Joe Kent Is the First Iran War Crack in the Trump Admin

The MAGA split over the Middle East has often been much ado about nothing. Although the second Trump administration began with staffing fights between hawks and doves—and acrimonious debates about Israel in conservative media—President Donald Trump held onto his coalition through a small war in Yemen and a one-off attack in Iran.

That changed on Tuesday afternoon when Joe Kent, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned over the current war in Iran, which the U.S. and Israel launched jointly last month. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter, which he shared publicly.

It might have been possible to dismiss Trump’s previous interventions as more careful than the adventures of “dumb presidents” in the past, as Vice President J.D. Vance did last year. But this war with Iran is too explosive to ignore. The administration began the war as an explicit regime-change campaign, did not expect it to escalate as much as it did, and now seems to be edging toward putting American boots on the ground.

Like the escalation of the war, Kent’s resignation seems to have caught the administration off guard. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was quick to claim that Kent had been on the outs for a long time anyway. Trump himself told reporters that he “always thought [Kent] was weak on security.”

The Biden administration also faced its own series of public resignations over its policy toward Israel, though these focused on Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza rather than the threat of a regional war.

Kent’s attacks on Israel provoked a harsh reaction from Trump’s supporters and opponents alike. On social media, Rep. Mike Lawler (R–N.Y.) called Kent “a leaker who spent more time undermining our foreign policy than doing his job. Now he’s out the door and blaming Jews on his way out.” From the other side of the aisle, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D–Fla.) told CNN that Kent was an “extremist” and the wrong “messenger.”

In addition to blaming Israel for the current war, Kent wrote in his letter that “the Israelis” used the same tactics “to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war,” and that he “lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel.” (Shannon Kent was a U.S. Navy intelligence technician killed by the Islamic State group while advising Kurdish rebels in Syria.)

Israeli officials and pro-Israel activists egged on the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously testified to Congress at the time that the war would have “enormous positive reverberations.” But there is no direct link between Israel and U.S. involvement in the Syrian Kurdish conflict. As for the current war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly stated that Trump decided to attack Iran because Israel was going to go first.

Kent, a former CIA paramilitary, is indeed an unusual messenger for these criticisms. During his unsuccessful congressional run in 2022, he sent a letter to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee filled with glowing praise for “the help that Israel has provided the United States” fighting their “common enemies in the Middle East.” In 2020, he called on Trump to “wipe Iran’s ballistic [missile] capability out,” a statement that Trump reposted in response to Kent’s resignation.

Other members of the Trump administration have been much more outspoken against war with Iran and the hawkish influence of Middle Eastern governments for much longer. During the 2024 elections, Vance told The Tim Dillon Show that “our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran.” Kent’s former boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, warned repeatedly in 2019 and 2020 about the danger of attacking Iran, even calling Trump “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” for considering it.

Kent met with Gabbard and Vance at the White House before going public with his resignation, The Washington Post reports. But Gabbard did not address Kent’s resignation when she testified to Congress on Wednesday. (Her subordinate, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, testified that he disagrees with Kent.) Instead, Gabbard praised the success of the war and Trump’s authority to wage it.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said. “That is up to the president, based on the volume of information that he receives.”