When Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today in protest of the Iran war, he blamed everyone except the person who launched it. In his resignation letter, addressed to President Trump, Kent portrays the president as a passive figure manipulated by others
- "high-ranking Israeli officials" and "influential members of the American media"-rather than the most powerful person imposing his will upon the world. Again and again, Kent casts Trump, a two-term president, as someone swept up in events rather than driving them.
"I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term," Kent writes. "Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation." The alleged shift, Kent claims, was due to an Israeli and media-driven "misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform" and "was used to deceive you."
Setting aside its potentially anti-Semitic undertones, this argument fails on the facts. In reality, Trump telegraphed his bellicose intentions toward Iran for decades, and once in office, he escalated conflict with the country at every opportunity. In 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis, Trump agreed with a TV interviewer that "we should have gone in there with troops," and said that doing so would make America "an oil-rich nation." In 1987, The New York Times reported that Trump had told a New Hampshire audience that "the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran's bullying of America." In 1988, Trump told a Guardian interviewer that if he were a political leader, he'd be "harsh on Iran," and declared: "One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I'd do a number on Kharg Island," the country's oil-export hub. (The United States bombed Kharg Is…
Far from a deviation from Trumpism, the president's Iran war is his ideology given final form. And Trump's most fervent supporters seem to agree. A CNN average of recent polls found that 89 percent of MAGA Republicans approve of military action in Iran, compared with just 9 percent who disapprove. Kent conjured a vision of an anti-war president who never existed, while claiming to speak for an anti-war, "America First" base that is not in evidence, to blame external actors for an entirely predictable domestic political decision.
It is hard to believe that Kent, a decorated former Green Beret, was genuinely unaware of all of this when he chose to serve the president. But long before he assumed his now-abandoned post, Kent gravitated toward conspiratorial explanations of events. He alleged that the 2020 election was "rigged and stolen," and that the FBI helped engineer the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol-and he stood by those claims in his Senate confirmation hearing.
Kent has also been partial to anti-Jewish ideologues. In 2022, he primaried and defeated Jaime Herrera Butler, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, before losing in the general election, but not before paying a member of the Proud Boys as a consultant. According to the Associated Press, Kent had "sought support from figures associated with the white nationalist
'Groyper Army' movement led by Nick Fuentes" during his campaign, then disavowed such an interest when the contacts became public. Kent later appeared at a fundraiser with a far-right commentator who had claimed that Hitler was a "complicated" and "misunderstood" figure, and whom the campaign also subsequently disavowed.
Kent's resignation letter reflects this worldview-and its fundamental flaws. In it, he blames Israel not just for somehow suborning Trump into war in Iran but also for being behind the Iraq War. The president, Kent writes, has fallen prey to "the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous I…
None of these claims makes much sense from a logical or factual perspective. But they are perfectly coherent as part of the long tradition of conspiratorial anti-Semitism, which blames groups of Jews for being behind the world's problems.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery considered the most influential anti-Semitic work of all time, purports to record Jewish schemers plotting to profit by keeping the world in a state of perpetual war. The Hamas charter, which cites The Protocols, similarly blames Jews for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and World War II.
Like Kent's letter, these works do not represent reality but rather an attempt to impose an ideology on reality. They pin crimes on a preconceived perpetrator. This fallacy is precisely the reason that movements-and countries-overtaken by anti-Semitism inevitably unravel. Societies that adopt conspiratorial explanations for political, social, and economic problems lose the ability to rationally redress them. "Why did the stock market crash?" is a good question. So is "Why did the U.S. invade Iraq?" But a person who blames a financial meltdown on the Jews or spends their time chasing phantom Israeli culprits instead of a war's actual American instigators will never understand the calamities in question and will fail to prevent future ones.
Anti-Semitic explanations of events rob people of their agency and prevent them from acting effectively to improve their circumstances. Seen from this vantage point, Joe Kent is a cautionary tale. He advocated for and worked for a president who then launched a war that he ardently opposed, because he fundamentally misunderstood the world he lived in.
The dangerous logic of the Joe Kent letter: The conspiracist anti-war activist completely misunderstood the movement and the president he served. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/... By @yair-rosenberg.bsky.social #conspiracism #antisemitism #trumpism
