How Tulsi Gabbard’s big moment with Harris is playing into Tuesday’s debate
It was 2019, and the second Democratic presidential primary debate was unfolding in Detroit when then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii went for the jugular.
Gabbard didn’t target Joe Biden, who at the time was the front-runner.
She turned instead to Kamala Harris, then the junior senator from California, and unleashed a bitter attack that took her prosecutorial record apart in detail.
“I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system that is disproportionately negatively impacting Black and brown people all across this country today,” Gabbard began, hitting Harris from the left. “Now, Sen. Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
Gabbard won loud, raucous cheers and applause. She continued, accusing Harris of blocking evidence in a death row case, keeping people in prison beyond their sentences and supporting a broken cash bail system. Major applause broke out in the room several times.
At the time, fact-checkers parsed Gabbard’s allegations, saying some weren’t accurate. Still, it turned into a major moment for Gabbard — even though Harris forcefully responded — and it was a standout episode in her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign.
It’s coming into view again now in the run-up to Tuesday’s second presidential debate after Donald Trump tapped Gabbard to assist him in his debate preparations. Trump campaign officials have said that he valued Gabbard’s experience in verbal combat with Harris and that the team had been seeking her consultation for some time. In 2022, Gabbard announced she was leaving the Democratic Party and campaigned for Republican candidates.
In February, she headlined a fundraiser for Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his residence in Florida. Gabbard had been among those under consideration to be Trump’s vice presidential pick, and she became a more active part of his team. She’s a frequent Harris critic on Fox News, she moderated a town hall for Trump, and she was recently named to his transition team.
Back in 2020, amid a crowded primary field, Gabbard’s focus on Harris took many observers by surprise.
“I remember thinking, ‘Hmm, that’s an interesting target — why Kamala?’ If you were handicapping the race, nobody thought Kamala was the front-runner at that point,” said Mark Longabough, a Democratic strategist who in 2016, as an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had gotten to know Gabbard when she was a Sanders surrogate. The attacks were effective, Longabough said, in part because Harris wasn’t yet well-known nationally.
“When somebody comes after you like that and starts laying down a bunch of charges, it causes voters to sort of scratch their head, because they don’t know. If she had gone after Biden or Bernie or someone better-known in the field, it might not have been as effective in some ways,” Longabough said. “Harris was kind of caught off guard. She didn’t expect such a tough attack from Tulsi Gabbard out of the blue.”
Asked about Gabbard’s involvement in debate preparations — such as they are in Trump world — a Trump campaign official said she had been helpful getting Trump to think about the pivot from attacking Harris to highlighting his policies or what he would do differently. That included talking through how to take things one step beyond the attack lines he gives at rallies into cohesive debate answers. The campaign official said the Trump team had been trying to get Gabbard involved for a while.
“Tulsi Gabbard whipped Kamala Harris’ butt on the debate stage,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said. “She’s offering her advice to President Trump ahead of Tuesday’s debate.”
Harris’ campaign didn’t comment.
When Gabbard went after her, Harris had come off her own major debate moment. In the first 2020 debate, on a crowded stage, Harris went after Biden over a decades-old busing policy and for his past comments about working with segregationist senators.
“I do not believe you are a racist,” she said as part of the encounter. Raising that prospect in the first place at the time rankled the Biden campaign.
In the Detroit debate, Harris did hit back at Gabbard, accusing her of having spent time during Barack Obama’s administration going on Fox News and attacking him. When Trump had been elected but not yet sworn in, Harris charged that Gabbard “buddied up to Steve Bannon to get a meeting with Donald Trump in the Trump Tower.”
Gabbard remains a perplexing and polarizing political figure. She was once viewed as a rising star in the party and as such a staunch supporter of Sanders that she delivered his nomination speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, launched her 2020 campaign as a progressive Democrat and at one point panned Trump’s foreign policy, accusing Harris of being in line with him and others; she said Harris would “continue the status quo, continue the Bush-Clinton-Trump foreign policy of regime-change wars.”
Gabbard had already lobbed direct criticisms at Trump, including in 2018, which got some attention.
“Hey @realdonaldtrump: being Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not ‘America First,’” she wrote on X.
Gabbard has long drawn the scorn of Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who suggested in 2019 that Gabbard — without specifically using her name — was “the favorite of the Russians.”
“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said.
When Gabbard dropped out of the 2020 race, she endorsed Biden.
“I know Joe Biden and his wife, and I’m grateful to have called his son Beau a friend who also served in the National Guard,” she said in a video statement then. “Although I may not agree with the VP on every issue, I know that he has a good heart and he’s motivated by his love for our country and the American people. I’m confident that he will lead our country guided by the spirit of Aloha, respect and compassion and thus help heal the divisiveness that has been tearing our country apart.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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