This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 29 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
As national outrage against this administration continues to grow, the current occupant of the Oval Office is coping in progressively unhinged ways.
On Wednesday evening, the increasingly unpopular — and cranky — president holed himself up and went on a social media rage spree, posting more than 50 times to his account in the span of just a few hours.
Gabbard has been working really, really hard to get back in Trump’s good graces.
Donald Trump reposted attacks on everyone from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, from former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. He even reposted an account smearing Minneapolis shooting victim Alex Pretti, calling the intensive care nurse a “domestic terrorist.”
Then, on Thursday, Trump decided to self-soothe with one of his North Korea-style Cabinet meetings, in which members of his administration go around the room lavishing him with praise.
But in a sign of just how rattled he is by the public outcry against his administration’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, Trump did not allow embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to speak at that meeting. And unlike his previous Cabinet meetings, he ended this one without taking questions from the press.
Another notable difference about Thursday’s Cabinet meeting was the absence of Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard has been out of the public eye for quite some time now, even amid several international crises that would typically fall well within her portfolio. For example, where was the director during the planning of one of the biggest national security operations of the Trump presidency: the lead-up to the night Trump attacked Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife? She definitely wasn’t in the Situation Room alongside the national security team. Instead, she was on the beach in Hawaii. Now, everyone loves a sun salutation, but her availability for yoga on the beach at this moment is also a pretty clear sign that she was not exactly in the inner circle.
But she has been working really, really hard to get back in Trump’s good graces.
It’s important to remember an exchange Trump had with Gabbard during a Cabinet meeting she actually did attend over the summer. After he asked the former Democratic representative about “bags of information” regarding “how corrupt the 2020 election was,” Gabbard said she would “be the first to brief” him once they had more details.
“We are finding documents literally tucked away in the back of safes and random offices, in these bags and in other areas,” she said. “Which, again, speaks to the intent of those who are trying to hide the truth from the American people.”
Gabbard, in her position as the director of national intelligence, assured the president she was hunting down information to support his widely debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Again, that was over the summer, and we have not seen much of her since. That is, until Wednesday, when she was seen literally creeping in the shadows of the Trump administration’s latest abuse of power in Fulton County, Georgia.
That’s where federal agents raided the elections office and hauled away pallets of boxes containing ballots from the 2020 election, executing a search warrant sought by Thomas Albus, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney whose district is 500 miles away in St. Louis.
Two people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Albus was empowered by Attorney General Pam Bondi to conduct nationwide investigations into Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Albus isn’t just a typical MAGA loyalist. He was once the right-hand man of former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, one of the chief pushers of the Big Lie. Not only did Schmitt sign an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results back in 2020, but he was also a notorious pusher of election disinformation. Now his protégé is in charge of the nationwide investigations into so-called election fraud.
As for Gabbard, her job is supposed to be about collecting intelligence from around the world and analyzing it for potential threats to U.S. national security. Yes, those can include legitimate threats to election security, but let’s be real, that is not what we are talking about here. So why was Gabbard in Georgia?
According to The Wall Street Journal, she is now leading an “administration-wide effort to hunt for proof of tampering in the election that Trump lost” more than five years ago. While that is itself equal parts embarrassing for him and alarming, what’s really worrisome is what she’s going to do with it.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “Gabbard is expected to prepare a report on her work, and the administration has discussed executive orders on voting ahead of the midterm elections, two of the officials said.”
In other words, this is not just a backward-looking investigation to vindicate an insecure president’s false election claims. This is about finding excuses to interfere with voting in the next election.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made that crystal clear in her comment to the Journal, saying, “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort.”
On Thursday evening, at the premiere of his wife’s multimillion-dollar turkey of a movie, Trump also didn’t hide his intentions, telling reporters Gabbard was “working very hard on trying to keep the elections safe.”
“She’s done a very good job,” the president said. “As you know, they got into the votes. They got a signed judge’s order in Georgia, and you’re going to see some very interesting things happening.”
Everything he does always seems to lead back to finding a way to control how people vote.
Just to put a fine point on this: The White House is telling us it is going to use this raid in Georgia and any other information it gathers as the basis for a report the director of national intelligence will file, which will then serve as justification for putting in place more restrictive measures in advance of the next election.
We have long known that Trump’s stolen election conspiracies are completely baseless, and the people who promoted those theories and tried to help him overturn the election results have all faced lawsuits, criminal charges and disbarment for their roles in that scheme. They were completely discredited.
But now the Trump administration appears to want to bring those kooks back into the spotlight.
On Thursday morning, Trump’s pardon attorney, Ed Martin, posted a photo from his official government account of himself with election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell. It included the caption “Good morning, America. How are ya’?”
And remember that late night rage posting? One of those posts was about a debunked conspiracy about Chinese and Italian satellites somehow being responsible for the 2020 election results.
Trump is bringing all of his wildest election conspiracies back, not just to gripe about the last election, but to use as some sort of bogus justification to limit voting in the next one.
It’s clear that interfering in that election has been his goal for some time now. Everything he does seems to lead back to finding ways to control how people vote. It’s why he told Minnesotans the only way he’d remove ICE agents from their state is if they turn over their voter rolls.
There is no great mystery about what’s going on here. Trump is weaker than he’s ever been, the American people are angrier at him than they’ve ever been, and as a result, Trump is taking his most drastic step yet to inject chaos into our next election.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Jen Psaki is the host of "The Briefing with Jen Psaki" airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.