Tulsi Gabbard and the Grift of a Thousand Faces
When you take a good hard look at Donald Trump’s Cabinet, one thing becomes abundantly clear very quickly: there is no shortage of grifters.
Pam Bondi spent years as Florida’s attorney general, a supposed law-and-order conservative, only to transform into Trump’s personal shield-bearer as his second attorney general during his second non-consecutive term — dropping investigations, bending the Justice Department into a loyalty operation, and proving beyond any reasonable doubt that her entire prosecutorial career was just a warm-up act for becoming the most expensive yes-woman in Washington.
Pete Hegseth sold himself to the American public as a warrior-patriot who would restore toughness and discipline to a military he claimed had gone soft — conveniently ignoring the sexual assault allegation hanging over his confirmation — and has since spent his tenure purging generals, tanking morale, and leaking classified war plans into a Signal group chat that included a journalist. The grift was competence cosplay.
There’s RFK Jr., who built a decades-long brand as the fearless independent crusader against corporate medicine and government health agencies, only to hand Trump complete control of the entire public health apparatus and sit there quietly while they gutted the CDC and FDA. The man who spent years warning you that the government would poison you is now the government poisoning you.
And then there is Tulsi Gabbard. I will be honest with you — and honestly, that is sort of the whole point of this newsletter — Tulsi Gabbard’s brand of grift is so exhausting and so transparent that I genuinely struggle to justify spending real intellectual energy reverse-engineering how her brain works. I seriously doubt this one is going to be long. Before I go any further, I want to say plainly and without any hedging whatsoever: I wish her husband Abraham a full recovery. A rare bone cancer diagnosis is devastating, and no amount of political disagreement changes that. But here at The Thinking Class, we call a thing a thing. And Tulsi Gabbard is a thing that needs to be called. So let’s be efficient about it.
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