If you were to invent a politician ideally suited to appeal to the MAGA base, you might come up with something like this: A classically handsome white guy with a tragically sympathetic life story whose service in US special forces during senseless wars led him to embrace America First isolationism—along with a substantial dose of conspiratorial far-right thinking. That is, they might come up with Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments and lost his wife to an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019 before entering politics as a stalwart defender of Donald Trump.

The fact that Kent’s biography is so compelling to the MAGA faithful is what makes his decision this week to resign as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the Iran war such a problem for Trump and his administration. Unlike others the president has cast aside, Kent can’t be dismissed as a lightweight or a grifter. Instead, he has been built up for years by Tucker Carlson and others on the right as a model of everything the Trump-era GOP should represent. Now by publicly quitting, Kent is fueling a broader confict that is tearing apart Trump’s coalition over the Iran war and the role that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played in pressing Trump into it.

“You wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms? Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson.”

As Kent wrote in his Tuesday resignation letter, “Iran posed no........

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