Former Democrat-turned-Independent Tulsi Gabbard, who has become a regular on Fox News over the past year and is remembered for her debate takedown of then-Sen. Kamala Harris on the 2020 presidential campaign trail, announced during a rally Tuesday she has joined the Republican Party.
The event was a campaign rally in Greensboro, N.C. with former President Donald Trump, and Gabbard’s announcement received a thundering applause. It was obviously a surprise to Trump, who was standing a few feet away.
Gabbard, who served in Congress representing Hawaii as a Democrat, left office following her unsuccessful White House bid. In 2022, she announced she was leaving the Democrat Party. At the time, it appeared to many observers the party had actually left her. Since then, according to Fox News, she has appeared at several speaking engagements and started her own podcast.
Her departure from Congress, and the party, probably began the night she essentially destroyed Harris on stage. She accused Harris of withholding evidence that might have set some people free from prison, and asserted that the former California prosecutor had prosecuted some 1,500 people for marijuana violations.
But it was on another podcast, hosted by Donald Trump, Jr., where Gabbard came out strongly in defense of Second Amendment rights while chastising Democrats, declaring gun control proponents’ intentions toward the right to keep and bear arms are not good “at all.”
Trump, Junior’s “Triggered” podcast featured Gabbard discussing her political evolution, and when they got around to gun rights—as detailed by an Ammoland report from April—she pulled no punches.
“I’ve got to tell you,” she told Trump, Jr. during the broadcast, “as time went on and I spent a lot of time, especially over my campaign for president and the year since, with a lot of folks in New Hampshire and Iowa and different parts of the country, who had a very different experience than I did growing up.
“They raised a lot of concerns about, around some of the things that throughout my time in Congress had all been coined as ‘well this is common sense gun safety laws,” Gabbard continued. “This is well-intentioned, in order to try to make sure that our communities are safe. That’s a pretty compelling argument. But as with many things in Washington, as you know well, once you start peeling back the surface, you can understand that for a lot of folks who are using those words, they don’t have good intentions at all.
“Their real objective is to try to get rid of the Second Amendment and take away our right to own firearms,” she told Trump, “and our rights to defend ourselves, and even more pointedly, especially where we are now and where the Biden-Harris administration has taken us, our Founders intended the Second Amendment to be a check on the abuse of power by a tyrannical government.”
There has been considerable speculation Gabbard may be angling for a cabinet position if Trump wins Nov. 5. Whether that is the case remains to be seen, but between now and then, her public appearances will likely become even more energized, whether she appears on her own or with the former president.
