President Donald Trump’s feud with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about whether Iran is crafting a nuclear weapon has led to Republicans explicitly siding with the president.
The House of Representatives was out of session this week. But Senate Republicans, who are generally more hawkish than their House counterparts, have sided with Trump in terms of whether Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
“I trust President Trump,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Independent. “He’s undoubtedly correct.”
Cornyn faces a primary challenge against a MAGA challenger in Texas Attorney General Paxton during next year’s Republican primary and he voted to confirm Gabbard.
In March, Gabbard told The House Intelligence Committee that the US Intelligence Community continued to “assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had “not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
But Trump directly contradicted her when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked him about her testimony earlier this week.
“I don’t care what she said — I think they were very close to having one,” he said. Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, echoed Trump’s words to The Independent.
“I'm just saying, listen to what the president said,” he said.
Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia also told The Independent that he trusted Trump.
“For God's sakes of living, they have told the whole world what they're wanting to do,” he said of Iran. “They're wanting to eradicate Israel.”
Gabbard represents a unique spot. A former four-term Democratic congresswoman who had endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and ran for president in 2020, she quit the party and in 2024, endorsed Trump. As a lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard, Gabbard has criticized nation-building and military interventionism.
Despite her previous criticisms of U.S. surveillance programs, she received almost unanimous consent from Senate Republicans, with the exception of former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky who has criticized the idea of war with Iran, did not want to comment about the split between Trump and Gabbard.
“I don't need to get in the middle of a fight between those two, I've made many pronouncements, you're welcome to use any of my quotes,” Paul told The Independent.
Trump’s split with Gabbard represents a larger contradiction between his campaign and his support for Israel. Despite his ardent support for Israel in his first presidency, Trump has criticized “so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neocons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits.’” During his announcement for his 2024 campaign, he bragged about how he did not send the country into new wars and was “the first president to do it for a long period.”
But Israel’s decision to conduct strikes on Iran and Trump’s decision to fully support its efforts has led some of Trump’s most devoted followers, including right-wing provocateur Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, to break with Trump.
“Clearly the Republicans are in a cat fight, because there's the wing of the party that clearly wants to do this and the clean wing of the party that clearly doesn't,” Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA analyst, told The Indepndent. “I don't know how much this is rooted in an intelligence conversation. I think they're kind of winging it any given day.”
Gabbard was initially set to meet with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, criticized the the administration for contradicting the intelligence community.
“If this president wants to completely ignore the intelligence community, we are playing in dangerous ground, and this is exactly the way we got ourselves into Iraq,” he told The Independent.
