On Wednesday afternoon, US president Donald Trump made the short flight to Dover Airbase for the solemn transfer of the six service members killed in the Middle East during a refuelling mission.
The ceremony was not broadcast, at the request of the families, but the sombre photographs – heavy coats and heavy mood against a slate sky – carried a stark power.
By the time Trump returned to Washington, it had been revealed that Joe Kent, the administration’s director of the US national counterterrorism centre until his abrupt resignation on Tuesday, was about to give an interview on The Tucker Carlson Show. As if explaining the Iran war was not sufficiently muddled for the Trump administration, the Kent dimension was now spilling into the Maga-verse.
Although nominally a Trump ally, Carlson has been relentless in his scepticism of the United States involvement. He was keen to hear Kent elaborate on his views that Israel, and Binyamin Netanyahu, had either coaxed or forced the administration into joining the aerial barrage that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has triggered energy price rises and mass chaos – and the deaths of thousands of innocents – across the Gulf.
“No, they weren’t three weeks ago when this started, and they weren’t in June either,” Kent told Carlson when asked about an imminent threat from Iran.
“The Iranians have had a religious ruling, a fatwa, against developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That’s available in the public sphere, but then also we had no intelligence to indicate that fatwa was being disobeyed or was on the cusp of being lifted.”
Later in the interview, Carlson played the clip of secretary of state Marco Rubio explaining the rationale for the attack, or war, in the days after its start by claiming Trump “made the very wise decision – we knew there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces.”
Rubio’s attempts since then to qualify or contextualise those remarks have not really helped, not least because he has a reputation for concise, blunt and accurate phrasing. The belief the United States was dragged into this military action by Israel has been a source of intense irritation to senior White House staff.
Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, has been offering vehement explanations in his daily Pentagon briefings but his bombast has hindered rather than helped the administration: Hegseth using the phrase “exquisite intelligence” is not a happy coupling.
Hours before Kent’s appearance, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was put through a squirming inquisition by Georgia senator Jon Ossoff during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Her answers did little to inspire the confidence of sceptics.
James Adams, director of defense Intelligence Agency, and US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testify during a Senate Committee on Intelligence in Washington on Wednesday. Photograph: Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images
Responding to Kent’s resignation letter, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated on Tuesday that the administration’s own counter-intelligence head was simply airing “the same false claim that Democrats and some in the liberal media have been repeating over and over”, reiterating that president Trump had “strong and compelling evidence that Iran was about to attack the United States first” and saying he would never take such a grave decision “in a vacuum”.
During Trump’s long question-and-answer session in the company of Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Tuesday, he repeated the claim that the US and the world was on the verge of a catastrophic series of attacks.
But Kent’s crisis of conscience has not helped the White House in its continuing effort to sell the necessity of the war to the public against the backdrop of escalating fuel prices, with oil at $110 a barrel, the prospect of Iran falling further into the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the potential for a land mission involving US troops and persistent scepticism from usually loyal voices.
“Joe Kent is a guy that is highly revered – 11 combat tours, valour and courage and dedication to country beyond question,” Steve Bannon, the Maga podcast host and former Trump adviser said on his show.
“Coming from a guy like Joe Kent, to me, you are going to have to investigate this. There should be an immediate investigation of what he is talking about. I’ve had many questions about the 12-day war and about this whole imminent threat. And as I’ve also said: now you are in it, we’ve got to win this thing.”
Megyn Kelly, the former cable anchor who describes herself as Maga-adjacent, has also been critical of the Iran attacks while Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman now estranged from and disillusioned with Trump’s version of Maga ideology, has anointed Kent “an American hero”.
Several commentators, including New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, have offered a more nuanced view of Kent, who has a recorded history of offering conspiracy theories on everything from January 6th to Anthony Fauci.
“The trauma of war breeds extremism,” Goldberg wrote on Wednesday. “Kent himself is a prime example. A former Green Beret, he told me in 2022 that he was propelled into politics by the 2019 death of his wife, Shannon Kent, a Navy cryptologic technician who was killed by an Isis suicide bomber in Syria.
“Back then, he blamed what he called the ‘administrative state’ for her loss, arguing that unelected bureaucrats had foiled Trump’s attempts to pull troops out of Syria. Now, he’s come to direct that rage toward the Jewish state, describing himself in his resignation letter as a ‘Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel’.”
Trump has declared, several times, that victory over Iran has been achieved, and that he will end the mission when he feels the time is right.
Meanwhile, Wednesday night fell in Washington with confirmation that Israeli intelligence had killed, or “eliminated”, another leading figure in the Iranian regime.
[ Israel’s relentless policy of assassination in Iran could backfireOpens in new window ]
Right now, Trump still has strong support among the Republican base for involving the US in the attack, according to recent polling. The White House frustration at what they see as the blind refusal of the liberal media and Democratic opponents to ever give the Trump administration credit for anything has turned molten since the Iran war began.
Now, Kent’s decision to speak up and jump from relative obscurity to the heart of a national debate adds another dimension to the conversation.
Last summer, Washington Democratic senator Patty Murray warned the chamber about her deep alarm at the Republicans appointment of Kent, whom she described as “a conspiracy theorist who espouses white supremacist views, and is patently unqualified for this important role in just about every way imaginable”.
“We have all the evidence we could ever need – in the public record, right now – that he is not going to do the right thing,” she said then.
“And we have no reason to believe he will do this important, high-stakes work in a serious, impartial manner – let alone a competent one. I am here to urge all of my colleagues to join me in doing exactly what people back in Washington state have done each time they were asked to trust Joe Kent: vote no.”
Her Republican colleagues may now wish they’d listened.