Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) appeared on Trump-boosting Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on the eve of the New Hampshire primary and defended President Donald Trump’s ouster of two key impeachment witnesses just two days after his acquittal.
Last Friday, after celebrating being acquitted of abuse of power charges, the president fired National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and U.S Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Vindman, specifically, was marched out of the White House by security, along with his twin brother, who was also terminated from his NSC position.
Gabbard, who has become a frequent Fox News guest in recent months, defended the firings to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto over the weekend, telling him that while she disagrees with many of Trump’s decisions “as it relates to foreign policy,” the public needs to realize that “there are consequences to elections.”
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“The president has, within his purview, to make the decisions about who he'd like serving in his Cabinet,” she added.
Appearing on Hannity on Monday night, the Hawaii congresswoman first called for Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez to resign over the chaotic Iowa caucuses, saying “he’s had a failure of leadership” and has been unable to “uphold that faith and trust.”
After telling Gabbard that she’s “been treated horribly” by the Democratic Party and that he supports her outspoken criticism of former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (Gabbard is suing Clinton for defamation), Hannity applauded her defense of Trump’s retaliatory firings.
“I thought that was courageous,” he stated. “Just acknowledging a simple truth that a president gets to hire and fire the people he wants, not people that disagree with his policy.”
Gabbard said the “deeper issue” is that her defense of Trump isn’t based on opinion but “on the Constitution,” noting at the same time that she’s still an active soldier in the National Guard.
“Thank you for your service,” Hannity interjected.
“Thank you, thank you very much, but as a member of Congress, I took an oath to the Constitution as does every member of Congress,” she continued. “And it is the Constitution that provides that our foreign policy is set by the president of the United States as well as, in some significant ways, by Congress, not by unelected bureaucrats and not by the military.”
“And the reason why our founders had the wisdom to do this, they knew if voters were unhappy with the foreign policy decisions being made, they could make that decision at the ballot box to hire or fire where they can’t do that with unelected bureaucrats or others,” the Democratic lawmaker concluded.
