Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done

By Anne Applebaum

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

 

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

 

For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.

 

This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.

 

NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.

 

But in Trump’s mind, these threats are justified: He has a problem right now, so he wants other countries to solve it. He doesn’t seem to remember or care what he said to their leaders last month or last year, nor does he know how his previous decisions shaped public opinion in their countries or harmed their interests. But they remember, they care, and they know.

 

Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after ​we’ve already won!"

 

At times, the ugly talk changed into something worse. Before his second inauguration, Trump began hinting that he wouldn’t rule out using force to annex Greenland, a territory of Denmark, a close NATO ally. At first this seemed like a troll or a joke; by January 2026, his public and private comments persuaded the Danes to prepare for an American invasion. Danish leaders had to think about whether their military would shoot down American planes, kill American soldiers, and be killed by them, an exercise so wrenching that some still haven’t recovered. In Copenhagen a few weeks ago, I was shown a Danish app that tells users which products are American, so that they know not to buy them. At the time it was the most popular app in the country.

 

The economic damage is no troll either. Over the course of 2025, Trump placed tariffs on Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea, often randomly—or again, whimsically—and with no thought to the impact. He raised tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the Swiss president, then lowered them after a Swiss business delegation brought him presents, including a gold bar and a Rolex watch. He threatened to place 100 percent tariffs on Canada should Canada dare to make a trading agreement with China. Unbothered by possible conflicts of interest, he conducted trade negotiations with Vietnam, even as his son Eric Trump was breaking ground on a $1.5 billion golf-course deal in that country.

 

Europeans might have tolerated the invective and even the trade damage had it not been for the real threat that Trump now poses to their security. Over the course of 14 months, he has, despite talking of peace, encouraged Russian aggression. He stopped sending military and financial aid to Ukraine, thereby giving Vladimir Putin renewed hope of victory. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, began openly negotiating business deals between the United States and Russia, although the war has not ended and the Russians have never agreed to a cease-fire. Witkoff presents himself to European leaders as a neutral figure, somewhere between NATO and Russia—as if, again, the United States were not the founder and leader of NATO, and as if European security were of no special concern to Americans. Trump himself continues to lash out at Zelensky and to lie about American support for Ukraine, which he repeatedly describes as worth $300 billion or more. The real number is closer to $50 billion, over three years. At current rates, Trump will spend that much in three months in the Middle East, in the course of starting a war rather than trying to stop one.

 

The result: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada will not participate in the “offensive operations of Israel and the U.S., and it never will.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says, “This is not our war, and we didn’t start it.” The Spanish prime minister refused to let the United States use bases for the beginning of the war. The U.K. and France might send some ships to protect their own bases or allies in the Gulf, but neither will send their soldiers or sailors into offensive operations started without their assent.

 

This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.

The Dangerous Logic of the Joe Kent Letter

By Yair Rosenberg

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

When Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today in protest of the Iran war, he blamed everyone except the person who launched it. In his resignation letter, addressed to President Trump, Kent portrays the president as a passive figure manipulated by others—“high-ranking Israeli officials” and “influential members of the American media”—rather than the most powerful person imposing his will upon the world. Again and again, Kent casts Trump, a two-term president, as someone swept up in events rather than driving them.

 

“I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term,” Kent writes. “Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.” The alleged shift, Kent claims, was due to an Israeli and media-driven “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform” and “was used to deceive you.”

 

Setting aside its potentially anti-Semitic undertones, this argument fails on the facts. In reality, Trump telegraphed his bellicose intentions toward Iran for decades, and once in office, he escalated conflict with the country at every opportunity. In 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis, Trump agreed with a TV interviewer that “we should have gone in there with troops,” and said that doing so would make America “an oil-rich nation.” In 1987, The New York Times reported that Trump had told a New Hampshire audience that “the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” In 1988, Trump told a Guardian interviewer that if he were a political leader, he’d be “harsh on Iran,” and declared: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island,” the country’s oil-export hub. (The United States bombed Kharg Island last weekend, and a contingent of Marines is now heading to the region, potentially to occupy it.) “While everyone is waiting and prepared for us to attack Syria,” Trump tweeted in 2013, “maybe we should knock the hell out of Iran and their nuclear capabilities?”

 

When Trump assumed the presidency in 2017, he quickly went to work putting his Iran impulses into action. He tore up the Obama administration’s nuclear deal in 2018 and assassinated Qassem Soleimani, a notorious leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2020. After returning to power in 2024, Trump picked up where he left off, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and finally this year launching the current war on the regime after directing the largest U.S. military buildup in the region since Iraq.

 

Far from a deviation from Trumpism, the president’s Iran war is his ideology given final form. And Trump’s most fervent supporters seem to agree. A CNN average of recent polls found that 89 percent of MAGA Republicans approve of military action in Iran, compared with just 9 percent who disapprove. Kent conjured a vision of an anti-war president who never existed, while claiming to speak for an anti-war, “America First” base that is not in evidence, to blame external actors for an entirely predictable domestic political decision.

 

It is hard to believe that Kent, a decorated former Green Beret, was genuinely unaware of all of this when he chose to serve the president. But long before he assumed his now-abandoned post, Kent gravitated toward conspiratorial explanations of events. He alleged that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen,” and that the FBI helped engineer the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol—and he stood by those claims in his Senate confirmation hearing.

 

Kent has also been partial to anti-Jewish ideologues. In 2022, he primaried and defeated Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, before losing in the general election, but not before paying a member of the Proud Boys as a consultant. According to the Associated Press, Kent had “sought support from figures associated with the white nationalist ‘Groyper Army’ movement led by Nick Fuentes” during his campaign, then disavowed such an interest when the contacts became public. Kent later appeared at a fundraiser with a far-right commentator who had claimed that Hitler was a “complicated” and “misunderstood” figure, and whom the campaign also subsequently disavowed.

 

Kent’s resignation letter reflects this worldview—and its fundamental flaws. In it, he blames Israel not just for somehow suborning Trump into war in Iran but also for being behind the Iraq War. The president, Kent writes, has fallen prey to “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” The historical record, however, suggests the opposite. “The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the enemy,” Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell and a vituperative Israel critic, told the anti-war reporter Gareth Porter in 2007. The Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal has recounted being told by then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002 that Washington was set on fighting “the wrong war.” (Trump, meanwhile, initially supported the Iraq invasion.)

 

In his letter, Kent also blames Israel for the death of his first wife, a Navy cryptologist, writing that she was killed “in a war manufactured by Israel.” But Shannon Kent was not killed in Iran or Iraq. She was killed by the Islamic State in Syria during the Trump administration’s campaign against the group—which Kent praises elsewhere in the same letter.

 

None of these claims makes much sense from a logical or factual perspective. But they are perfectly coherent as part of the long tradition of conspiratorial anti-Semitism, which blames groups of Jews for being behind the world’s problems. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery considered the most influential anti-Semitic work of all time, purports to record Jewish schemers plotting to profit by keeping the world in a state of perpetual war. The Hamas charter, which cites The Protocols, similarly blames Jews for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and World War II.

 

Like Kent’s letter, these works do not represent reality but rather an attempt to impose an ideology on reality. They pin crimes on a preconceived perpetrator. This fallacy is precisely the reason that movements—and countries—overtaken by anti-Semitism inevitably unravel. Societies that adopt conspiratorial explanations for political, social, and economic problems lose the ability to rationally redress them. “Why did the stock market crash?” is a good question. So is “Why did the U.S. invade Iraq?” But a person who blames a financial meltdown on the Jews or spends their time chasing phantom Israeli culprits instead of a war’s actual American instigators will never understand the calamities in question and will fail to prevent future ones.

 

Anti-Semitic explanations of events rob people of their agency and prevent them from acting effectively to improve their circumstances. Seen from this vantage point, Joe Kent is a cautionary tale. He advocated for and worked for a president who then launched a war that he ardently opposed, because he fundamentally misunderstood the world he lived in.

 

 

Joe Kent’s Secret

By Jonathan Chait

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

In February 2025, Donald Trump nominated Joe Kent, a 2020-election conspiracy theorist with links to the Proud Boys and white supremacists, as head of the National Counterterrorism Center. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Kent’s beliefs did not complicate his tenure, during which Trump continued smearing minorities and insisting the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. The sticking point, rather, became the war in Iran. Kent resigned today from the administration, protesting that Trump, a figure he idolizes, has been manipulated by Israel and its American lobby.

 

“In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter. Yet, “early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”

 

It seems odd that Trump could simultaneously understand how to avoid bad wars better than any other president and be susceptible to manipulation by a foreign country and the news media. Yet this kind of conspiratorial thinking is essential to the MAGA movement. Unable to entertain the thought that Trump himself might fail, the president’s supporters insist that only treachery can explain the constant betrayals and catastrophes they see.

 

The most obvious explanation for Trump’s second-term bellicosity is that he is intoxicated with power. Almost immediately after he won the 2024 election, his impulse to subjugate less powerful countries seemed to erupt. He threatened to take over Canada, the Panama Canal, and Greenland. He insisted on renaming the Gulf of Mexico after the United States for no apparent reason other than establishing America as the hemisphere’s boss country. He renamed the Defense Department the “Department of War,” which was perhaps a clue about his waning desire for peace. Then he bombed vessels in the Caribbean, bombed Iran, launched a military coup in Venezuela, and threatened war in Greenland again (until a stock-market plunge apparently made him reconsider) before going to war, again, with Iran.

 

You don’t need to blame Israel to explain why Trump’s anti-interventionist sentiments waned. As Trump himself wrote to Norway, in the context of his threats to annex Greenland, “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

 

Accepting Trump’s account of his own actions would force Kent, an anti-interventionist Trump worshipper, to question the great leader’s moral inclinations, even his mental fitness. That must be a difficult thought for Kent to absorb. And so it is easier for Kent to imagine his hero as the tragic victim of a sinister conspiracy.

 

The theory that Trump can do no wrong is also propounded, obviously, by Trump himself. Accordingly, he responded to Kent’s resignation by telling reporters, “I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.”

 

The idea that Trump would appoint somebody he always considered weak on security to such a lofty national-security role does not track. You could see appointing a loyalist whose main shortcoming is being extremely weak on security to, say, the Fine Arts Commission.

 

Yet for Trump to have suddenly discovered Kent’s disqualifying weakness would imply that he made a mistake by entrusting him as head of counterterrorism. For Trump to have always known about Kent’s unfitness for his position somehow makes more sense. In his first term, Trump sometimes claimed that pity had motivated him to offer high-level positions to officials who subsequently quit or were fired. He seems to believe that this quality of bigheartedness reflects better on him than admitting he misjudged somebody.

 

A senior administration official told Fox News that Kent was “a known leaker and he was cut out of POTUS intelligence briefings months ago,” and that the White House “told DNI Tulsi Gabbard he should be fired for suspected leaks but she never did.” (In another report, intelligence officials denied this.)

 

Keeping a known leaker in a top security position, while also retaining an insubordinate director of national intelligence, does not sound like high-quality foreign-policy management. One might quickly proceed from these claims to doubting the brilliance of Trump’s decision making.

 

But “Trump is incompetent” is an impossible and incoherent thought, like “Big Brother is ungood,” so alternative explanations are required. Both stories imagine Trump as the victim of a conspiracy—either by Israel and the news media to trick him into bombing Iran or, alternatively, by his own staff to leak unflattering facts about him and refuse orders to rectify the situation.

 

Kent’s resignation, and the administration’s response, reveal one of the paradoxes of MAGAthink: the Great Man of History as dupe.

Strange New Disrespect

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

One of the temptations in writing about populism is trying to discern which figures are earnest chuds and which are exploiting the grassroots right’s appetite for chuddery to build clout.

 

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter. It may be that Tucker Carlson is a sincere groyper whereas Megyn Kelly is a poseur, but so what? “We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” The pretenders ladling out postliberal slop to grow their audiences aren’t being careful.

 

I’ve come to think it’s a false dichotomy, in fact. There may be such things as “pure cranks” and “pure clout chasers,” but my guess is that most influential chuds are a bit of both. They probably always harbored certain postliberal sympathies but suppressed them prior to the Trump era, fearing they’d be marginalized if they didn’t. As it’s become clearer since 2016 that there’s a market for the stuff, it’s become not merely safe but lucrative to release that pent-up supply.

 

I will die on this hill: For all his faults, the president hasn’t made anyone’s character worse. He simply removed the few remaining moral checkpoints to mainstream political success and left it to individuals to decide for themselves what they’re willing to condone to gain power. Nothing in my lifetime has illuminated the American character as starkly as how right-wingers reacted to that invitation. Trump is the Great Revealer.

 

Which brings us to Joe Kent.

 

Kent is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center—or was until this morning, when he published his letter of resignation at a moment when America is on alert for Iranian terrorism. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” he wrote. “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.”

 

He went on to blame “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for a “misinformation campaign” that convinced Trump to attack. It was “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war,” Kent, a veteran of that conflict, continued. He even blamed the Jewish state for the death of his first wife, who was killed in a 2019 suicide bombing during another war that he claimed was “manufactured by Israel.”

 

The attack that killed Shannon Kent happened in Syria.

 

There are many things to say about Kent’s letter, which gained a phenomenal amount of traction online in just a few hours. But I find myself tempted by the familiar question: Is he an earnest postliberal or just exploiting the right’s appetite for postliberalism to build clout?

 

As usual, I think it’s a false dichotomy.

 

An earnest chud.

 

“I strongly condemn Nick Fuentes' politics, especially in regards to our ally Israel.”

 

That was Joe Kent writing in March 2022, a strange thing to say given his apparent belief that said ally bears moral responsibility for the Iraq war and his own wife’s murder. But it was less strange under the circumstances: Kent was running for Congress in Washington state that year and in hot water for his associations with white nationalists. That included a personal phone call with groyper-in-chief Fuentes, who alleged that Kent told him, “I love what you’re doing.”

 

Candidate Kent also insisted that “the 2020 election was rigged, and has rationalized the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by claiming that an otherwise peaceful crowd was infiltrated by Deep State agents [and] provocateurs,” according to a New York Times report at the time. He was a full-spectrum chud, in other words—a decidedly mixed bag in a purplish district like the one he was running in. Hence his disavowal of Fuentes, an obvious ploy to reassure nervous normie voters that he wasn’t the crank he’d been cracked up to be.

 

He finished narrowly ahead of GOP incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach Trump, in the district’s jungle primary thanks to the depravity of the Republican base. But he ended up losing the general election (narrowly) to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, then lost by a similar margin two years later when he challenged her again. He was, it seemed, just the tiniest bit too postliberal to be viable in a swing district, a tad too prone to telling far-right podcast hosts things like, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white-people special interest group.”

 

But Donald Trump loved him, naturally. Less than a year after Kent was rejected a second time by Washingtonians for being too gross for Congress, the president put him in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center. Now here he is, resigning that position with rhetorical flourishes that sound like, uh, Nick Fuentes about the Jewish state being the cause of all modern American wars.

 

That’s one of the extraordinary things about his resignation letter. Kent could have presented his objection to the war as a simple disagreement over policy; instead he went out of his way to portray Israel’s government as a U.S. puppeteer across multiple conflicts, even tossing in a reference to certain shadowy “influential members of the American media” as de facto co-conspirators. Never, I assume, has a federal official framed his departure so explicitly as a protest against Israeli influence over U.S. policy, and certainly never by scapegoating Israel in such comprehensive groyper-esque terms.

 

All that was missing was an image of an octopus emblazoned with a Star of David wrapping its tentacles around the White House and Pentagon. If you were of the opinion that Joe Kent was an earnest chud, not just a poseur pretending to be one for clout, you should feel vindicated today.

 

Another extraordinary thing about his resignation letter is that it exists at all. Despite the persistent moral sleaze that oozes through every artery of Trumpist government, it’s almost unheard of for one of the president’s aides to quit in disgust over his policies or behavior. A few staffers resigned in protest shortly before and after January 6, but I don’t believe there’s been a single high-level departure during his second term over matters like menacing Greenland, granting legal impunity to the ICE goon squad, or turning the Justice Department into one of the most corrupt, obnoxious agencies in the federal government. (There have been lower-level resignations, to be sure.)

 

And no wonder. Trump’s second administration is a kakistocracy by design, its members selected for their flair for ruthlessness and blind loyalty to the leader. Principled disagreements with the president are supposed to be impossible. And in a way, Kent’s resignation remained true to that: By laying ultimate blame for the war on Israel, not on Trump, he followed postliberal etiquette about never squarely faulting the president for his own terrible decisions. As the saying goes, “Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed”: If he screws up, he’s either gotten bad advice from an aide or been deceived by the eternal Jew.

 

Still, it’s remarkable that Joe Kent, a man ambitious enough to have run for Congress twice and who landed an important federal job against all odds, would toss that job aside and shank the president on his way out the door. I don’t think the zealous purity of his chud convictions can fully explain it; I suspect Kent believed there was something to be gained—clout, let’s call it—in doing so.

 

We may have reached the point in postliberalism's evolution at which embarrassing Donald Trump publicly is a good career move for a right-winger, provided that the thing he embarrasses the president over is his solidarity with Israel.

 

Clout and the post-Trump right.

 

“We do not share a political movement with anyone who traffics in antisemitism, promotes Liz Warren’s economic policies, or promotes Rashida Tlaib’s foreign policy,” Sen. Tom Cotton declared recently at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s symposium on antisemitism.

 

It’s a noble sentiment, but I can’t get past his choice of pronoun. As the old joke goes about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?”

 

Tom Cotton might not want to share a political movement with antisemites, but he does. A guy who was recently crowned “Antisemite of the Year” by one watchdog group was a frequent honored guest of Donald Trump’s in the White House until recently. Jew-baiters like Tucker Carlson, Fuentes, and Candace Owens command a collective audience of millions online. Young Republicans in particular are prone to antisemitism, with one 2024 survey finding that 20-something Trump supporters were likelier than anyone else to confess to holding unfavorable views of Jews.

 

Note: Not unfavorable views of Israel or “Zionists” or Benjamin Netanyahu. Of Jewish people writ large.

 

To all appearances, the future of the Republican Party—and the Democratic Party, as this phenomenon is bipartisan—will be considerably more antisemitic than the past was. If Cotton means to say that he won’t remain part of the GOP if that happens, good for him. But forgive me for doubting him: Many conservatives would have said (and did say!) circa 2015 that they won’t remain part of a Trumpist GOP, yet here we are. Partisanship beats morals almost every time.

 

Joe Kent’s resignation letter can be understood as a bold but straightforward ploy to impress the sizable vanguard of young right-wingers who are skeptical of Israel and/or Jews and who’ll wield increasing influence within the party in years to come as older Republicans age out of the electorate. With one dramatic gesture he established himself as a singular figure in postliberal politics, a man so hostile to the Jewish state’s influence in America that he would rather martyr himself by relinquishing power and sacrificing Donald Trump’s favor than keep silent about it.

 

By breaking with the president, he did what more powerful dovish Trump deputies like J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard haven’t been able to bring themselves to do. Reached for comment by the Times about Kent’s resignation, Tucker Carlson could barely contain himself. “Joe is the bravest man I know, and he can’t be dismissed as a nut,” he told the paper. “He’s leaving a job that gave him access to highest-level relevant intelligence. The neocons will now try to destroy him for that. He understands that and did it anyway.”

 

It’s not just the Tuckerites who have made Kent’s resignation a sensation on social media, though. Strange new respect for him will pour in from the left, as that’s where most of the movement in American public opinion on Israel is. Despite the noise generated by the groyper faction, a new NBC News survey found Republicans’ views of the Jewish state have turned only slightly less positive since 2023, down from 63-12 to 54-18 today. GOP sympathies for Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians actually increased since 2013, inching up from 67 percent back then to 69 percent today.

 

Democrats and independents are where the seismic shifts are happening. Democratic views on Israel went from 34-35 favorability in 2023 to 13-57 now, while independents shifted from 40-22 to 21-48 over the same period. In 2013 both groups sympathized more with Israelis than with Palestinians; now both sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis, with Democrats breaking 67-17 on the matter.

 

Simply put, Kent’s strange new disrespect for Israel isn’t that strange as a political matter. In the same way that right-wing demand for postliberalism unlocked hidden supply among commentators during the Trump era, public demand for greater opposition to Israel is destined to unlock hidden supply among the political class as well. My guess is that Kent views his resignation as a way to get in on the ground floor of that, establishing himself as one of the boldest anti-Israel voices in America and gaining him new fans across the political spectrum.

 

Notably, he’s not the only Trump crony to have fallen out with the president over Israel this week. Remember Stewart Rhodes? He was the head of the Oath Keepers, a group founded to protect America from federal tyranny that ended up acting as foot soldiers for a right-wing tyrant’s coup plot on January 6. Rhodes did time for that before the tyrant in question commuted his prison sentence; now he’s hoping for a full pardon to wipe his record clean.

 

But there are certain things he won’t stoop to doing to earn Trump’s mercy. “We can’t shut our eyes to the obvious role of the influence of Zionism in our government, of the Israeli people, intelligence services, Mossad, and others in our government,” Rhodes said this week. “So that’s why I no longer call myself MAGA. I am an America-only patriot. I’m a Christian nationalist, an American Christian nationalist.”

 

Is Stewart Rhodes an earnest postliberal chud? Indubitably. But I think he also senses that soon there’ll be more political juice to be squeezed from the postliberal right by being anti-Israel than by being pro-Trump. The same goes for Joe Kent, who’s never had as much clout as he has now—so much so, I think, that if and when “America First-ers” start sniffing around for a candidate to challenge Vance from the right in 2028, he’ll be an obvious alternative if Carlson refuses to do it.

 

Especially if this already unpopular war goes bad. Kent is shrewdly pulling the ripcord at a moment when Trump is poised to use ground troops to end the regime’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz; deploying infantry polled terribly when it was hypothetical and will poll catastrophically if it ends with American soldiers being killed. The more dangerous this conflict gets for the United States, the more prescient and defensible Kent’s resignation will seem to many in hindsight. Even to some Republicans who are backing Trump for now.

 

And honestly, as a matter of basic political calculation, which sounds better? Sticking around as counterterrorism chief for a president whom you know will blame you if Iran manages to pull off a terror attack on U.S. soil? Or bailing out now and having endless bouquets thrown at you by Israel’s many Americans critics for demagoging the Jewish state so unapologetically?

 

In a party dominated by postliberal chuds, there’s really no downside to what Kent did. I’m sure his interview with Tucker is already booked.

Good Riddance

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

At first blush, the resignation of America’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in wartime — indeed, in protest against a war with the world’s foremost exporter of Islamist terror — is an unnerving development. Fortunately, the former director, Joe Kent, authored an open letter explaining the thinking that led him to abandon his post. A cursory survey of his deliberative process should reassure trepidatious Americans that they’re better off without him.

 

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote at the outset of his letter. If that’s his biggest problem with this war, then it calls into question not America’s actions but the author’s judgment. At no point since 1979 has the Islamic Republic of Iran not represented an imminent threat to the lives of U.S. civilians and service personnel, as well as American national interests across the globe. The Iranian threat is measured in degrees, not in its presence or absence. The amount of time and resources America devotes around the clock to containing the Islamic Republic’s bloody ambitions has been prodigious. If the National Counterterrorism Center didn’t know that or simply discounted it, he was in the wrong job.

 

But that’s not Kent’s foremost objection to this war. Rather, his frustrations seem to be linked almost exclusively to Israel and the pernicious influence he believes it exercises over American political actors, including President Trump.

 

“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” he wrote.

 

Where exactly are these pro-war sentiments Kent is describing? Republicans are behind the U.S.-Israeli campaign in the Persian Gulf, but much of the rest of the country remains skeptical. Indeed, the president acted on his repeated campaign trail insistence that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon (or a ballistic missile shield around a nuclear bomb program) despite the absence of public consensus in favor of those operations. What is Kent talking about?

 

Unfortunately, the former director’s thinking doesn’t get any clearer from there.

 

“This echo chamber was used to deceive you,” Kent wrote directly to Trump, “that you should strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory.” Was Kent not paying attention at the outset of this war when Trump said that combat operations would take at least 4 to 5 weeks but could go “far longer” if warranted?

 

“This was a lie,” Kent continued, “and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

 

Israel did not push the Bush administration into the Iraq War. To say as much ignores the constant maintenance of the post-1991 status quo in Iraq, which put Americans in uniform in harm’s way every day, to say nothing of Israel’s thoroughly documented skepticism of the invasion of Iraq.

 

“In the weeks preceding Sharon’s meeting with Bush on February 7, 2002, a procession of Israeli officials conveyed the message to the US administration that Iran represented a greater threat,” read a Ynet summary of the Washington Post’s reporting around a meeting between President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

 

Indeed, Kent appears to even blame his wife’s tragic death in combat against the Islamic State militia on Israel when he alleges that the Syrian Civil War — or, at least, America’s intervention in it — was “manufactured by Israel.” Does he mean that Syrian instability was an Israeli project? If so, Jerusalem is also to blame for the Arab Spring revolts that ignited many conflicts in the region and ousted figures like the relatively Israel-friendly Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in favor (briefly) of a figure in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. Bit of a blooper there.

 

Or maybe Kent resents America’s introduction of soldiers into Eastern Syria to protect the area’s oil infrastructure. If so, his grievance is with Barack Obama, who spent two years resisting the necessity of intervention inside Syria even as he reluctantly committed U.S. troops and air assets to the campaign against ISIS in Iraq in 2014.

 

None of this is especially persuasive — that is, unless you don’t need any persuading to assume the worst of Israel and its American puppets. In fact, the letter is so clearly influenced by addled thinking informed by anti-Israel biases that it’s reasonable to conclude that Americans are better off without Joe Kent as the nation’s anti-terrorism czar.

Stephen Miller Is (Virtually) Untouchable

By David M. Drucker

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

 

The political fallout from President Donald Trump’s mass deportation program has damaged his job approval ratings, led to the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and prompted the White House to urge Republicans in Congress to abandon the issue and instead tout administration efforts to remove criminal aliens.

 

But the main architect of mass deportations, Stephen Miller, remains the White House deputy chief of staff because of his unquestionable loyalty to Trump and personal popularity among GOP voters. Few if any Republicans in Washington, D.C.—elected officials, lobbyists or operatives—are demanding Miller’s ouster, or even that immigration be removed from his portfolio. That’s despite the boost the mass deportation operation has given to the Democratic Party’s bid to recapture the House of Representatives and Senate in midterm elections.

 

A key reason why: The White House aide enjoys a following all his own inside the GOP.

 

“He’s the Holy Grail of MAGA,” a Republican lobbyist told The Dispatch, requesting anonymity to speak candidly, as did most who were interviewed for this story. “He’s the true north of MAGA for the president.” In a January Quinnipiac University poll, Trump’s job approval among Republican voters was 88 percent. Miller scored an impressive 73 percent rating in the same survey.

 

John Fredricks, a conservative talk radio host and a Trump supporter since the president first sought the GOP nomination a decade ago, has known Miller for 15 years. He explained Miller’s rise in the Make America Great Again movement, and White House staying power, to The Dispatch this way: “He’s got balls and a plan—most people have one without the other. He’s got them both, and you can quote me on this. He’s got balls and he’s got a plan. And that’s why he is revered within MAGA.”

 

“Stephen Miller is the guy, that if he were to leave the administration, everybody would doubt the sincerity of the other administration people,” Fredricks, who is based in Washington, D.C., added.

 

Many Republicans who work in the nation’s capital view Miller with “a combination of admiration and hate, but mostly fear,” a second GOP lobbyist said. This party insider added that Miller’s adept management of his close relationship with Trump is among the reasons the long knives haven’t come for Miller the way they did Noem, a Senate-confirmed Cabinet secretary, and others who have been in the president’s orbit as long as he has.

 

“He operates in a fiefdom with almost unlimited power and he’s smart enough not to overstep—a  very dangerous combination for such an opportunistic hardliner,” this lobbyist said.

 

That keen sense to avoid big-footing Trump has made Miller an elusive figure for many Republican professionals in Washington. Even Republican lobbyists supportive of the president, or at least not openly hostile, have told The Dispatch they have had no interaction with Miller, despite his broad sway over domestic and foreign policy. “Stephen is way more focused internally than externally,” a GOP operative said. However, this experience is not universal.

 

Miller has been in town, and involved in Republican politics for years. He has relationships that predate Trump. And so some Republicans with business or concerns related to the administration’s agenda have, from time to time, used Miller as a high-level White House conduit. Given Miller’s deep involvement in immigration policy, he is often sought after for help on that issue. “People backchannel to Miller all the time,” a Republican who works on K Street said. “The consensus is, unless immigration-related, it usually isn’t a useful backchannel.”

 

Miller, 40, is something of a MAGA wunderkind.

 

Well before Trump first campaigned on a platform of securing the border and limiting immigration—both legal and illegal—Miller was making a name for himself fighting the fight on Capitol Hill. In 2013, Miller was a communications aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. As many Republicans in Congress negotiated with Democrats to pass a bipartisan overhaul of federal immigration law, Miller worked furiously to kill the legislation and at times seemed more emotionally invested in the legislation’s defeat than Sessions. (The bill cleared the Senate but died in the House.)

 

During Trump’s 2016 campaign, Sessions was among the first congressional Republicans to endorse, precipitating Miller’s move to the populist candidate’s campaign and eventually, Trump’s first White House. Throughout that period and in the years since, Miller’s power in Trump’s circle, and his stature in the MAGA movement, has grown. He played a key role in planning Trump’s second administration during the four years out of power, became a regular warmup act at the president’s campaign rallies, and now exercises inordinate influence—far more than his title, deputy chief of staff for domestic policy, suggests.

 

This has made Miller a unique force to contend with in Washington, a phenomenon appreciated by Republican operatives supportive of Trump.

 

For instance, one Republican government relations executive friendly with the White House conceded that Miller is often a terrible messenger for Trump’s agenda, causing supporters like this individual to gripe privately among themselves about his television appearances and preference that he leave on-camera interviews to more capable voices in the administration. The same is occasionally said of the president. But observe how Trump and Miller are viewed through a similar lens: “The benefit of the doubt is given to Trump at every turn—and that applies to Miller,” the government relations executive said.

 

Republicans in town who lack the same affection for Trump tend to find Miller’s political durability frustrating. The generic ballot gauging which party voters would prefer to be in control of Congress has worsened for Republicans over the past few months, suggesting the GOP’s 2026 turbulence is at least partially related to the public backlash against the mass deportation program. While midterm elections are historically challenging for the president’s party, some Republicans argue Miller is making matters worse.

 

“It’s probably time for him to move on. I don’t think he’s helping the president,” a veteran GOP lobbyist said. “There was a victory here: Trump sealed the border. Let’s get rid of—using Trump’s words, not mine, the ‘bad hombres,’ and call it a day. This is a classic example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

 

The White House did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Collapse of the Cranks

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, March 17, 2026

 

The war on Iran has already had one beneficial effect on the U.S. It’s forcing a much-needed spring cleaning on the American right. The conservatives and the obsessive anti-Israel America-bashers are actively parting ways. The schism is turning into a sorting, and the country needs this as much as the right does.

 

At last, Donald Trump is in an open war of words with the subversives who had been pretending to be supporters. Tucker Carlson, the mercenary leader of the anti-American right, claimed that Trump was duped by Israel into Operation Epic Fury, which he also described as “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Trump then said that Carlson had “lost his way” and is not MAGA. Carlson now claims that the administration has surveilled him and is working to prosecute him as a foreign agent. 

 

Trump has also gone after Carlson’s gutter-mouthed yes-woman, Megyn Kelly. And he did so in the way that would precisely wound her most—he never mentioned her name. On Truth Social, he wrote a florid defense of conservative talker Mark Levin, whom Kelly has been attacking for months, and predicted that “those who speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound.”

 

Today comes news that another unsound thinker has dropped by the wayside. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has resigned over the war on Iran. His resignation blames Israel for conning the U.S. into war and, creatively, for the death of his wife, who was killed in Syria in 2019 by a suicide bomber.

 

Whether they’re kicked out or they decide to leave the Trump coalition, the paranoids of the right are in the minority. Polls show that Republicans, and specifically MAGA voters, overwhelmingly support the war in Iran and the U.S.-Israel alliance.

 

The anti-Semites who sought to dominate the right and steer American foreign policy are watching their dreams die. And those who either naively or cynically believed that the right could accommodate both Israel supporters and activists dedicated to sundering the U.S.-Israeli relationship are being proven wrong.

 

If, God willing, the war in Iran continues on its current trajectory and ends in American and Israeli victory, the anti-American Israel-haters will be cast deep into the wilderness. At which point, I have no doubt, they will overtly join the left.

 

Then there’s poor JD Vance. Nothing about the current state of play works in his favor. That he is the vice president in an administration carrying out the exact foreign policy he has denounced makes him look like a non-entity. He’s already considered a sell-out among the groypers he’s tried to reassure. And in the event of American victory, no one will forget where he stood at the start—and where Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stood all along. That’s what happens when you throw in your lot with conspiracy-theorizing podcasters instead of your country.

 

So the war is flushing the Jew-haters and anti-Americans out of MAGA. Ideally, liberals would purge the mirror-image maniacs of the left from their movement. They’ve chosen instead to elevate them. The United States can survive, miraculously, if one major political party welcomes America-haters and anti-Semites. But a United States dominated by two competing visions of destruction and revolution is national suicide. Donald Trump is now winning more than one war for the future of the United States.