In February 2025, Donald Trump appointed Joe Kent, a 2020 election conspiracy theorist with links to the Proud Boys and white people, as head of the National Counterterrorism Center. What can go wrong?
Kent’s faith did not interfere with his tenure, where Trump continued to vilify minorities and insist that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. The sticking point, instead, became the war in Iran. Kent resigned today from the administration, protesting that Trump, a man who worships idols, has been deceived by Israel and its American lobby.
“In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to use military power without plunging us into endless war,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter. However, “early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and prominent members of the US media deployed a disinformation campaign that thoroughly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiment to encourage war with Iran.”
It seems odd that Trump could simultaneously understand how to prevent a worse war than any other president and be easily manipulated by a foreign country and the news media. Yet this type of conspiracy thinking is essential to the MAGA movement. Unable to imagine that Trump himself could fail, the president’s supporters insist that only betrayal can explain the repeated betrayals and tragedies they see.
The most obvious explanation for Trump’s second-term antics is that he is drunk on power. Almost immediately after winning the 2024 elections, his drive to dominate weak countries seemed to emerge. He threatened to seize Canada, the Panama Canal, and Greenland. He insisted on renaming the Gulf of Mexico after the United States for no other reason than to establish America as the leading country in the world. He renamed the Department of Defense the “War Department,” perhaps a hint at his desire for peace. Then he blew up a ship in the Caribbean, attacked Iran, launched a military coup in Venezuela, and threatened war in Greenland again (until the stock market crash made him reconsider) before going to war, again, with Iran.
You don’t need to blame Israel to explain why Trump’s anti-interventionist sentiment has waned. As Trump himself wrote to Norway, in the context of his threats to annex Greenland, “Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the 8 PLUS wars, I no longer feel the responsibility to think about Peace.”
Accepting Trump’s account of his own actions would force Kent, a non-interventionist Trump worshiper, to question the great leader’s moral leanings, even his sanity. That must be a hard thought for Kent to grasp. And so it’s easy for Kent to think of his hero as an unfortunate victim of an evil plot.
The theory that Trump can do no wrong has also been offered, of course, by Trump himself. Accordingly, he responded to Kent’s resignation by telling reporters, “I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.”
The idea that Trump would nominate someone he has always seen as weak on security for such a major national security role does not follow. You could see appointing a trustee whose main flaw is being too weak to secure, say, the Fine Arts Commission.
Yet for Trump to discover Kemp’s unqualified weakness would mean he made a mistake in appointing him as counterterrorism chief. For Trump to always be aware of Kemp’s unfitness for his position somehow makes more sense. During his first term, Trump sometimes claimed that compassion motivated him to give senior positions to officials who resigned or were fired. He seems to believe that this trait of greatness reflects better on him than admitting he misjudged someone.
A senior administration official said Fox News that Kent was “a known hacker and was cut off from POTUS intelligence months ago,” and that the White House “told DNI Tulsi Gabbard that she should be fired for alleged leaks but she didn’t.” (In another report, intelligence officials denied this.)
Read: Why Trump changed his mind about Kristi Noem
Placing a known leaker in a top security position, while also retaining a non-executive director of national intelligence, does not sound like high-quality foreign policy management. One can quickly move from these claims to questioning the beauty of Trump’s decisions.
But “Trump is bad” is an abstract and unrelated idea, just like “Big Brother is bad,” so an alternative explanation is needed. Both stories imagine Trump as the victim of a conspiracy—either by Israel and the media to trick him into bombing Iran or, alternatively, by his staff to leak unsavory facts about him and refuse orders to correct the situation.
Kent’s resignation, and the administration’s response, highlight one of MAGAthink’s controversies: History’s greatest figure as a dupe.
