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If Thursday’s confirmation hearing is anything to go by, Tulsi Gabbard may well become President Trump’s first Cabinet nominee to get voted down by the Senate.

It was a disastrous audition for the post of director of national intelligence, as all of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s eight Democrats and a few of its nine Republicans raised serious questions about her judgment, her qualifications, and her ability to develop trust with the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies that she would oversee and with their counterparts in allied nations.

From the get-go, Gabbard’s nomination to be the top U.S. intelligence official has struck many as the most startling in a string of startling nominations. Many of these nominees seem well suited to weaken the departments or agencies that they would head—or, to put it in terms that Donald Trump and his entourage have invoked on many occasions, the sort of people who would, deliberately or by dint of their incompetence, help dismantle the “deep state.”

Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who turned MAGA enthusiast after a failed 2020 run for the presidency, has made waves in recent years for parroting Kremlin propaganda on the Russia–Ukraine war, for defending Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad (by disputing intelligence findings that he was behind specific chemical weapons attacks on his own people and by claiming that the rebel groups he bombed and strafed were all al-Qaida fighters), and for making various other bizarre claims.

When Trump announced her nomination, the anchors on Russia TV—the Kremlin-run news channel—greeted the news with glee, hailing Gabbard as “our girlfriend.”

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