The Real Enemy

If you missed this yesterday, save yourself time and skip to the 2:45 mark in the video. Everything before that is stuff you learned in fourth grade and feels vaguely like the answer to the question, “What if we made Greta Thunberg director of national intelligence?”

“As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” says America’s most powerful intelligence officer. “Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.”

There are a dozen angles from which one might approach that, starting with the fact that we are assuredly not closer to nuclear war than we’ve ever been. Only a liar or an ignoramus would say so. Which one is Tulsi Gabbard?

Another is to wonder why the DNI is cutting videos lobbying the public on foreign policy. That job isn’t supposed to be political; rather the opposite, so as not to raise suspicions that intelligence being supplied to the president has been colored by his director’s bias. In the 20 years since the position was created, I can’t recall the person holding it ever issuing a statement laying out their pensées on war like Gabbard does here.

A third angle, popular yesterday among hawks, was to remind her that the atomic bomb almost certainly saved American and Japanese lives on balance. So many Purple Hearts were made in the United States for the anticipated military invasion of the home islands that the Defense Department still hadn’t depleted its inventory more than 50 years later. Japan’s surrender after Nagasaki averted a bloodbath that would have produced millions of casualties.

But here’s the angle that occurred to me: Did she get this from Tucker? Last month, Tucker Carlson hosted a minor housing official from the George H.W. Bush administration who claimed that the United States has built a secret network of bunkers to shelter America’s ruling class from doomsday at the low, low cost of $21 trillion.

The point of the first 2:45 of Gabbard’s clip is that there’s nowhere to hide from the horrific consequences if the bomb drops, and true enough. For her to then turn around and allege that “elites and warmongers” not only will be able to hide but will be so safe underground as to render them indifferent to the end of human civilization can’t be explained by logic, only by conspiratorial Carlsonian populist paranoia.

It’s several standard deviations away from rational thought. Which is just what you want to see in a director of national intelligence, I’m sure you’ll agree.

There are three points to make about all this.

In the same way that promoting healthier eating offends right-wing populists when Michelle Obama does it but not when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does, American officials apologizing to former enemies offends them when Democrats do it but not when Republicans do.

Gabbard’s quasi-apology to Japan for bombing Hiroshima isn’t the first time this year that the White House has condemned prior U.S. military action. “The so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” Donald Trump told an audience in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago, alluding to Iraq. “In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.” The odds can’t be worse than 50-50 that he’ll call the Cold War a mistake the next time he meets Vladimir Putin face to face.

It’s unusual to see apologies issued from a movement that typically treats remorse as a character flaw, evidence of weakness. But Trump and Gabbard have strategic reasons to signal regret: They want to ally the United States with illiberal nations, and part of their effort to shape public opinion is to encourage Americans to second-guess previous uses of military force against illiberal regimes.

If Tulsi Gabbard were sincerely worried about nuclear brinkmanship, she’d worry about Moscow. Russian expansionism is the world’s foremost cause of weapons proliferation right now and will remain that way until China at last makes a move on Taiwan. Ukraine, for instance, must be considering building nukes to deter the next Russian invasion; European powers, led by France, are mulling their own “nuclear umbrella” in the absence of U.S. leadership. The surest way to make nuclear war more likely is to tempt Putin into attacking Eastern Europe by undermining NATO—yet that’s exactly what the Trump administration has done, no doubt with Gabbard’s support.

Russian, not American, “warmongering” is the greatest risk to world peace, and Gabbard would acknowledge that if she weren’t a longstanding useful idiot. (Senate Republicans who dutifully confirmed her to be DNI are suddenly shocked, shocked, to discover it.) Her Hiroshima video implicitly adopts a talking point that the Kremlin has used since the beginning of the war: Let Russia do whatever it wants to whoever it wants, or else World War III is in the offing. It’s nuclear blackmail, and America’s top intelligence official is part of the extortion.

I don’t think Gabbard’s video is primarily about Russia, though. I suspect it’s ultimately about Iran, another traditional American enemy with whom her views often align in strange and conspicuous ways. There’s a power struggle happening behind the scenes right now between doves like Tucker and hawks like radio host Mark Levin as the president weighs whether to support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program. (Levin recently met with Trump in person to lobby him on it, prompting this screed from Carlson.) The new video from Gabbard is a sort of “bat signal” to try to rally MAGA populists behind the doves at a decisive moment. Mark Levin will be safe in his trillion-dollar Pentagon super-bunker if Israel bombs Iran’s enrichment facilities—but what about you?

If nothing else, highlighting the horror of Hiroshima encourages Americans to draw a moral equivalence that flatters figures like Putin. If you’re looking to create an international order in which authoritarian bullies get to pulverize their regional neighbors with impunity, you need to extinguish the American people’s native antipathy to foreign strongmen. “Sure, Russia’s doing terrible things in Ukraine, but we nuked people” is one way to do it. It’s a tactic most commonly seen in progressive tankies, but then that’s Tulsi all over.

Hawks frequently accuse Gabbard of being a Russian asset, but I’ve never gotten that sense from her. There’s always been a purity to her populism that makes me believe she’s in earnest. Like any good MAGA, her skepticism toward information provided by America’s establishment and her gullibility toward information provided by its adversaries seem equally absolute.

Another good trait to have in a director of national intelligence, no?

If I’m right, it’s possible that Gabbard really does believe that “elites” have access to nuclear shelters so luxe that they’ve stopped caring whether their policies bring about Armageddon or not. Never mind that someone in her position should be able to obtain a definitive answer about that in five minutes.

And so her Hiroshima video may be just the latest reminder that this is surely the most ill-informed administration the United States has ever had.

Partly that’s due to willful ignorance by the president. Last month, NBC News reported that Trump had sat for a grand total of 14 intelligence briefings to date, turning the “President’s Daily Brief” into more of a weekly brief. (Joe Biden had received 90 such briefings over a comparable period.) To try to get him more interested, Gabbard is considering, uh …

You know what? I’m just going to quote NBC News because it would embarrass me to have to describe this in my own words:

One idea that has been discussed is to transform the PDB so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast, according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Under that concept as it has been discussed, the national intelligence director’s office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network’s personalities to present it; Trump, an avid Fox News viewer, could then watch the broadcast PDB whenever he wanted.

A new PDB could include not only graphics and pictures but also maps with animated representations of exploding bombs, similar to a video game, another one of the people with knowledge of the discussions said.

The president doesn’t know what’s going on moment to moment because he can’t get motivated to find out unless Steve Doocy is talking to him through a screen.

Another problem is willful blindness by Gabbard herself. In May, she fired two top intelligence officials after they concluded that immigrants who belong to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua are probably not acting at the behest of the Venezuelan government, contradicting a key claim Trump made when he invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Gabbard’s office insisted that the two were fired for leaking but she’s now requiring intelligence reports to be approved by her or her top deputy before they’re published, which suggests that the conclusion itself was the problem.

“Nobody wants to give the boss what he or she needs to hear if the messenger is going to get shot,” one former intelligence official told Axios. Gabbard and Trump don’t want the truth; they want their biases confirmed.

And then there’s the eternal information problem that bedevils the modern right, the feedback loop between populist leaders and populist media. When Trump claims that Los Angeles would be “burning to the ground right now” if he hadn’t deployed U.S. troops, he’s exaggerating to a preposterous degree—but maybe not intentionally. If most of the information you got came from apocalyptic right-wing social media and Fox News, you, too, truly might believe that the entire city, if not the state, was about to go up in flames.

So when Tulsi Gabbard says the world is “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” consider the possibility that she’s not reciting Russian propaganda. (Knowingly, I mean.) She may simply have sat through one too many MAGA grift-casts grousing about Ukraine and ended up believing the lie.

Whether by choice or by disposition, this is the most aggressively ignorant government we’ve ever elected. And it’s getting stupider by the day.

The thrust of Gabbard’s video isn’t that imperial Japan was done dirty or that it’s almost midnight on the doomsday clock. It’s that the real enemy of the American people, the “political elite and warmongers,” lies within.

There’s no more succinct summation of postliberalism. The president himself famously used the formulation “the enemy from within” on the trail last year. A key reason that the dregs of right-wing populism side with Russia in the current war, I’m sure, is because their true adversaries on the American left and the Reaganite right are foursquare behind Ukraine. There’s no foreign power that MAGA Republicans are more eager to discredit and defeat than the enemy from within.

No, not even China. Just this morning, Trump excitedly announced another trade truce with Beijing—an objectively bad one. He’s bent over backward to save TikTok, breaking the law repeatedly to do so. He fangirls endlessly over Xi Jinping, praising his dictatorial brilliance. After watching Trump dismantle the Pax Americana over the last four months, only a fool could still believe that he’ll ride to Taiwan’s rescue if China attacks.

MAGA has no quarrel with Chinese totalitarianism. How could it? It’s a Maoist movement itself. If the president ultimately indulges his fantasy of handling mass demonstrations in L.A. the way “the Chinese generals” do, there’s no doubt which side of that American Tiananmen Square most of his supporters would be on.

For all its natural antipathy to the left, the American right spent most of the 65 years after World War II looking abroad for enemies. The Soviet Union and international communism filled the role for most of that period, then jihadis and Islamism stepped in after 9/11. But when the Iraq war went sideways and America elected Barack Obama, the search for enemies turned inward. That’s the genesis of the postliberalism that Trump eventually harnessed and rode to power. It was time to confront “the real enemy.”

All MAGA politics flow from that. When the president addresses the troops at Fort Bragg and encourages them to boo—in uniform—domestic enemies like Gavin Newsom and the media, that’s postliberalism. When he needlessly frightens Californians by sending the Marines to Los Angeles despite things being “very well under control,” that’s postliberalism. When he insists on punishing illegal immigrants by sending them to Guantanamo instead of back home to friendly European countries who are willing to take them, that’s also postliberalism.

One must be diplomatic, even friendly, with ogres like China and Russia, but one can never be too rough on the enemy from within.

Gabbard’s Hiroshima video is an interesting stylistic twist on that belief. Instead of ranting about some imaginary catastrophe, as populists tend to do, she’s the picture of composure while discussing an actual catastrophe that America inflicted on Japan. But her tone masks the insanity of what she’s suggesting: Supposedly, the chief moral consideration in triggering a nuclear holocaust for our elites—of which she somehow isn’t a part, despite being one of America’s most powerful officials—is whether … they’ll personally have access to a bomb shelter.

To believe that hawks want to arm Ukraine and Israel because they’re willing to live the rest of their lives underground in a radioactive wasteland, not because they believe that keeping the peace occasionally requires deterrent force, is to stoop to a level of casually hysterical demagoguery that even Trump rarely approaches. The elite “enemy from within” isn’t merely an enemy, to hear Gabbard tell it. He’s an outright demon, a homicidal maniac.

And maybe that explains why she cut the video. Her role as DNI requires her to focus on foreign threats, which is no fun at all for a populist. All of the action on the postliberal right is in demagoging domestic enemies, and she wanted a cut. Now she has it. If she lands on the ticket in 2028, don’t be surprised.