Why Joe Kent’s Resignation Will Inflame the MAGA Civil War
The time for choosing sides has now officially arrived.
THE FACTION OF MAGA PERSONALITIES angry about Donald Trump’s war with Iran now has a martyr, and he’s one of their own.
The resignation of National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent this week—and the ensuing Trump administration attacks on him—have lent a new prestige to Iran-war critics like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Kent cited his disagreement with the war as the reason for his resignation (along with some wink-wink antisemitism about the war’s origins, too). In doing so, he gave likeminded allies a vessel onto which they could attach their own grievances.
He also did something those allies had been unable to do to this point: put real pressure on figures within the administration to make difficult calculations about their own political careers. If Kent could resign over the war—they might be asked in the not-too-distant future—why couldn’t they, too?
It’s fair to say, even at this early juncture, that Kent’s resignation is producing the biggest fissure on the right since Trump pushed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene out of Congress in November.
Kent is set to be interviewed by Owens Thursday night, at a banquet for MAGA group Catholics for Catholics. But first, he stopped by Carlson’s show on Wednesday, where Carlson sought to position Kent as an aggrieved patriot attempting to save the country from “certain disaster.”
“Is this the kind of person that makes me proud to be a fellow American?” Carlson asked his audience to consider.
The answer Carlson was looking for, of course, was “Yes!” Summing up the flurry of leaks aimed at Kent since his resignation—the latest being that, prior to his resignation, he was put under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information—Carlson said the Trump administration’s new ethos was “Joe Kent was right, therefore Joe Kent must be destroyed.”
Supporters of the Iran war outside the administration have also tried their hands at discrediting Kent. Mark Levin, perhaps the right’s most prominent war supporter, called Kent a “rogue staffer.” Glenn Beck and others pointed to an article critical of American aid to Ukraine that Kent’s wife coauthored for the Grayzone, a publication that has frequently run cover for Vladimir Putin. Beck, who erroneously called the site “the Graystone,” suggested that Kent, through his wife, has somehow fallen under the thrall of pro-Putin forces.
“The man may be the head, but the wife is the neck and she turns the head,” Beck said.
But Kent’s resignation is attracting some unusual supporters too, suggesting his criticisms of the war could get more support than those offered by more polarizing figures like Owens. While Breitbart has attacked him, the Daily Caller called his critics “neocon chicken hawks.”
Kent’s resignation is important not just because it’s forcing conservative publications to weigh in on the merits. It’s important because he isn’t a faceless bureaucrat. Kent is a known figure in right-wing media, with friendships with people like Carlson to draw on.
As a congressional candidate, he became a frenemy of antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes, first talking to Fuentes on the phone in an apparent bid for his support, then infuriating the groypers when he disowned their leader. Kent even employed a Proud Boy. And he embraces some of the dissident right’s more outlandish beliefs, saying in his appearance on Carlson’s show that he was blocked from investigating whether Charlie Kirk was really killed by a lone gunman.
Maybe someone like that should never have been in an administration, let alone in a prominent role in the national security apparatus. But Kent was given that job. And his decision to leave it on the terms he did effectively puts an end to the notion that this administration is all onboard Trump’s Iran policy. It also raises real questions about whether the isolationist America Firsters can coexist in the now war-hungry president’s coalition.
JOE KENT’S DECISION TO QUIT will hasten and heighten the showdown between Donald Trump and his right-wing critics. In a way, this current moment has echoes of Democratic factionalism in the runup to the Iraq War, or the grassroots conservative revolt to the George W. Bush administration’s push for a legal pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
In each case, a vocal group of activists in the party was unhappy with the pursuits of the party’s leadership. But the leadership went ahead anyway, wrongly convinced they knew better than the neophytes which way the political winds were blowing.
In a few years, the Iran war will probably be unpopular on the right, read through the same anti-Israel lens through which they came to see the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
For anyone in the administration with political ambitions who might believe this is where things are heading—and who might want to get there more quickly—Kent has raised the stakes for what it will take to do so convincingly: a loud resignation. JD Vance and Marco Rubio will likely be stuck on the wrong side of that debate in 2028. But Kent and Carlson won’t be.
This is a movie where you're actively rooting for everyone involved to die...........
The antisemitism is far more than wink-wink. I'd say if the situation were Trump on the side of a country attacking Israel, Kent would not be bothered by the absence of an imminent threat.