United States | The spy who purged me

Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard are coming for the spooks

The president-elect’s intelligence picks suggest a radical agenda

Tulsi Gabbard during the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
Chapter and verse from the book of GabbardPhotograph: Getty Images

OF DONALD TRUMP’s nominees to high office, few are more suspicious of the government they are pegged to join than Tulsi Gabbard. The Democrat-turned-Republican warns of a “slow-rolling coup” by “the entire permanent Washington machine”, as she describes it in “For Love of Country”, a campaign book published in April. Her list of putschists is long, catholic and spook-heavy: “the Democratic National Committee, propaganda media, Big Tech, the FBI, the CIA, and a whole network of rogue intelligence and law enforcement agents working at the highest levels of our government”. Yet she may soon oversee some of that machinery.

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This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Spooking the spooks”

From the November 30th 2024 edition

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