As the Iran War Continues, Trump Loyalists Abandon the Supreme Leader

President Donald Trump has faced intense criticism over the Iran war from his MAGA base, but the first major rupture within the administration has come from someone Trump himself hand-picked for one of the most sensitive posts. Earlier today, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned abruptly, stating in a letter addressed to the president (which he shared on X) that he could not “in good conscience” support a war he said was launched despite Iran posing “no imminent threat” to the United States.

The resignation comes at a time when the Trump administration is facing mounting pressure over rising oil prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and questions about the war’s objectives and the plan for ending it. The news has already triggered swift responses from the administration and prominent Trump loyalists, with House Speaker Mike Johnson stating, “I don’t know where (Kent) is getting his information, but he wasn’t in those briefings clearly.”

Kent wrote that the U.S. “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” reminding the president of his own past opposition to “never-ending wars” and warning him that the current Iran conflict was a repeat of this very pattern. In his letter, Kent invoked his combat experience — 11 tours, primarily in Iraq — and referenced his first wife, Shannon Kent, who was killed in a 2019 suicide bombing by the Islamic State group while she served in Syria, a war also “manufactured by Israel,” he wrote.

“I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives,” Kent said.

In his tweet announcing his resignation, Kent wrote that it was an honor to serve under Trump and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard. The latter has been something of a thorn in the administration’s side on Iran policy. Last March, she testified on Capitol Hill that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” When asked by a reporter about that testimony, Trump said that Gabbard was “wrong.” “I don’t care what she said,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One, insisting that the Iranians “were very close to having one.”

This public rebuke, and the glaring discrepancy between the president and his own DNI, who Trump nominated and defended despite considerable controversy over her qualifications and unusual views on a range of issues, generated speculation about a growing divide within the administration over Iran. Gabbard issued a tweet criticizing reporters for “intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division.” But Gabbard has long opposed U.S. military confrontation with Iran. As recently as 2020, she was selling “No War With Iran” T-shirts online — which critics of the Iran war are now excavating to suggest that Gabbard is suppressing her true views to avoid getting fired.

In response to the surprise resignation, the vocal Trump ally Laura Loomer, fresh off a trip to India, who was recently called out for her now-deleted racist and anti-Indian social media posts while on a trip to India, called Kent a “notorious leaker” who, like Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and Dan Caldwell (a former top Pentagon aide fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after being accused of leaking classified information, though he was recently hired by the Office of the DNI), is “consumed by an obsession with Israel and rabid, irrational Jew hate.”

Rather than engage with the content of the letter, Loomer dismissed the resignation as an attack on “the Trump-MAGA legacy,” underscoring the terms of this emerging divide. The breach exposes the growing fault lines at the heart of the “America First” doctrine: deep skepticism over foreign interventions and regime-change wars (as evidenced in resurfaced tweets by Trump himself criticizing the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and opposing war on Iran) colliding with the instinct to defend the administration at all costs.