HONOLULU — U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said Sunday that Hawaii’s 2018 false missile alert motivated her to run for president in 2020.
“I don’t remember the exact moment or day … but it was that experience that we all went through that was what drove me to make that decision,” she said in a speech at the 2019 U.S. Conference of Mayors in Waikiki.
Gabbard blamed the fear those in Hawaii had on a “new Cold War that’s being escalated with increasing tensions between nuclear-armed countries like Russia and China, and therefore a new arms race.”
Her platform while running for president has been founded largely on ending U.S. participation in the nuclear arms race and “wasteful regime-change wars” and reinvesting those resources to address health care, jobs, infrastructure and other needs.
Gabbard, who was one of the first to post on Twitter that the missile alert was false, was a vocal critic of nuclear threats to the U.S. soon after the Jan. 13, 2018, incident.
Her speech on Sunday, which she made as a scheduled speaker at a session held by the conference’s Women Mayors Leadership Alliance, focused mostly on her presidential platform.
Another point Gabbard made against spending on nuclear arms was that there is no funding for municipalities to prepare for it, which she called a failure of the federal government.
“You as mayors, people working at the local level, are you getting grants from the federal government to invest in these nuclear fallout shelters to protect your constituents?” she asked. “No, it’s not happening. Hundreds of trillions of dollars that would be needed to do this kind of thing are not coming to our communities. Our leaders have failed us.”
For the first three minutes of her speech, she discussed the progress women have made in local and federal government, noting that women now make up 20% of the mayors in the U.S.
During the next 10 minutes or so, she shifted focus to her presidential platform and discussed the ongoing arms race and the needs of U.S. citizens. She tied her foreign policy-heavy platform to the needs of local government, as many in her audience were mayors. She said the U.S. is currently spending $4 billion per month on war efforts in Afghanistan, which can be instead used in cities.
“Think about what you can do in your city and your community for $4 billion,” she said.
Gabbard then called on all mayors to also speak out against nuclear war.
“Speak out against these regime-change wars and this new Cold War that’s sucking money out of our pockets and our communities,” she said.
Elizabeth Kautz, mayor of Burnsville, Minn., agreed that money should be spent on U.S. needs instead of war efforts, and she complimented Gabbard on understanding the needs of local government.
“She understands the domestic agenda. She understands what happens to cities and the funding that we need,” Kautz said. “She focused on infrastructure … so she knows it, because she was a councilwoman.”
Gabbard is riding a campaign high, after she and nine other Democratic presidential candidates — including U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker — debated on national TV for the first time Wednesday.