Joe Kent Resigns From Trump Administration Over Iran War

Joe Kent has resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of President Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Kent, a twice-failed Washington congressional candidate aligned with the isolationist MAGA right, is the highest-ranking Trump official to quit because of the war.

But Kent didn’t portray the president as the real villain in the lengthy resignation letter that he posted on X on Tuesday. That distinction goes to Israel and its supporters in the United States. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Kent went on to argue that in the letter “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” launched a “misinformation campaign” early in Trump’s current term that undermined his America First agenda. Writing directly to Trump, Kent argued that this “echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.” He added the Israelis had used the same approach to “draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”

Trump, of course, is the president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world—not some hapless victim of Israeli deception. He willingly joined Israel to initiate the current war, despite the apparent reservations of some of his senior advisers. It was his responsibility to determine what was in the best interests of the United States, and he failed spectacularly in that task.

It is certainly true that Israel played a major role in pushing Trump towards war. Netanyahu has wanted the United States to attack Iran for decades, and he finally found a willing accomplice in the second-term version of Trump. It was not for nothing that a New York Times article headlined “How Trump Decided to Go to War” began with Netanyahu walking into the Oval Office in February determined to keep Trump “on the path to war.” The Israeli leader was particularly concerned that the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a diplomatic solution with Iran would prevent the battle he longed for.

After the war began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that the United States had been dragged into the war by its ally. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he explained on March 2.

Still, Trump could have easily said no to that pressure. He chose not to.

On a political level, Kent’s resignation is one of the most significant public splits thus far over Israel among the president’s supporters. In one camp are traditional neoconservative hawks like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). In the other is a more isolationist faction that includes Tucker Carlson and, at times, antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes.

The energy within the GOP base—particularly among younger voters—is clearly with Carlson, who is known for being close to Vice President JD Vance. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s recent decision to respond to criticism from hawkish conservative commentator Mark Levin in notably crude terms is another sign of how things have turned. Where that leads remains to be seen. But it is increasingly clear that should Trump’s second term turn out to be a bust, much of the far right is prepared to make Israel a convenient scapegoat for the president’s own incompetence. Some, like Fuentes, will no doubt extend the blame to Jewish Americans.

For Kent, seeing the United States launch itself into another poorly planned war has a deeply personal dimension. As I reported in a 2022 profile, Kent is a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments in the wake of 9/11. Serving in what came to be called the Global War on Terror was a radicalizing experience. “Was it worth it for our nation?” Kent said in a 2020 interview. “Was it worth it in terms of what we gained? It’s just hard to justify.”

Most tragically, Kent’s wife Shannon, a Navy cryptologist and the mother of his two boys, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019. As I reported, Kent later said that he and fellow veterans lost so many comrades that putting their names on memorials became “one big numb.” He continued, “It’s still very surreal that Shannon is now one of those.”

In his resignation letter, Kent blamed Israel for drawing the United States into Iraq two decades ago. That contrasts with a 2024 interview he gave to the podcaster Shawn Ryan, in which he did not single out Israel when assigning responsibility for the senseless wars in which he served. “Where do you think the big push came from?” Ryan asked Kent about the Iraq War. Kent blamed “moneyed interests in Washington, DC,” before citing Vice President Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton. Iraq, as he put it, was “good for business.”

Kent’s populist anti-interventionism was always the area where he was most likely to overlap with some on the left. On domestic politics, though, there was far less common ground. As I wrote after Trump picked Kent last year:

The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.

“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”

That is part of what makes putting Kent in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center so unsettling. He is a trained counterinsurgent who is now far more attuned to threats from within than those from overseas.

Last May, the Times reported that Kent had pushed intelligence officials to rewrite an assessment of the relationship between the Venezuelan government and the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. The move came after Trump sent more than 200 Venezuelans to an infamous Salvadoran prison based on the false premise that they were all members of Tren de Aragua, and that the group was controlled by the Venezuelan regime.

Referring to Trump and his boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Kent wrote, “We need to do some rewriting” and an additional analysis “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS.” In essence, Kent was pushing to twist intelligence to justify the indefinite detention of innocent men in horrific conditions. Unlike the Iran war, that, apparently, wasn’t a red line.