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Joe Kent, the Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday because he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.” It is the highest-profile protest resignation of the second Trump administration—during which there has been much to protest-resign over—and exposes the rift within MAGA over President Donald Trump’s keenness for warmaking.

Such a headline-grabbing move from an ideological ally of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, under whom Kent served, is welcome news to the war’s opponents. It should also be welcome news that Joe Kent is no longer serving in the United States government. Kent has a long history of conspiratorial thinking that has twice cost him winnable congressional races.

That’s on full display in his resignation letter. While it arrives at a conclusion held by a majority of Americans—what, exactly, is the point of this war?—the letter manages to absolve Trump of agency in his decision to strike. It suggests Trump had become changed, from the anti-war politician he once was to a manipulee of Israel. But he’s not the latter now, and he never was the former. Greenlighting the Iran war was a decision Trump made, free-thinkingly, based on how he’s always been, in pursuit of his own legacy.

Kent’s mistaken impression of Trump can maybe be explained a bit by his background. He is a former Green Beret who served 11 tours of duty, mostly in Iraq. His wife, who was in the Navy, was killed by a suicide bomber in 2019 during the war against the Islamic State. After the tragedy, Kent became more involved in politics.

He ran for Congress in 2022 in Washington, leaping at the opportunity to take down incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 riots. He was successful in terms of taking down Herrera Beutler—but then narrowly lost the general election to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (Two years earlier, in 2020, Herrera Beutler had carried the district for Republicans by 13 points.) Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Kent again in a 2024 rematch.

The double loss was largely attributable to Kent’s fringe-right views and ties. He was an election denier following the 2020 election, and had ties to white nationalists like Nick Fuentes and groups like the Proud Boys. He believes the FBI and intelligence community were involved in “planning/directing” the Jan. 6 riot, and suggested following the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on Trump that the Secret Service were either “in on” it or let it “happen.”

These views may have cost Kent two congressional races in a GOP-leaning seat, but they did earn him the favor of Tucker Carlson, Trump, and Gabbard, who hired him as her chief of staff at DNI before he was nominated to the NCTC. He was confirmed to that role last July in a nearly party-line vote in which all Republicans, excluding retiring North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, supported him.

Fast-forward eight months, and Kent portrays in his resignation letter a president who has been successfully coopted by dark and powerful forces that have led him astray from his previous anti-war commitments.

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“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,” Kent writes. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie 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. We cannot make this mistake again.”

First things first: It’s a very welcome development in American political discourse over the last few years that people can criticize Israel without being immediately labeled antisemitic. But there is still a line. So who were these “influential members of the media” pushing this war? Is this the same media that’s getting yelled at every day by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for not loving the war enough? The same one threatened by the Federal Communications Commission into more enthusiastically waving its pompoms? It’s also fully ahistorical to say that Israel drew the United States into the Iraq war. That mythmaking was manufactured domestically.

Of course, it’s true that Israel lobbied Trump to attack Iran. But Israel has been lobbying American presidents for decades to take out Iran. Why did it only work this time?

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President Trump is obsessed with besting other presidents, both Democrat and Republican, in part by doing things he felt they only talked about. Presidents have for decades called for regime change in Venezuela, so he abducted their leader. He is, at this moment, pushing to collapse the Cuban government, something presidents since John F. Kennedy have wanted. He took full credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, even if that wasn’t a politically wise thing to do, because no other Republican had been able to lock in the conservative Supreme Court majority he had. He’s trying to eliminate the Department of Education, something Republicans have used as a campaign line since the department was founded. He wants a deal to end the Ukraine-Russia war, even if the deal ends on bad terms, because President Joe Biden could not get one.

He has three years left in his term, and a lot of legacy bullet points he’d like to fill in. Taking out the Iranian regime, or the Iranian threat to American allies in the region, would be a biggie on that list. As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham—one of the war’s key proponents—repeatedly put it, toppling the Iranian regime would make him “Ronald Reagan Plus.” And so he’s doing it.

This has always been Trump’s psychological profile, and in his second term, he feels more comfortable in the job pressing previously unpressed buttons. It is not clear, as Kent writes in his letter, “that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Instead, it’s that Iran hawks, including the current Israeli leadership, finally landed on a president willing to do it. This war is happening, for better or worse, because Trump is who Trump is—and what he wants to cram in during his few final years in power.

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