When Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center on Tuesday, he did something rare in Trump’s orbit. He went around the President to tell the public the truth. That truth, stated plainly by his own top counterterrorism official, punctured the central justification for a war that is increasingly dividing the movement that made Donald Trump President.
Kent’s verdict was unambiguous.
Iran, he wrote in his resignation letter, posed “no imminent threat” to the United States, making clear the conflict was a war of choice, not necessity. While he tried to soften the blow by suggesting Trump was misled by Israel into the war, Kent has surely watched the President double and triple down on the conflict by citing the “imminence” of the threat. Trump dismissed Kent within hours on Tuesday, telling reporters he’d always found his counterterrorism chief to be “weak on security”.
But you don’t defuse a bomb by insulting it. And Kent poses a continuing liability to the President, particularly because he’s a long-time Maga loyalist.
Trump’s entire legal and constitutional argument for unilateral military action against Iran rests on a single pillar: self-defence against an imminent threat. That threshold exists for a reason. Under both American constitutional law and international law, a president cannot simply launch a war without the approval of Congress just because he wants to. He must demonstrate that the danger was real, urgent and left no time for deliberation. That’s why, hours after the offensive began, Trump quickly released a statement saying his objective was “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”.
Now a top official — whose job afforded him access to much of the same intelligence as the President — has essentially accused Trump of lying. Indeed, Kent’s allegations will become a virtual roadmap for investigators. Whether it is congressional committees, inspectors general or prosecutors, they will now have a valid reason to ask: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”
Today might be the first day such questions get asked under oath. Trump’s top spy chief, Tulsi Gabbard, will be testifying on Capitol Hill, where she will be grilled about whether intelligence showed an imminent threat from Iran or not, and what Trump knew in advance. That, in turn, will open other lines of inquiry that will not easily close.
Miles Taylor, who worked at the Pentagon, White House and on Capitol Hill, says Trump’s decision-making was ad hoc, impulsive and often recklessly indifferent to the facts (Photo: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty)For instance, what did the President know about Iranian intentions and capabilities before the first strike? What did his intelligence community tell him about the timeline of any threat? Did he ignore or override assessments that contradicted a decision he’d already made? Did he knowingly mislead Congress?
Meanwhile, we haven’t heard the last from the man who just defected from Trump’s orbit and accused the President of lying to the American people. Joe Kent is slated to begin hitting the podcasting circuit on Wednesday, with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where he is sure to justify his decision to resign in protest against Trump’s decision to launch the type of “forever war” he pledged to end.
Don’t expect that to go over well with the White House.
I know something about how this President handles inconvenient truths. I served in the first Trump administration as his chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, and I resigned in protest because of what I saw. On matters of life and death, I encountered a president whose national security decision-making was ad hoc, impulsive and often recklessly indifferent to facts that complicated his preferred course of action.
Trump didn’t weigh options. He made decisions and then demanded justifications after the fact, including when policies were foreseeably unlawful. What I’m watching now, with Kent’s resignation and the administration’s furious scramble to discredit him, looks disturbingly familiar. I’ve lived it. And I suspect I know what happens next.
Kent’s protest resignation is a crack in what is beginning to look like a fracturing dam.
Inside the Maga movement, the fissures are multiplying. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie (two of Trump’s most reliable allies in the US Congress) have broken publicly with the administration over the suppression of the Epstein files, a raw nerve that touches the movement’s deepest suspicions about elite impunity. And an even wider group of elected Republicans — who have watched tariff-driven price increases land in their districts like a slow-motion economic crisis — are privately terrified that Trump’s trade war will become a tax on the midterms they cannot survive.
The populist coalition that carried Trump to a second term was built on promises that are starting to feel purely conceptual for his most diehard supporters. He vowed to put “America First”, end foreign adventurism and protect working Americans from rising prices. Yet, a war of choice in the Middle East that Trump has said will “Make Iran Great Again,” along with rising body counts and spiking gas prices, threatens to hollow that promise out entirely.
Joe Kent understood this.
His resignation letter was addressed to Trump, but it was written for the Maga faithful as a reminder of what they thought they were voting for. He invoked Trump’s campaign promises, speaking as a true believer who concluded he had been betrayed.
To be clear, Kent was a controversial nominee for the top counterterrorism position because of his fringe views and perceived “mega Maga” attitude, but that’s also what makes him dangerous to this White House.
He has been called a “conspiracy theorist with white supremacist views” by top Democrat Mark Warner, claimed the 2020 election was stolen, said US officials were involved in the January 6 Capitol riots and suggested former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci should be tried for murder over the pandemic. Now, he has turned on Trump.
Aides to the President will continue to attack Kent and limit the fallout. They’ve even suggested to the press that they welcome more resignations — noting that they don’t want more disloyal people in their ranks.
But I know the truth.
In reality, they’re terrified of what comes next. In the first term, when people like me started resigning in protest, it wasn’t an aberration. It became a wave. And that wave swept Donald Trump out of the White House.
Miles Taylor is the former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader.
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