Top Counterterrorism Official (and Known Extremist) Resigns Over Iran

One of President Trump’s most extreme, Nazi-sympathizing counterterrorism officials is leaving his post over the war on Iran.

National Counterterrorism Center director and former GOP congressional candidate Joe Kent announced his resignation, in a letter on X Tuesday morning.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran 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,” he captioned it.

Kent’s protest resignation is unprecedented for the Trump administration.

“In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” Kent wrote in his longer letter. “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us 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.”

Kent’s resignation highlights a major fault line between the anti-interventionist MAGA right wing—the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Tucker Carlsons—and the more traditional neocons. Many of the former cheered on Kent’s focus on Israel as a primary catalyst for aggression, while the latter rejoiced at his departure.

“REAL COURAGE,” wrote extremist Steve Bannon acolyte Grace Chong. “This is what putting America first actually looks like.”

“The MAGA Coalition is shattered,” commentator Tim Pool chimed. “Trump can say ‘I AM MAGA’ all he wants, and it may be true, but lost support means MAGA is meaningless.”

“Good riddance. Iran has murdered more than a thousand Americans. Their EFP land mines were the deadliest in Iraq,” Republican Representative Don Bacon said. “Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.”

The White House has yet to comment.

Read Joe Kent’s full resignation letter here.

Donald Trump can’t back up his claim that an ex-president supported his decision to wage war on Iran.

All four living former presidents denied speaking to Trump recently, NBC News reports. A George W. Bush aide told the news outlet that “they haven’t been in touch,” and one of Bill Clinton’s aides said that Trump couldn’t have been referring to the forty-second president. Likewise, “no recent conversations” have taken place between Trump and former President Barack Obama, an aide to Obama said. An unnamed source told NBC that Trump couldn’t have been referring to Joe Biden, either.

“I’ve spoken to a certain president—who I like, actually. A past president, former president. He said: ‘I wish I did it. I wish I did.’ But they didn’t do it. I’m doing it. Yeah?” Trump said about the Iran war while at a lunch for Kennedy Center board members Monday afternoon. Later, Trump said in the Oval Office that he “spoke to one of the former presidents who I actually like.”

“I actually speak to some,” Trump said. “And he said, ‘I wish I did what you did.’” When Trump was asked to be specific, Trump said it wasn’t Bush, and when asked if it was Clinton, he replied, “I don’t want to say.”

“I don’t want to say because a member of a party, a member of a party, they have Trump derangement syndrome, but it’s somebody that happens to like me, and I like that person, who’s a smart person, but that person said, ‘I wish I did it.’ OK, but I don’t want to get into who. I don’t want to get him into trouble,” Trump said. “You know, it’s interesting. And maybe he’d be proud. And I could even ask him that: ‘Would you like me to reveal your name?’”

A former president backing Trump up on this war doesn’t even make sense. Bush rejected calls from within his Cabinet to go to war with Iran while he was president, and Obama actually negotiated a landmark deal with the country over its nuclear program. Biden avoided offensive military action during his four years in office, and Clinton last year publicly asked Trump to “defuse” tensions between Iran and Israel. Trump must be feeling some kind of insecurity or pressure over his decision to attack Iran if he’s trying to claim, without anyone going on the record, that a former president supports his reckless decision to bomb the country.

Trump-appointed National Economic Council head Kevin Hassett proudly admitted that the Iran war’s negative impact on the average U.S. consumer is “the last” of the administration’s concerns—a shockingly tone-deaf message 18 days into an extremely unpopular war. 

“The fact is that the U.S. economy is fundamentally sound, and that if [the war on Iran] were to be extended, it wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all,” Hassett said Tuesday morning on CNBC. “It would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about if that continued, what we would have to do about that. But that’s like really the last of our concerns right now because we’re very confident that this thing is going ahead of schedule.” 

Trump made this same conflation of the average consumer with the larger U.S. economy last week. 

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday morning. But that “we” isn’t normal people dreading their visit to the gas station right now. It’s American gas and oil companies that will see these headwinds, while consumers get hit with skyrocketing prices at the pump.

These tactless comments invoke the same criticisms of the Biden administration during the 2024 campaign. No one wants to hear about how great the economy is doing while they can’t buy a house, or eggs, or gas. Hassett’s comments make it seem like the economy is a game to him rather than life or death for most people. If Democrats needed any more midterm attack advertisement fodder, they should look no further.  

Donald Trump is joking about making a new fifty-first state.

The president took to Truth Social Monday night to celebrate—and take credit for—Venezuela’s victory in the semifinal round of the World Baseball Classic.

“Wow! Venezuela defeated Italy tonight, 4-2, in the WBC (Baseball!) Semifinal. They are looking really great. Good things are happening to Venezuela lately! I wonder what this magic is all about? STATEHOOD, #51, ANYONE?” he wrote.

It was a particularly dark joke from the leader who abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Afterward, Trump claimed that the United States would “run the country now” and would likely keep its hands in Venezuela for years. While the new regime Trump has installed looks a lot like the old one—it’s run by Maduro’s former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—it’s friendlier to U.S. oil interests. Now Trump’s trying a similar gambit in Iran—but with much more disastrous results.

Trump has previously warned that Cuba could be next for annexation.

Trump continually made gestures last year at annexing both Canada and Greenland, but thankfully hasn’t launched an all-out coup.

The president’s allies once believed that Donald Trump had the ability to end the Iran war whenever he saw fit. That is no longer the case.

The people surrounding the president have interpreted a shift in power in the war, as the possibility of a quick and decisive victory moves out of reach, Politico reported Tuesday. Iran’s chokehold on the global oil supply has put the U.S. in a situation that could result in a boots-on-the-ground solution if the White House wants to amend the economic consequences of the war.

“We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” one person close to the White House told Politico. “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.”

At issue is whether the U.S. can obtain control over the Strait of Hormuz, the water channel situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The strait is the single most important energy transit point in the world, funneling approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments. Iran began laying mines across the passageway last week, effectively sealing the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the rest of the open ocean.

Ensuring the free flow of oil through the strait would likely require seizing control of portions of Iran’s shoreline, a warplan that would almost certainly require the physical presence of U.S. troops in Iran. But doing so could put America in yet another open-ended Middle East conflict—exactly the kind that Trump has railed against for more than a decade.

“The terms have changed,” a second person familiar with the U.S. operation in Iran told Politico. “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day through the strait, accounting for roughly 7 percent of total U.S. crude imports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The diminished access to the strait has rattled American markets. Oil prices have skyrocketed since the U.S. and Israel jointly attacked Iran on February 28, jumping from less than $70 per barrel to approximately $100 per barrel. The national cost of gasoline has also grown by roughly 25 percent from February.

“For the White House, now the only easy day was yesterday,” the second source told Politico. “They need to worry about an unraveling.”

So far, 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south. Some 3.2 million people have been displaced, as the U.S.-Israeli strikes have damaged more than 42,000 civilian sites—such as homes, hospitals, and schools—across Iran, according to Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani.