Trump's reaction to Joe Kent's resignation should concern you | Opinion

There is a fair chance you've never heard of Joe Kent, a retired Green Beret who served as President Donald Trump's director at the National Counterterrorism Center but resigned March 17 in protest about the war in Iran.

Trump now wants you to think he doesn't know Kent, either. Trump, who has drawn criticism from some big names in the MAGA-verse for the war he launched on Feb. 28, felt compelled to respond to Kent's resignation with a standard Trumpian distancing device.

"I always thought he was a nice guy," Trump said of Kent, whom he endorsed for Congress in 2022 and 2024. "But I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security. I didn't know him well, but he seemed like a pretty nice guy."

In a normal presidency, this would be the stuff of scandal. The president just admitted in public that he gave a serious national security job to someone he always thought was "very weak on security."

Why would he do that? If Trump's claim is true, why didn't he fire Kent before he resigned?

Clearly, Trump wasn't prepared for obvious questions about Kent, because his impulses are his only plans.

Trump sure seemed to know Joe Kent when he nominated him

In Trump's view, being known by Trump is all that matters. He has a long history of claiming he doesn't know people he clearly knows when they cross him or are no longer of use to him.

It's only been 13 months since Trump nominated Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, which analyzes terrorism threats and shares information across other federal agencies.

"As a Soldier, Green Beret, and CIA Officer, Joe has hunted down terrorists and criminals his entire adult life," Trump wrote in a February 2025 social media post that noted how Kent's wife, Shannon, was killed while serving in the U.S. Navy in Syria in 2019. "Joe continues to honor her legacy by staying in the fight."

Sounds like Trump knows Kent pretty well. Maybe that's what scares Trump.

Kent's resignation letter says Iran "posed no imminent threat" to America, and he blames Trump's war on "pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."

Trump's White House pushed back, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisting in a March 17 social media post that the president had "strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first."

This is the same Leavitt who two weeks ago said Trump attacked Iran because he "had a good feeling" Iran would attack first.

Trump's three presidential runs, which Kent supported in 2016, 2020, 2024, were based on a populist revulsion of American foreign interventionism – exactly the kind of entangling regime change Trump is now pursuing in Iran.

Kent's resignation letter accuses Trump of being led astray from that worldview by a "misinformation campaign" fed to him by "Israeli officials and influential members of the American media."

One serious problem here for Kent: He claims Trump was deceived by "the same tactics the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war."

But the public record is clear that Israeli government officials actually warned then-President George W. Bush against launching an invasion in Iraq. The Israelis then, as now, wanted America to attack Iran instead.

MAGA is holding strong for Trump even as big-name supporters don't

There are other factors to consider when assessing Kent's credibility. CNN in 2022 spelled out Kent's campaign flirtations with White nationalists and Nazi sympathizers when he was seeking Washington state's 3rd District seat in the U.S. House.

Still, Kent has been talking about American military entanglements in the Middle East in the same tone as he set in his resignation letter to Trump this week.

In an essay published in Newsweek in January 2024, when he was again seeking the congressional seat, Kent wrote that the then-recent deaths of three American military members in an attack on a Jordanian border outpost by "Iranian-backed militants" would be used by then-President Joe Biden "to justify a new war against Iran."

Kent was off by two years and one president.

Trump recently started moving an expeditionary force of 2,500 Marines to the Middle East to supplement the U.S. armada of warships already stationed there. That's exactly the "boots on the ground" scenario that Kent warned about when Biden was calling the shots. But Biden never invaded Iran.

Trump may have no choice. And he certainly has nobody to blame but himself.

His MAGA base supports his war with Iran, but a majority of Americans don't. And former influencer allies like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan have been warning that Trump has swerved off course from his reelection campaign promises of "no new wars."

More troubling for Trump is the reaction of NATO and other American allies as he flip-flops between declaring victory in Iran and complaining that they won't send their navies to help reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage along Iran's southern coast for oil tankers to transit from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and then the Arabian Sea and beyond.

MAGA may be sticking with Trump, for now, because MAGA never really stood for anything. Kent and the MAGA-verse influencers don't look like a tipping point for Trump, as of now, but it could be the start of something serious if that kind of Trump-adjacent criticism about Iran continues to grow.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.