Once a “rising star” inside the Democratic Party, Tulsi Gabbard’s star has since fallen. Republicans, in all their wisdom, have decided to pick it up, dust it off, and follow it into a cul-de-sac.

“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party,” Gabbard revealed last week. She said that the party she vied to lead just two years ago is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” Today’s Democrats stoke “anti-white racism,” have no respect for the Constitution, are hostile to “people of faith and spirituality,” and support teaching “explicit sexual content” in schools.

Here, the former congresswoman has deployed all the empty bluster that people who spend their lives on the internet find intimidating. And for some, it’s also affecting. Who doesn’t love to hear their own ideas expressed by a recent convert to their cause? And yet, conscientious conservatives less susceptible to the flattery of mimicry might ask the former congresswoman where she’s been all these years. The contours of modern Democratic politics she denounces were readily apparent when she was one of its “leading voices.”

We can’t blame Republicans for being susceptible to emotional manipulation. After all, the white-hot denouncements Gabbard’s heel-turn elicits from Democrats are a function of her betrayal. Apostasy is a greater sin than heresy, and everyone in this story is human.

And humans make mistakes, which is what explains the efforts by Republican candidates to make Gabbard into an avatar for the New Republican—a species within the GOP’s taxonomy that generally rejects Republican orthodoxy. In her first foray into the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Gabbard made headlines for herself—not the candidate she was there to support—when she insisted that, like Joe Biden, Hitler probably had the best of intentions. The strategic brilliance is positively blinding.

Any Republican who invites Gabbard to share his spotlight deserves the discomfort he’s likely to experience as a result. Gabbard is a known quantity. Her passions, which seem aroused mostly in opposition to American strategic interests abroad, have led her to sidle up alongside some of the world’s worst actors.

Gabbard’s “road to Damascus” first led her, quite literally, to Damascus. Armed with all the benefits of the intelligence to which she was privy, to say nothing of media reports anyone possessed of sufficient curiosity could consume at their will, Gabbard went out of her way to bestow legitimacy onto Syria’s mass murdering despot Bashar al-Assad. She couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for the plight of the Syrians being gassed, tortured, and slaughtered by their government. Nor was she capable of making the distinction between the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, or al-Nusra militants and anyone else engaged in resistance against that regime. Gabbard reserved her contempt for the West’s efforts to protect vulnerable populations inside Syria. Indeed, the model of geostrategic propriety to which we should aspire, she said, was Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria,” she said. “Putin did.” That restatement of Moscow’s line on the conflict in Syria forces those who adhere to it to disregard the fact that Assad materially supported the ISIS caliphate when it was a useful foil. It also elides the distinctions between Islamist terrorists, free Syrian rebels, Kurdish proxies, and many other actors with distinct motives and values. Papering over those distinctions was crucial to Moscow because it justified Russian support for starvation campaigns targeting whole cities and the bombing of hospitals.

Gabbard’s views didn’t change when it was U.S. forces engaging directly with Russian militia groups and threatening to target U.S. soldiers. Indeed, she believed that was all our fault. At the time, she warned that Western efforts to oppose Russia’s bloody ambitions in Syria could “result in a nuclear war” with Russia. Likewise, she says that the West’s support for Ukraine as it struggles to resist a naked campaign of territorial conquest is similarly naïve and dangerous.

Joe Biden is heedlessly “escalating their proxy war with Russia” in Ukraine, Gabbard charged this week. He is “discouraging diplomatic efforts and bringing the entire world closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.” She coupled this allegation with a full-throated endorsement of Ukrainian capitulation, which the West should somehow engineer. Gabbard’s penchant for conspiratorial thinking is on full display in a statement that presupposes the West is so omnipotent that it can dictate terms to every other actor on Earth and also so malevolent that it declines that duty.

What you can say about Gabbard is that she’s a true believer. It’s not as though she’s advocating a popular view of the conflict in Ukraine. Last week, three out of every four Americans told pollsters they supported arming Ukrainian forces despite the risks; this  included two-thirds of self-described Republicans. That high level of support has been remarkably stable since the start of this war, despite the fluidity of the conditions on the battlefield. Of course, a dedicated ideologue is free—even obliged—to take unfashionable but principled stands. But what does it gain Republican candidates in closely contested races to shackle themselves to someone so committed to saying unpopular things?

Indeed, what kind of political powerhouse are Republicans acquiring for themselves in Gabbard? What crossover appeal is there in someone who dropped out of the Democratic presidential nominating contest in the spring of 2020 after winning just over 270,000 Democratic votes? Republican voters don’t seem to share her enthusiasm for Russia’s geostrategic interests, nor are GOP-leaning independents starved for pro-Assad content. Is the Republican base just salivating over the restoration of Roosevelt-era banking regulations or the chance to team up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to provide Americans with a monthly stipend at taxpayer expense?

Gabbard contributes to the populist right’s campaign to discredit the party’s commitment to extroversion abroad and limited government at home. If Gabbard’s supplication before the GOP presents the party with any opportunity at all, therefore, it is the chance for Republicans to humiliate themselves. And if history is any guide, the GOP will take maximum advantage of it.