While the leftwing media is portraying former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s interview with Donald Trump, Jr. on his March 11 “Triggered” podcast as “groveling” to become former President Trump’s 2024 running mate, they are—perhaps deliberately—avoiding another part of that interview like the proverbial plague.
It was when Trump, Jr. touched on the Second Amendment that Gabbard, who left the Democratic party after leaving Congress and became something of a regular on Fox News, unloaded on Capitol Hill anti-gunners and the Biden-Harris administration.
The 3-minute, 51-second segment saw Gabbard first explain her childhood growing up in Hawaii—“Probably one of the most restrictive states for gun ownership in the country”—and her later experiences serving in the military to detail how her early views toward gun ownership were shaped.
Gabbard left Congress in 2021 following her unsuccessful run for the 2020 presidential nomination.
But the, she recalled how her attitudes changed after being on the campaign trail mounting a long-shot effort to gain the Democrat nomination. It is not the kind of narrative her former anti-gun Democrat colleagues want anyone to hear.
“I’ve got to tell you,” she told Trump, Jr., “as time went on and I spent a lot of time, especially over my campaign for president and the year since, with a lot of folks in New Hampshire and Iowa and different parts of the country, who had a very different experience than I did growing up.”
“They raised a lot of concerns about, around some of the things that throughout my time in Congress had all been coined as ‘well this is common sense gun safety laws. This is well-intentioned, in order to try to make sure that our communities are safe,’” Gabbard continued. “That’s a pretty compelling argument. But as with many things in Washington, as you know well, once you start peeling back the surface, you can understand that for a lot of folks who are using those words, they don’t have good intentions at all.” Then she lowered the proverbial boom.
“Their real objective is to try to get rid of the Second Amendment and take away our right to own firearms,” she detailed, “and our rights to defend ourselves, and even more pointedly, especially where we are now and where the Biden-Harris administration has taken us, our Founders intended the Second Amendment to be a check on the abuse of power by a tyrannical government.”
Gabbard’s remarks are quite a shift from when she was running for the presidency four years ago, but since then, her high-profile departure from the Democratic party, coupled with frequent criticisms of Democrats on Capitol Hill and the Biden-Harris administration, reflect something of an epiphany for the former Aloha State congresswoman.
As she continued explaining her dramatic change of course on the Second Amendment, Gabbard told Trump, “When you look at what the Biden-Harris administration has done, where they’re using the power of our law enforcement at county, state and federal level in different ways, using the power of the Department of Justice, the power of the National Security state, against American citizens…where they have no issue of using the secret FISA court to surveil Americans, illegally without a warrant, they have no issues siccing the FBI or other law enforcement agencies against American citizens who’ve done nothing wrong other than exercise their right to free speech, so over time my increased understanding, my being able to have some great and honest conversations with Americans who cherish our freedoms, who cherish the Second Amendment, helped me better understand what it really meant.”
Gabbard revealed she and her husband “are gun owners and recently competed in the Tactical Games for the first time. I appreciate and respect every American’s right to own a gun or not to own a gun.”
While many responses to the interview show skepticism toward Gabbard’s change of heart, some of her remarks are the stuff of which campaign advertising is made, not by her, but perhaps by Republicans running for office this year who want to portray Democrats as dismissive of civil rights, especially the right to keep and bear arms.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
