Tulsi Gabbard will take a two-week break from the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign trail to join the Army National Guard for a training exercise in Indonesia.
The Hawaii representative, 38, will squeeze in a visit to the Hawkeye State for the Iowa State Fair before she leaves later this week, a campaign spokesman told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
“We’ve got a strong people-powered campaign, and so we’re working on making sure that our folks are out and they’re continuing to go to the fairs and the town halls and sharing our message as I will be stepping away from the campaign for two weeks to fulfill my duty to the Army National Guard,” Gabbard told ABC this week.
It’s not unusual for White House hopefuls to take a few days off campaigning to deal with situations at home.
Pete Buttigieg stepped off the trail in June to respond to the shooting death of a black man by a white police officer as part of his mayoral duties in South Bend, Indiana. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio returned to Manhattan last month after tens of thousands of residents lost power for five hours. And former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke canceled events in California and Nevada last week after a white nationalist, anti-immigrant shooter killed 22 people when he opened fire in an El Paso Walmart with an assault-style rifle.
But contenders less frequently offer up the same reason as Gabbard, who’s vying to become the first active soldier elected commander in chief since Harry Truman.
The timing, however, is problematic for the Hawaii Army National Guard major and Iraq War veteran, whose presidential bid is premised on bringing “a soldier’s heart to the White House” and ending U.S. participation in regime-changing wars.
After successfully lobbing political grenades at Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan over foreign policy during the June opening debates in Miami and California Sen. Kamala Harris in Detroit last week over her prosecutorial record, she has met the fundraising threshold of 130,000 individual donors to walk out onto the debate stage in September when the events reconvene in Houston. She now has to register 2% support in four polls before the Aug. 24 deadline, needing to add three more surveys to qualify.
Before she was elected to Congress in 2012 as the body’s first Samoan American and Hindu member, Gabbard won a 2002 race to become a Hawaii state legislator at the age of 21, the youngest woman in U.S. history to be seated in a statehouse. In 2004, she decided against reelection so she could deploy on two tours in the Middle East, one in Kuwait and another in Iraq.
Though rising quickly to Democratic National Committee vice chair, she resigned from the post in 2016 to endorse Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for that cycle’s nomination over establishment favorite former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She has also earned widespread criticism for meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad and her reticence to denounce his alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people.
