Today, as first reported by The Washington Times, Team Trump released a video featuring President Trump’s triumphant return to the world stage with his first international trip since securing the nomination to be the 47th President of the United States. The video features President Trump’s visit to the historic re-opening of the Notre Dame Cathedral where he engaged with several world leaders and in additional meetings discussed how he will implement his successful peace through strength national defense strategy.
The video highlights Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Nominee Tulsi Gabbard, and National Security Advisor Nominee Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), and their commitment to President Trump’s mission to bring safety, security and freedom back to Americans.
“The American people re-elected President Trump because they trust him to lead our country, ensure peace through strength, stand by our allies, and restore America’s reputation on the world stage. It’s clear that President Trump has already started that process with his historic visit to Notre Dame, and when he returns to the White House, he will continue to drive forward on his mission to Make America Strong Again.” – Trump-Vance Transition Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt
Watch the entire video HERE or read the transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT
Scott Jennings:
Let’s just be honest, for God knows how many months, and thank goodness Donald Trump is willing to go represent this country on the world stage. He’s not taken office yet, but you can already see the attitude change of the American posture and the posture of the rest of the world to the United States of America.
Pete Hegseth:
But we will be strong, and we will have peace through strength, as Donald Trump has said, and we will put America first. That’s what he’s asked me to do at the Pentagon, and that’s my promise to the American people and our war fighters led by President Donald Trump. That’s how we’re feeling – good right here, feeling great. Fight for the country, fight for our military.
Tulsi Gabbard:
I stand in full support and wholeheartedly agree with the statements that President Trump has made over these last few days with regards to the developments in Syria. It’s one of the many reasons why I appreciate President Trump’s leadership and his election, where he is fully committed, as he has said over and over, to bringing about an end to wars, demonstrating peace through strength, and putting the national security interests and the safety, security and freedom of the American people first and foremost.
Rep. Mike Waltz:
President Trump and our team are watching very closely the 10s of 1,000s of ISIS fighters and their families that are still held in camps from when President Trump, in his first term, cleaned up and destroyed the ISIS caliphate. We have to keep a close eye on that the Kurds that are watching them. And then finally, of course, we’ll always stand with Israel, but our core interests are ISIS, Israel, our Gulf Arab allies. And of course, as Jackie mentioned, finding the whereabouts of Austin Tice.
Scott Jennings:
We’ve had a weak presidency for four years. We will now have a strong president. Love him or hate him. This man projects strength. Joe Biden has projected weakness. I’m glad Donald Trump is there. This church, this cathedral reopening is a big deal to Catholics and Christians all over the world. Thank goodness Donald Trump made this trip. It makes America look good for the US president to be engaged in a historical moment like this. So, I’m glad he made the trip.
French President Emanuel Macron:
Welcome back again. Thank you. We are very happy to have you here.
President Trump:
Thank you very much. Very great honor. And we have a great relationship. As everyone knows, we’ve accomplished a lot together, and the people of France are spectacular, and it’s an honor to be here. We had a good time together, and we had a lot of lot of success, really great success, working together on defense and offense too. And it certainly seems like the world is going a little crazy right now, and we’ll be talking about that. Thank you very much indeed.
Former Director of Counterterrorism at CIA: Tulsi Gabbard Is Right for Director of National Intelligence
Bernard Hudson, who is the former director of counterterrorism at the CIA, writes in the National Review that Tulsi Gabbard “has the experience, temperament, and professional integrity necessary for the American intelligence community to win and keep the trust of the American people.”
Hudson: The United States has increasingly become a low-trust society, where diminished confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of our institutions is widespread and bipartisan. This now extends to the American national security and intelligence sectors, where that loss of trust is problematic for a country with enduring global responsibilities and interests.
For a vocal portion of the elite national security establishment, however, the remedy for that skepticism is not to entertain that its critics may have a point, but to demand reflexive obedience to an outdated consensus that may no longer be fit for purpose.
This erosion of institutional trust has been fueled, in part, by some of the spectacularly wrong calls the U.S. intelligence community has made over recent years. Its assessment that there was an active weapons of mass destruction program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq set in motion two decades of regional instability. Its prediction that the removal of Libya’s Qaddafi would improve regional stability resulted in years of civil war in that country and a torrent of refugees to Europe. Its assessment that the Afghan government could sustain itself once American bayonets departed fell apart when that government collapsed within a long weekend.
These failures have had real, lasting effects on the security and credibility of the United States, as it seems to have effectively pioneered militarism without victory. Compounding this is a sense by many Americans that the security services are immune from consequences when systemic failures occur.
There has also been an unwelcome trend where some of the residual prestige and expertise the security services possess has been repurposed to disparage domestic political figures. These included, but were not limited to, public accusations that a sitting U.S. president was the agent of a hostile, foreign power. This flimsy accusation occupied the nation’s attention for years before ending with a whimper. Still, a substantial, partisan remnant of millions of believers in this baseless accusation remains.
These events convinced just as many others on the opposite side of the partisan divide that the same intelligence community that protected the country in the years after 9/11 had perhaps begun to apply to the American people the tactics it had learned against our enemies overseas.
Given all this, restoring the American people’s broad faith in the intelligence community is an urgent task. They need to believe that those entrusted with the vast powers of the national security apparatus will perform their duties in a nonpartisan way that prioritizes constitutional rights, meaningful accountability, and democratic safeguards.
Changing these trends will be hard, and that effort must begin at the top. It is vital the director of national intelligence (DNI), who leads the intelligence community, be someone with high integrity, sound judgment, and a clear understanding of the commander in chief’s intentions. It would also go a long way toward reestablishing credibility with Americans if the next director were someone with a significant, bipartisan background.
Tulsi Gabbard fits these criteria. She has the right experience, temperament, and professional integrity to restore faith in America’s intelligence community.
Gabbard is a career public servant who served in the Hawaii state legislature and for four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the latter capacity, she was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. She was also the vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. She has also worn her country’s uniform for over two decades in the U.S. Army, with a combat deployment to Iraq. As a soldier, she knows both the importance of patriotism and the cost that all military interventions inevitably require.
In addition to serving her country in a combat zone, Gabbard has a different and equally rare form of courage. The DNI needs to be willing to say unpopular — and, sometimes, unwelcome — things in pursuit of accuracy, free of the Beltway conventional wisdom that often serves as blinders.
Sadly, not all policy-makers or senior officials have been willing to ask hard but fair questions of the American national security establishment. During her time in Congress and in her 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gabbard displayed a willingness to think and speak beyond the predictable sound bite. She first made waves in 2015, bucking her party to blast the Obama administration for banishing mention of descriptive terms like “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“[It is] critical that we accurately define our enemy and its ideology,” she told an interviewer in 2016. “The ideology shared by ISIS, al-Qaeda, and affiliated terrorist organizations is ‘Islamism.’ Distinct from the religion of Islam, Islamism is a radical political ideology of violent jihad aimed at establishing a totalitarian society governed by laws based on a particular interpretation of Islam.” Despite relentless attacks from the Left, she has remained an outspoken Democrat critic of some of her party’s terrorism policy — and, by extension, its foreign policy more broadly. This position has aged far better than that of many of her detractors.
For this reason, Gabbard has also been the target of vitriolic criticism and was, like Donald Trump, smeared as a Russian agent. Government officials did not deny the recent revelation that Gabbard was apparently added to the one of the many terrorist travel watch lists the government maintains, despite the fact that she maintains a top-secret clearance as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves.
Her detractors have accused her of making comments supportive of hostile foreign leaders. But these accusations are misleading. Rather than being soft on America’s adversaries, she has been willing to ask hard questions of an often-flawed elite foreign policy consensus.
A telling example is the criticism to which she has been subjected regarding her 2017 visit to Syria and meeting with its former president, Bashar al-Assad. Over the prior several years, the U.S. administration expended tens of thousands of non-U.S. lives and enormous amounts of treasure in a failed attempt to topple Assad. Gabbard argued that involvement in Syria’s civil war wasn’t in the American interest. Not long after her visit, Washington’s elite foreign policy caste itself came to abandon regime change as a priority, due to concern about just who might take over in Syria.
Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq occupation, has also been attacked for questioning the intelligence about Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people. Whether or not she was right about this, it shows a willingness to depart from the herd and push back on received wisdom. The intelligence community could have used such a voice prior to the Iraq War, which was erroneously justified by using flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. And it could use a similar internal skeptic of its consensus today.