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Mother Jones illustration; Saul Loeb\/AFP\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you were<\/span> to invent a politician ideally suited to appeal to the MAGA base, you might come up with something like this: A classically handsome white guy with a tragically sympathetic life story whose service in US special forces during senseless wars led him to embrace America First isolationism\u2014along with a substantial dose of conspiratorial far-right thinking. That is, they might come up with Joe Kent<\/a>, a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments and lost his wife to an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019 before entering politics as a stalwart defender of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n The fact that Kent\u2019s biography is so compelling to the MAGA faithful is what makes his decision this week to resign as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the Iran war such a problem for Trump and his administration. Unlike others the president has cast aside, Kent can\u2019t be dismissed as a lightweight or a grifter. Instead, he has been built up for years by Tucker Carlson and others on the right as a model of everything the Trump-era GOP should represent. Now by publicly quitting<\/a>, Kent is fueling a broader confict that is tearing apart Trump\u2019s coalition over the Iran war and the role that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played in pressing Trump into it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms? Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n As Kent wrote<\/a> in his Tuesday resignation letter, \u201cIran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.\u201d On Wednesday evening, he made similar points in a quickly arranged interview with Carlson that has already been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube and X. (The conversation later veered off into unsupported speculation about the assasination of Charlie Kirk and Trump\u2019s near assasination in Butler, Pennsylvania.)<\/p>\n In response to Kent\u2019s departure, the administration has turned to a predictable playbook with White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt putting out a statement<\/a> lambasting the \u201cabsurd allegation\u201d that Trump \u201cmade this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries.\u201d In a nod to Kent\u2019s appeal, Trump called<\/a> Kent a \u201cnice guy\u201d before adding that he was \u201cvery weak on security.\u201d Administration officials may also be the source of recently leaked<\/a> news that the FBI is investigating Kent for potentially leaking sensitive information.\u00a0<\/p>\n If the investigation is pursued, it would pit Kash Patel, Trump\u2019s cosplaying FBI director, against a special forces veteran who moved on to doing covert operations for the CIA. (Carlson also recently released a video in which he suggested that the CIA and the Justice Department might be preparing to go after him as well because he was in touch with people in Iran before the war.) The idea of going after Kent and Carlson after they spoke out against the war would also likely draw attention to Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary who suffered no consequences for accidentally sharing<\/a> war plans with a journalist and then lying about it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to guess which side much of MAGA would choose\u2014and to a large extent they already have. The faction of major right-wing influencers who are defending Kent or staying silent is notably louder than the one leaning into attacking him. <\/p>\n It helps that Kent is broadly right about why this war started, although he was wrong later in his resignation letter to portray Trump as a hapless victim of Israeli deception. As reporting from the New York Times <\/em>and other outlets has made clear<\/a>, Netanyahu played an essential role in pushing the United States toward war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted<\/a> as much when he said earlier this month the United States attacked Iran when it did because Israel had decided to strike. It is nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which Netanyahu opposed a war with Iran and Trump started one anyway.<\/p>\n That reality is impossible to stomach for Carlson and other right-wing figures who have criticized the war, such as former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. MAGA is supposed to be a movement of dominance with Trump as its punisher-in-chief. Now, as they see it, the president is being humiliated by a nation the size of New Jersey on the other side of the world that is undermining the isolationism that was key to Trump\u2019s appeal. \u201cThis [war] happened because Israel wanted it to happen,\u201d Carlson stressed at the start of the conflict. \u201cThis is Israel\u2019s war. This is not the United States\u2019 war.\u201d<\/p>\n There were more MAGA recriminations on Wednesday when Israel struck Iran\u2019s South Pars gas field, which sent energy prices rocketing even higher. In the wake of the attack, which came well after<\/a> the United States told Israel to stop<\/a> hitting Iranian energy infrastructure, a senior Israeli official claimed<\/a> that it had been coordinated between Netanyahu\u2019s office and the White House. Then, later on Wednesday, Trump posted<\/a> on social media that Israel had struck the gas field \u201cout of anger\u201d and that the United States \u201cknew nothing about\u201d it in advance.<\/p>\n Neither scenario looks good for Trump. Either Israel explicitly ignored a previous US instruction not to attack Iranian energy sites, or the Trump administration green-lit the strike only to realize within hours that doing so was obviously counter to its own interests. The right-wing podcaster Tim Pool responded<\/a> by sharing the president\u2019s full Truth Social post with some unusually on-point commentary of his own.<\/p>\n Kelly, the former Fox News host, made the stakes for the Trump administration more clear in a post<\/a> of her own. \u201cYou wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms?\u201d she wrote on Wednesday on X. \u201cIndict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson. See how that works out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n