Tulsi Gabbard goes missing from TV spots as Trump officials boast about president’s Venezuela attacks

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was excluded from President Donald Trump’s team planning the U.S. military raid on Venezuela over the weekend, according to a report.

Operation Absolute Resolve saw Caracas hit with a series of missile strikes on Friday night before Delta Force commandos stormed a military complex to capture the country’s then-president, Nicolas Maduro, and First Lady Cilia Flores, who were subsequently taken to New York to answer narco-conspiracy charges.

The mission was reportedly planned for months in advance by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and White House Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, with “little role” for Gabbard, The Washington Post reports.

While Trump was flanked by those men when he delivered a press conference about the operation from his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Saturday, Gabbard was nowhere to be seen, nor has she appeared on conservative channels like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN to celebrate its success as a range of Trump loyalists have done.

The former Democrat appears to have spent the New Year in her native Hawaii, posting a series of photos of herself on X on January 2 practising yoga on the beach, and did not comment on Maduro’s removal until Tuesday.

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“President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers,” the director finally wrote.

“Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve.”

An unnamed former U.S. intelligence official told the Post: “It seems pretty obvious that she was not part of this and has not been part of the inner circle for some time, if ever. She is an isolationist, and Trump is some kind of weird imperialist.”

The Independent has reached out to the White House and to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for comment.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Post: “President Trump has full confidence in his entire exceptional national security team.

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“Efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work.”

An Iraq War veteran and former Democratic congresswoman, Gabbard has long spoken out against costly American involvement in foreign conflicts and looks an uneasy fit with the administration, given its current turn towards interventionism.

A video of her warning the U.S. to “stay out of Venezuela” from January 2019 was recirculated on social media earlier this week, providing a reminder of her past opposition to meddling in South America.

“The United States has a disastrous history of military intervention and regime change around the world, which has brought suffering to millions of people, bankrupted our country, dishonored our troops, and it’s undermined our national security,” she said in the clip.

“Venezuela poses no threat to the United States. Congress has not authorized the United States to go to war in Venezuela, and there’s no justification for our country to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”

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She also derided then-White House national security adviser John Bolton around the same time and took issue with the first Trump administration’s other foreign policy adventures, including its threats against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2018 and the assassination of Iranian military official Qasem Soleimani in early 2020.

In her current role – which has largely had a domestic focus so far – she angered Trump last June by visiting Hiroshima and posting another video online in which she said: “As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”

Interpreted in some quarters as a warning to the president, it did not stop him from joining Israel’s hostilities against Iran by striking the latter’s nuclear facilities less than two weeks later.

When it was pointed out to Trump that Gabbard had told Congress three months earlier that Tehran was not currently accelerating its nuclear program, he replied curtly: “I don’t care what she says.”

She is by no means the only member of his MAGA coalition struggling to reconcile their instinctive “America First” isolationism with the administration’s recent actions, which have also seen it threaten Greenland, Cuba, and Colombia.

Just as Gabbard declared in October that there would be no more “toppling regimes [and] trying to impose our system of governance on others,” Vice President JD Vance has faced hypocrisy accusations in recent days, given that he told a graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy last year there would be “no more undefined missions; no more open-ended conflicts.”