Joe Kent Is a Loon

By Rich Lowry

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

There are many qualities you look for in a director of the National Counterterrorism Center, but an active imagination isn’t one of them.

 

Joe Kent, though, has shown since his high-profile resignation that he has one, and not the kind of imagination that makes for a great Elizabethan poet or a compelling noir novelist but the sort of fevered fancy that fuels the Candace Owens podcast.

 

Kent says, apparently quite sincerely, that President Trump may have launched the war against Iran because he feels threatened from shadowy forces connected to Israel.

 

In other words, what the combined military might of Israel and the United States is attempting to achieve in Iran — get a top Iranian official to bend to our will by convincing him that he’ll otherwise get killed — the Jewish state has already done to the president of the United States.

 

We are supposed to believe that Donald Trump, one of the most indomitable figures in the history of American politics, who is bold and fearless, who never lets a thought go unexpressed, who is ardently pro-Israel and has been throughout his two terms in office, is secretly controlled by his fear of potential Israeli attempts against his life.

 

This must be the dumbest and craziest thing that any former high-level U.S. intelligence official has ever believed or floated.

 

To be sure, we’ve had lots of incompetent intelligence officials and lots of partisan haters, many of whom exposed themselves during Trump’s first term. But Kent’s irrationality is next-level.

 

It’s as if Allen Dulles left the CIA and went on a media tour explaining how the Rothschilds might be running a secret world government or that at least there are a lot of “data points” suggesting as much.

 

The more respectable “Israel is controlling Trump” theory is based on a distortion of Marco Rubio’s remarks at the start of the war. He said that if Israel attacked first without the U.S. joining in, our troops would be at greater risk from an Iranian retaliation than if the U.S. and Israel attacked together.

 

The point was about the timing of the U.S. strike, not its justification, as Rubio made clear at the time.

 

But critics of the war insist that Israel forced our hand. The idea is that rather than just telling Netanyahu, “No, don’t do that,” if he opposed a strike against Iran, Trump mustered an enormous U.S. armada and air fleet over the course of weeks and staked his presidency on a large-scale attack against Iran that he, in his hearts of hearts, thought was a mistake.

 

Is that plausible? Does that sound like Trump?

 

Kent is not content to leave it at that. He floats what he calls a “darker” scenario, namely that sinister forces have scared Trump into doing their bidding on foreign policy out of fear for his life.

 

This theory, like so much we hear from the conspiratorial right these days, goes back to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

 

Kent says that Kirk wanted to rethink our relationship with Israel and opposed war with Iran — then got assassinated. This, Kent maintains, raises all sorts of questions, by which he means that Jewish interests might have killed Kirk, although in an admirable show of intellectual probity and restraint, he won’t flatly assert that these forces carried out the assassination.

 

Kent makes much of the FBI’s keeping him from pursuing leads in the Kirk case. During his interview with Tucker Carlson, he and Carlson dwelt on this at length, with a shocked Carlson — who is obviously close to Kent — pretending that it was the first he’s heard of it, although it’s been a matter of public knowledge.

 

Carlson kept asking what possible legitimate reason the FBI could have had to object to Kent’s “just asking questions,” as they say.

 

Well, when the New York Times reported on this bureaucratic dispute last year, it said:

 

The inquiry by Joe Kent, the director of the counterterrorism center, alarmed Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I. Mr. Patel and other senior officials believed Mr. Kent was overstepping, treading on F.B.I. responsibilities and potentially interfering with the investigation and the prosecution of the suspect, Tyler Robinson.

 

All of these certainly sound like standard-type concerns in such a case rather than a pretense to cover up the truth about the assassination.

 

And, by the way, why would MAGA hero and Trump loyalist Kash Patel make himself part of a conspiracy to hide a conspiracy to kill Kirk?

 

This alleged cover-up would have to be quite wide-ranging. On the narrow question of Kent’s inquiry alone, the Times reports that there was a high-level gathering:

 

Mr. Kent’s efforts were a topic at a White House meeting that included Mr. Patel, Mr. Kent and his direct superior, Ms. Gabbard. Top Justice Department officials, Vice President JD Vance and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, were also there, according to several of the people who spoke to The New York Times about the matter.

 

So all these people would have had to be witting or unwitting facilitators of a plot to keep the public from knowing of the Jewish or Israeli interests that killed the most promising MAGA leader of his generation.

 

Et tu, Susie Wiles?

 

Then, there’s the minor matter of the avalanche of evidence against Tyler Robinson that’s already public. If all we knew about the case was that there was video of Robinson fleeing the scene with a rifle down his pants, that’d make for a pretty strong presumption of his guilt.

 

Also, if Robinson were a patsy for Israel, he might have mentioned it to someone by now, given that he’s facing the death penalty in an open-and-shut murder case.

 

Finally, why would Jewish interests want to kill Charlie Kirk? He was a philosemite who was clearly holding back some pretty nasty forces on the right. Yes, some Jewish donors were upset with him for providing a forum for an increasingly unhinged Tucker Carlson, but when donors are irked, what they generally do is pull their funding, not undertake elaborate assassination plots.

 

At the end of the day, more than anything else politically, Kirk was a Trump loyalist. So if lethal Jewish interests were — to indulge this insanity further — picking off anti-Israel voices to shape the U.S. debate over Iran, Kirk wouldn’t have been on the list.

 

Kent tells us that Kirk urged him to stop an Iran war the last time he saw him, briefly at the White House last year in the run-up to the Twelve-Day War. Assuming this is true, it didn’t stop Kirk from getting in line after Trump decided to launch Operation Midnight Hammer anyway, saying that he trusted Trump who was the man of the hour with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

 

As mentioned earlier, none of this accords with Trump’s temperament in general or his posture toward Israel in particular. When Trump appeared, exultant, in the Knesset last year for the most pro-Israel speech we’ve ever heard from an American president, was he really pretending because he was a kind of hostage, performing on a string for his frightening Israeli puppet masters?

 

Uh, Trump doesn’t scare easily and is very bad at fakery. So, on top of every other implausibility, the idea that he’s posing as an ally of Israel — and has been for years — only because he’s been intimidated into it is utterly laughable.

 

If Israel were holding a metaphorical, or perhaps literal, gun to Trump’s head, we might well be bombing Tel Aviv rather than Tehran.

 

Regarding all of this, one might be tempted to give Joe Kent points for creativity, but it’s a very bad thing when people in his former line of work are absurd fantasists.