Eliza brought a cheese board on Tuesday night, and by the time we got to the Manchego somebody said, with the cheerful finality of a woman closing a car trunk, that Tulsi Gabbard was going to be fine. Fine. That was the word. Not qualified, not prepared, not experienced. Fine. I put down my wine and asked what, exactly, fine meant in the context of a person who is now reading the President’s morning intelligence brief, and everyone at the table suddenly found their napkins deeply interesting.
Yesterday the Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, which is the job that sits on top of eighteen separate intelligence agencies like a very small hat on a very large head. One Republican — Mitch McConnell, of all the ghosts to rise — voted no. Every other Republican, including several who had spent the previous three weeks telling reporters on background that they had grave concerns, decided that their grave concerns were, in the end, about the weight of a feather.
I want to be careful here. I have spent thirty years watching Washington confirm people I did not like for jobs they were not good at, and I am not in the business of pretending every appointment is the end of the republic. Most of them are just disappointing. But the DNI job is specifically, structurally, the job of telling the President what is true when the President would prefer it not be. That is the entire point of the position. It exists because after September 11th we decided somebody needed to stand in the doorway and say the quiet parts out loud.
Gabbard’s public record on the intelligence community she now leads is not ambiguous. She has called its leadership a cabal. She has described its work, repeatedly, as a threat to American democracy. She flew to Damascus in 2017 and sat across a table from Bashar al-Assad and came home to tell a skeptical press corps that she was skeptical he had gassed his own people, a skepticism that has survived, like a houseplant nobody waters but nobody throws away, every subsequent finding to the contrary. She has praised Edward Snowden as brave. She has, on a podcast whose name I will not dignify, suggested that the very agencies she now oversees were running a kind of shadow government.
These are not gotcha clips scraped off an intern’s laptop. These are on-the-record positions, delivered on camera, defended in print, and repeated in book form. The woman who now decides what intelligence the President sees spent the last four years telling anyone who would listen that the people collecting that intelligence are the problem.
I asked a friend of mine — a lobbyist I’ll describe only as bipartisan, in the sense that he will take anyone’s money — what he thought was going on. He chewed an almond for a long time. Then he said: Margaret, the fix is that the President doesn’t want the briefing anyway. He wants someone who’ll give him the version that makes him feel good on Tuesday. He said this like he was telling me the weather. He said this like it was a logistics problem. He said this and then asked if there was more wine.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have outlasted seven administrations and one fire, called me yesterday morning before the vote. Judy does not do politics on the phone. Judy does crossword clues and grandchildren and the occasional complaint about her knee. Yesterday Judy said, Maggie, the career people are not okay. That was the whole call. Maggie, the career people are not okay.
The defense of Gabbard, insofar as one was mounted on the Senate floor, amounted to three arguments, each flimsier than the last. One: she was a veteran, which she is, and which has almost nothing to do with whether she should run the intelligence community, a fact we all understood clearly the last six times this argument was deployed on behalf of someone we disagreed with. Two: she had evolved, a word that is doing Olympic-level heavy lifting in this town lately. Three — and this was the one Senator Lankford actually said out loud — that the President deserved his team. As though this were a cabinet post at a small PR firm and not the person who decides which threats the commander in chief is allowed to know about.
Here is what I keep turning over. For twenty years the bipartisan consensus in this city — a consensus I frankly found sanctimonious at times — was that the intelligence community, for all its sins, was one of the few institutions too serious to be turned into a loyalty test. You could argue about its methods. You could argue about Iraq, and many of us did, loudly. But you did not, as a matter of basic civic hygiene, install at the top of it someone whose stated view was that it needed to be brought to heel.
That consensus died on Wednesday. Fifty-two senators killed it, and forty-seven more shrugged, and a fiftieth — a former majority leader whose own legacy is not exactly a rose garden — was the only one who apparently remembered what the job was for. When the history of this week is written, and it will be written, the interesting number will not be 52. It will be 47: the senators who privately agreed Gabbard should not have this job and publicly helped her get it.
I said some version of this at dinner, and Eliza — who I love, and who has been my friend since the Clinton administration — told me I was being dramatic. She said the intelligence community would manage. She said the career people always figure it out. She said we had survived worse. And maybe she’s right. Maybe the professionals down the hall will keep the lights on, keep the briefings honest, keep the country intact through sheer inertia and muscle memory, the way they always have.
But I want to note, for the record, that this is now the argument. The argument is no longer that the people we confirm are qualified. The argument is that the institution will survive them. That is a different country than the one I started covering. That is a country that has decided the guardrails are somebody else’s problem.
I asked Eliza, on her way out, what she would say if her daughter — who is twenty-four and asks very good questions — wanted to know how this happened. Eliza stopped in the doorway. She said, I’d tell her we were tired. Then she took her Tupperware and went home, and I stood in my kitchen with the lights on for a long time, thinking about what it means when tired becomes a governing philosophy.