Tulsi 2020: Anti-war Democrat says she’s running for US president
Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. The Samoan and Hindu congresswoman is an Iraq War veteran and an outspoken critic of US ‘regime change’ policy in Syria.
“I have decided to run and will be making a formal announcement within the next week,” Gabbard told CNN’s Van Jones, the network revealed on Friday evening. The interview will air on Saturday evening.
“There are a lot of reasons for me to make this decision. There are a lot of challenges that are facing the American people that I'm concerned about and that I want to help solve,” she said, mentioning healthcare access, criminal justice reform and climate change as her key platform issues.
There is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace.
Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012 and currently serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She served in a medical unit of the Hawaii National Guard and was deployed in Kuwait and Iraq.
In 2016, Gabbard resigned as Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), after endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. Sanders eventually lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, who went on to lose the election to Donald Trump.
Also on rt.com Stop being ‘Saudi Arabia’s b*tch,’ Tulsi Gabbard tells Trump, critics pounceDue to her antiwar stance in Syria, Gabbard was at one point rumored to be a potential candidate to head Trump’s State Department, and even met with the president-elect at Trump Tower in November 2016, but nothing came of it. In January 2017, she traveled to Syria on a fact-finding trip, outraging the Washington establishment. She has also proposed a bill to outlaw US weapons sales to terrorists.
Gabbard first sparked rumors of a 2020 run in December, when she toured Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to host nationwide party primary elections.
Inspired by the party’s strong showing in the November midterms, a number of Democrats are eager to challenge Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced on New Year’s Eve that she was forming a presidential exploratory committee. Julian Castro, former Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Obama administration, has also toured Iowa and is expected to announce his candidacy this weekend.
It is unclear whether Gabbard will get much traction among the establishment Democrats, who she has frequently disagreed with on foreign policy issues.
Ostensibly, Tulsi Gabbard checks all the correct "diversity boxes" that Democrats claim they want: young, female, minority. But weirdly, she won't benefit from satisfying these (fake) criteria, because she's hated for unrelated political reasons. So that should be fun.
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 11, 2019
Tulsi Gabbard is a really next-level politician. Any amateur can be a traditional US racist politician, but it takes skill to succeed in America as a Hindu-nationalist racist / tankie Assad apologist.
— Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) January 11, 2019
Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t have a base but she’s someone people like the more they see her. Don’t sleep on this one. Although if you follow Cernovich you remember I said over two years ago that she was the one to watch...
— Mike Cernovich 🦍🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) January 12, 2019
Say what you want about Tulsi Gabbard (I have my own criticisms) but this is probably an accurate prediction of how opposition to her campaign from other Democrats will play out https://t.co/xEhdD1ZmyN
— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) January 11, 2019
I’d pay close attention to the financing of this campaign. https://t.co/DMiABthwNY
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) January 11, 2019
Tired of Putin? Vote Assad 2020!!!!!!! https://t.co/aMMF71wz69
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) January 11, 2019
So many entrenched bipartisan interests fear the foreign policy debate her presence on the campaign trail will provoke. Look for more obsessive attacks in Omidyar’s the Interventionist, republished in his local Hawaii paper. Also, not sure what this means for a Bernie run. https://t.co/RD7pCRRkTW
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 12, 2019
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