Joe Kent Isn't the Hero. You Are
Intel official’s resignation is a popular victory—but also a campaign slogan
The American revolution against Donald Trump can claim another victory. The president’s top counterterrorism official has resigned, issuing a blistering condemnation of the Iran War. He did not resign in some scandal. Not under pressure. Not to spend-more-time-with-my-family or whatever BS is usually given.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent said in a powerful letter today. He adds: “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”
It’s definitely a bracing statement for say-nothing Washington.
But it’s also another victory in the ongoing American upheaval I’ve been documenting for weeks now. From Mamdani’s election to the Epstein files disclosures to the victory in Minneapolis to the firing of Kristi Noem, the Trump administration is increasingly being beaten back. That’s not the result of anything that the courts have done, and certainly not Congressional action (what action?). It’s the result of the public pressure—people power, first and foremost.
Kent’s letter, for all its patriotic rhetoric, seems a lot like an insider coup against a declining president; and an attempt to capture the leadership of an increasingly unhappy MAGA. Kent is, after all, a politician who has run for Congress twice and seems all but certain to do so again. A cynic might even call this a campaign launch.
For all of his supposed truth-telling in his resignation letter, Kent is hardly anti-war. The letter praises Trump for “killing Qasem Solamani” and for “defeating ISIS,” a naked appeal to the president’s vanity (and to his supporters). Kent is just more a doctrinaire isolationist, the very kind of ideologue that Trump hired when he was in his “I won’t go to war” phase.
He does, however, now echo the same concerns about the Iran war that have been expressed by a majority of Americans since the February 28 airstrikes that killed Iran’s leader.
The majority of Americans oppose the Iran War, as seen in virtually all of the dozen or so available polls. It is striking to behold, not only because there has been no “rally around the flag” effect, as I’ve written, but also because the opposition is so broad based.
So when Kent says this war isn’t serving America, he’s echoing the view of a clear majority of the country. A majority so clear that politicians like Kent want to tap into it. And that’s a good thing.
But there’s a cynicism to his letter and its insistence that the president of the United States is some defenseless lamb being led astray by Israel.
The obvious conclusion here, that President Trump has chosen to ignore the popular will of Americans, is somewhere Kent isn’t willing to go. He instead offers the questionable explanation that the nation of Israel is somehow calling all of the shots. It is a clever ploy for a politician who is clearly looking to gain the support of MAGA without criticizing their standard bearer.
Kent has a tone that speaks directly to Trump and MAGA, assuring them that their blameless leader has been hoodwinked. Israel is to blame, he says, and thus he can argue that the true path of the Trump revolution can be preserved. Just stop the war.
But when the news cycle is done focusing on Kent, the war in Iran will still be there. It will have the same lame salad bar of objectives, and targets will continue to be struck with perfect and obscene precision. Congress will do nothing. Wall Street will focus on their bottom line. Washington will fight about the spelling of some word. But the Pentagon? It will continue, continue with a level of efficiency and preparedness that has come to characterize “war” in the current era, an industrial efficiency that no president can seem to resist.
People who read his letter might be spurred to action against Israel but about the U.S. military they will have nothing much to say because Kent gives them nothing.
The ease with which the military can now, aided by modern technology and AI, rapidly put together a plan of attack, bomb with relative impunity, and destroy lots of “targets” is the lingering problem for the future. Barack Obama was similarly seduced by the ability to kill with drones, and then undertook assassinations from the air driven largely by the seeming “success” and buoyed by the low-risk enterprise.
It is true that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agitated for war, but the Israeli military is operating more and more of one mind with the U.S. military. The two countries have shared a common war plan against Iran since the Biden administration. That level of cooperation has solidified under Trump, driven more by a true affinity and affection for the technologically and operationally sophisticated friend than anything Donald Trump (or Benjamin Netanyahu) has ordered.
A senior intelligence officer tells me that rather than Trump, it is Hegseth, a self-described “warrior,” who is most susceptible to Israeli influence.
“For a Hegseth who only wants the ‘warrior’ answer, Israeli swagger and combat competence is catnip,” the officer says.
The source adds that while Trump loves a winner, and he loves action, it is Hegseth and his “impetuousness” that pushes the relentless destroy-the-target, no-rules. no-quarter style of warfare that has unfolded.
That reality—the ease of warfare I’m describing—is the enduring problem that we will need to address long after Trump is gone and Kent is a Senator, or the next Charlie Kirk or MAGA-darling. (Axios reports that the White House is already prepping for a Tucker Carlson interview of Kent.)
So Kent is right in decrying that Israel’s objectives hold too much sway over what America sees as its interests, but he too easily lets Trump (and the Pentagon) off the hook, portraying them as helpless victims. The buck stop over there.
“You hold the cards,” Kent says to President Trump in closing.
Now turn them over to me, he means.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
his leaving struck me as a rat leaving a sinking ship
Insightful and all too credible a take. Rather than Israeli pressure or blackmail, more likely it's Trump's narcissism and stupidity, and that of his main crew, that led to war. The man with the silver spoon down his throat couldn't manage a casino without going bankrupt, couldn't build a hotel without stiffing contractors and workers, wouldn't have gotten into an Ivy or had capital to begin with without his NYCity daddy. Joe Kent may be as much an opportunist as the supposedly astute J.D., but yeah, he also may be better at cutting his losses.