Joe Kent’s abrupt resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington, D.C., represents an inflection point in the Republican Party’s evolving attitude toward U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran in a joint military operation with Israel.
Kent, the first senior member of the Trump administration to voluntarily leave his post, resigned on March 17, almost three weeks after American and Israeli forces attacked Iran following the failure of U.S. diplomatic efforts to dismantle Iran’s weaponized nuclear program.
Kent’s resignation is a reflection of the divisions the war has caused in the Make-America-Great (MAGA) wing of Trump’s party and his administration. In essence, isolationists oppose the current war as a betrayal of MAGA precepts, while interventionists endorse it as a necessity.
Kent, a dyed-in-the-wool isolationist, claimed in a letter to Trump that Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the United States, and that “Israel and its powerful American lobby” had pressured him to declare war on Iran.
In all probability, Kent singled out Israel for opprobrium after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on March 2 that Israel had implicitly pushed the United States into attacking Iran. Rubio, a staunchly pro-Israel figure in the Trump administration, subsequently withdrew his comment. Critics of the war, however, regarded it as a tacit admission that the United States was acting on Israel’s behalf rather than its own national interests.
In fact, the United States, which has been at loggerheads with Iran since the fall of the pro-Western Iranian monarchy in 1979, went to war with Iran on February 28 for its own good reasons.
Iran is a bully that seeks domination over the Middle East and the dismantlement of U.S. bases in the region. Iran’s nuclear program is an existential threat to major U.S. allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Iran’s sponsorship of Islamist proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas is a source of regional instability and has been a trigger of wars in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
Kent, in his impassioned letter, blissfully ignored these realities and cast Israel as a scapegoat for U.S. failures in the Middle East.
He said that Trump’s entry into the first Iran war, alongside Israel in June 2025, represented an abandonment of the “values and foreign policies” he had campaigned on since 2016. He accused Trump of forgetting that “never-ending 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.”
In one of the most scathing passages, he accused “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” of launching “a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”
A veteran of the 2003 war in Iraq, he added that Israel had lured the United States 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.”
And in another baseless accusation, he suggested that his wife, Shannon, a U.S. Navy chief petty officer killed in Syria in 2019 during an operation to flush out Islamic State fighters, had died due to “a war manufactured by Israel.”
In closing, he urged Trump to “reverse course and chart a new path for our nation” so that the United States would not “slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.”
Trump, who appointed Kent to his post last summer, welcomed his departure, criticized him for being “weak on security,” and claimed he did not understand the Iranian threat.
Vice President JD Vance, a longtime skeptic of overseas military engagements, said that Kent had to resign because he did not support Trump’s agenda.
Kent’s boss, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, defended Trump in a cautious statement: “After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and took action based on that conclusion.”
Gabbard, whose views reportedly align with the party’s isolationist wing, did not explicitly refute Kent’s allegations, which echo the claims of Patrick Buchanan, a presidential aspirant three decades ago.
In 1990, Buchanan claimed that “the Israeli Defence Ministry and its amen corner in the United States” had prodded the U.S. into attacking Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. He later said he was referring to the newspaper columnists A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer, the neo-conservative scholar Richard Perle and the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. But to some observers, Buchanan’s snide comment was little more than an antisemitic insinuation questioning the loyalty of American Jews.
Kent’s letter, while not explicitly antisemitic, was clearly a smear against Israel, the United States’ chief ally in the Middle East.
Bret Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist, recognized Kent’s ploy: “What is true is that the United States is going to war with Israel, not for it. That’s something many Americans, MAGA-type conservatives most of all, often claim to want: an ally that pulls its weight, shares the risk and contributes meaningfully to victory.”
Republicans in the interventionist camp, as well as Democrats, blasted Kent just as vigorously.
Don Bacon, a member of the House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee, reposted Kent’s letter with the comment “Good riddance” and implied he was a hater. “Antisemitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government,” he wrote in a social media post.
Amos Hochstein, a senior Biden administration official who brokered a maritime agreement between Israel and Lebanon, condemned Kent as a neo-Nazi and racist. “No one should be taking anything he says seriously, even if you happen to agree with some elements.”
Ilan Goldenberg, a former official in Democratic administrations, lambasted Kent’s letter as antisemitic. As he wrote, “A secret conspiracy of the media and Israelis to deceive Trump into going to war with Iran is ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes.”
Judging by his record, Kent is partial to conspiracy theories. Case in point: Without presenting a shred of evidence, he charged that FBI agents might have been responsible for orchestrating the January 6, 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill.
And Kent has associated himself with the American far-right. When he ran for a congressional seat in his home state of Washington four years ago, he hired Graham Jorgensen, a member of the Proud Boys military group, as a consultant. In addition, he has worked with Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, a Christian nationalist organization.
Kent certainly has admirers among Republican isolationists who agree with his claim that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked Trump into striking Iran. Objectively speaking, Netanyahu is a hawk who has been calling for a military showdown with Iran since his second term of office in 2009. But he left it to Trump’s discretion to make that momentous decision.
Whatever happens in the future, Trump’s attack on Iran is bound to be consequential. Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist, predicted that Kent’s resignation will likely cement “the emerging narrative, on both the right and the left, that Israel has dragged America into this deeply unpopular war. It’s a powerful story because it’s partly rooted in truth, even if it taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control.”
Tucker Carlson, Kent’s close friend and an anti-Zionist podcaster, has promoted this storyline, deplored U.S. and Israeli air strikes in Iran as “absolutely disgusting and evil,” and claimed that Israel “wanted (the war) to happen.”
Carlson’s friend, Megyn Kelly, has accused Mark Levin, a Jewish Fox News broadcaster, of being an “Israel Firster.” Levin has hit back, describing her as “emotionally unhinged.”
Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones and Trump’s former campaign manager, Stephen Bannon, concur with Carlson and Kelly, as does Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who resigned in January.
Much to their disappointment, Trump insists that the Iran war is consistent with the principles of the MAGA movement. U.S. senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz are among the U.S. senators who agree with Trump. The influencer Laura Loomer has sided with Trump as well.
The rifts in the Republican Party over the war have emerged at a time when Israel’s popularity in the United States has fallen steeply since its two-year war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The most recent polls indicate that 53 percent of Americans are unfavorably disposed toward Israel and that increasing numbers of Americans are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Some Republicans have drifted away from Israel, too. A 2025 Pew Research poll found that 23 percent of Republicans over the age of 50 view Israel negatively, compared to 19 percent in 2022. The figure for Republicans under 50 is 50 percent, compared to 35 percent in 2022.
It goes without saying that Republicans like Kent, Carlson, Kelly, Bannon and Rogan will be working ceaselessly to undermine Israel’s image in the United States.