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.