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?
Here’s one reason:
The FBI has opened a leak investigation into a top former intelligence official who resigned Tuesday in protest over the war in Iran.
The investigation into former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent is focused on allegations that he improperly shared classified information, four people with direct knowledge of the investigation told Semafor.
In his resignation letter, Kent wrote that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and accused President Donald Trump of starting the war because of “pressure from Israel.”
They say he’s been under investigation for months. Ok.
So far the MAGAs and most of the Republicans are sticking with Dear Leader. But Sommer thinks this is going to be significant and I think he’s right. Kent’s a hero to the Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen crowd which may not be a big deal while Trump is still in charge but it could be very important as this war drags on and the presidential election looms. As Sommer points out:
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.
I wrote something similar in this piece last week. At this point I’m going to guess the 2028 nominee is going to be a Republican governor who can say he had no fingerprints on any of this mess.
Stay tuned.