Donald Trump put Tulsi Gabbard through the wringer at a private meeting because he felt she hadn’t backed his war against Iran with sufficient enthusiasm.
“Trump was displeased with Gabbard when she didn’t wholeheartedly endorse the Iran war during her recent testimony to Congress about threats to the U.S.,” Axios reports, citing five people with knowledge of the president’s attitude toward his director of national intelligence.
The president apparently made his feelings clear during a private chat in March, the day after Joe Kent, Gabbard’s former counterterrorism chief, quit over what he framed as the U.S. being goaded into the conflict by Israel.
Two sources told Axios Trump “scolded” Gabbard and “questioned her loyalty,” while a further two said he “wasn’t that mad” and instead “chided Gabbard in a sarcastic and friendly way.”
The president has charged Gabbard, who oversees the 17 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, with investigating perceived threats to election integrity. Critics have raised concerns that Trump may be planning to use Gabbard’s findings to centralize control over the polls ahead of this year’s crucial midterm elections.
Still, the pair have repeatedly butted heads over the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Iranian regime, beginning when Gabbard said during Congressional testimony in March 2025 that American spies had assessed that Iran was not, in fact, in the process of building a nuclear weapon.
Trump—who later launched strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities on precisely the opposite pretext, and who now says his ongoing war with the Islamic regime is at least in part to prevent it from obtaining weapons of mass destruction—slammed Gabbard for that assessment, telling reporters: “I don’t care what she said.”
Tensions mounted further after Gabbard wrote to the Senate that Iran had made “no efforts” to rebuild its nuclear capabilities since Trump’s strikes last summer, after the president had claimed the regime was just weeks from successfully building its first bomb.
White House officials had also repeatedly told Gabbard to fire Kent before he resigned, with her refusal further rankling the president.
The Guardian reported last week that Trump had privately asked advisers about the possibility of replacing Gabbard. Some aides had even taken to joking that her title’s acronym, DNI, stood for “Do Not Invite” given the frequency with which she had been excluded from key strategy sessions on the Iran conflict.
Gabbard’s salvation appears to have come from an unlikely corner of the MAGAverse. Axios reported Friday that Roger Stone, the president’s longest-serving political adviser, had intervened on her behalf, with one insider telling the publication: “Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi.”
Stone declined to comment on Axios’ reporting but confirmed the claims in a post on X, insisting that “fortunately, I acted in time.” Sources who spoke with Stone say he gave Trump four reasons to keep Gabbard on board.
These included that she is, in fact, loyal to the president’s agenda, that she didn’t deserve to be fired, that doing so would create a potentially damaging PR crisis, while also potentially turning her into a martyr among members of the MAGA base who are opposed to Trump’s war in the Middle East.
Axios notes that Stone’s intervention is likely to have now put him in the crosshairs of another of the president’s prominent allies, Laura Loomer, who has railed against the intelligence chief and only last week claimed on X that the White House had given Gabbard “the option to resign.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, Gabbard’s office and Stone’s representatives for comment on this story.
