telegenic, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was once seen as the future of the GOP. Despite flaming out in the 2016 primary, he has suddenly found himself among the front-runners for the opportunity to preside over the Senate. The only problem? Rubio, like Trump, is from Florida, and the Constitution bars electors from voting for a president and vice president from the same state. That would not be a concern if Trump tabbed Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who since crashing ignominiously out of the primary before a vote was cast has reinvented himself as one of Trump’s staunchest surrogates. He’s black and donors love him, two marks in his favor. But like Haley, he hails from South Carolina, a state that counts for little in Trump’s electoral calculus.

Other prospects have the same sorts of credits and debits. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), maybe the most MAGA figure being contemplated, is in Trump’s own words a “fighter.” But Ohio, too, is reliably red these days, Vance is in his first term in the Senate, and Trump may prove hesitant to pick anyone who might claim to succeed him in leadership of the movement as well as the country. Trump took a shine to Katie Britt, but her poorly received performance delivering the GOP response to the State of the Union address last month suggested the first-term senator from Alabama isn’t ready for prime time. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the No. 3 Republican in the House, is one of Trump’s most ardent defenders in Congress. That she’s a woman is a bonus. But she’s only a congresswoman, and it’s unlikely she’d put Trump’s former home state of New York in play.

These figures and others not mentioned have their strengths and weaknesses. For some, perhaps most, those strengths are vastly outweighed by the weaknesses. But they do have them. Gabbard, on the other hand, scarcely has any strengths at all. In choosing her, Trump would be choosing someone who is all downside and no upside.

For one thing, Gabbard, though now an independent, spent her entire two-decade career in elective office as a Democrat, beginning when she was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives at just 21. She backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016, resigning her position as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. After dropping out of the 2020 presidential race, she endorsed Biden. She is a proponent of “Medicare for All” and free college tuition. This is hardly the track record one would expect of someone eying the GOP presidential ticket.

And eying it she is, by her own admission. Asked in March if she’d be amenable to being Trump’s vice president, Gabbard conceded, “I would be open to that.” The possibility that she’s on Trump’s short list was a major factor in her decision to spurn independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s offer to be his running mate. Gabbard, a source told NBC News, only turned down Kennedy because she “is convinced that Trump is going to pick her.”

Gabbard’s personal background would also likely become a campaign problem. She was raised in an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement, which critics have likened to a cult and have accused of being anti-gay and Islamophobic. Gabbard herself once worked for an organization that promoted conversion therapy, for which she has since apologized. She has for many years been a practicing Hindu, which some religious and social conservatives may find off-putting.

While some Republicans may find Gabbard’s religion offensive, even more, especially those who favor a robust, interventionist foreign policy, will balk at her skepticism of American power and dalliances with hostile powers. She drew bipartisan ire for meeting with Bashar Assad in 2017, a move seen as validating the Syrian dictator’s murderous war against his own people. Gabbard has also taken a decidedly soft stance toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, chastising Biden and Western leaders for being insufficiently solicitous of Russia’s “legitimate” security concerns about Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO. Distasteful as many in the GOP’s old guard might find these stances, they are what has endeared her to what can be called, faute de mieux, the Tucker Carlson wing of the party, after the former Fox News host who is an ardent admirer of Gabbard in large part because of her views on international relations.

There is, moreover, a clear appetite for those views within the party. Trump himself has sought them out. The former president solicited Gabbard’s advice on “foreign policy and how the Defense Department should be run in a second Trump term,” the Washington Post revealed in February. This meeting of the minds is why, per NBC News, Trump insiders believe a national security post is a much likelier landing spot for the Iraq War veteran in a second Trump administration than the vice presidency.

In addition to the ideological and philosophical considerations that limit Gabbard’s appeal to Republican voters, there are practical concerns that might give Trump himself pause. The ability to raise money is one of Trump’s main criteria in choosing a running mate. Unlike such contenders as Vance, Stefanik, Burgum, Scott, and Rubio, Gabbard has no constituency in the GOP donor class. Indeed, her positions are more likely to repel the plutocrats who turned to Haley in the forlorn hope that she could vanquish Trump and restore the pre-2015 Republican Party. “Mr. Trump has asked several people about the fundraising prowess of possible running mates,” reported Michael Bender of the New York Times. When it comes to opening Republican donor wallets and checkbooks, Gabbard is surely at the bottom of the list.

The blackest mark against Gabbard from Trump’s perspective is that she squanders one of his strongest advantages: voter fears that a vote for Biden is really a vote for Kamala Harris. Trump and Biden are the two oldest presidential nominees in history. Given this reality, their understudies may be a factor in 2024 in a way they haven’t in decades.

Harris, the incumbent, is deeply unpopular. Her ratings are worse than Biden’s. From her irritating laugh to her habit of tossing word salad whenever she opens her mouth, she is an object of contempt and ridicule whose most notable accomplishment to date is a series of failed reinventions, each less successful than the last.

Yet despite her myriad flaws, Harris is a former state attorney general and U.S. senator — i.e., someone who’s been elected statewide multiple times — and not just in any state but in California, the largest state in the union. As vice president, she’s also been on a winning national ticket. Gabbard fans may no more want to hear it than Harris’s numerous detractors on the Right, but as awful as she is, she is simply a more credible potential president than Gabbard.

Former Vice President Mike Pence solidified Trump’s standing within the party and helped win over skeptical GOP voters. Gabbard seems designed to have the opposite effect. Popular though she may be with a segment of the Republican Party that makes up in volume what it lacks in size, there is good reason to think she would be much less attractive to average Republicans, whose votes are more important to Trump as there are a lot more of them.

Gabbard has tried to make herself more attractive to Republicans in the last few years by, among other things, abandoning the Democratic Party to become an independent, speaking at CPAC, and even serving as a guest host on Carlson’s Fox News show before the network fired him. But less unpalatable is not the same as more palatable.

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Trump is looking for a lot of qualities in a running mate. But as the Washington Post put it, “More than anything, he wants someone who can help him win.” For a host of reasons, from her unusual upbringing and her decadeslong career as a Democratic office holder to her status as the favorite of a disreputable fringe of the conservative movement, that person is not Tulsi Gabbard.

Or to put it another way: Gabbard would be an interesting choice for vice president. Interesting in the same way a Brit might respond “that’s interesting” upon hearing someone declare his or her intention to surrender worldly goods and go live in a commune. Which is to say, he or she would have to be completely barmy to do it.

Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on X: @varadmehta.

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