The Gop Is Dismissing Joe Kent. They Might Come To Regret It.

When Joe Kent resigned as the U.S.’s top counterterrorism official over dissatisfaction with the Iran war, President Donald Trump and much of the establishment GOP shrugged him off as a nobody who was probably better off gone.

But the ideological fault line Kent’s defection exposed this week is proving harder to paper over, cracking open a deepening battle for the soul of the Republican Party.

Tucker Carlson, whose podcast is a megaphone for the anti-war populist right, had Kent on his program within 36 hours of his resignation. Far-right commentator Candace Owens booked him for a Thursday event at the old Trump Hotel in Washington.

And the White House was doing what it has done since the war began — insisting that the critics amount to little more than a loud, online fringe with no real purchase in Trump’s MAGA party.

But there is a clear risk in dismissing Kent. Carlson and Owens, whose average viewership rivals CNN’s primetime lineup, have both suggested, or hosted people who have suggested, that Israel is behind a range of ills — from leading the U.S. into a war with Iran to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Kent’s resignation letter, which he shared on X, said intelligence showed Iran posed no imminent threat despite Trump’s assertions and that Israel pushed the U.S. into war.

The rift cuts to the heart of a question the Republican Party has never fully resolved in the age of Trump: whether the president’s coalition was built on the force of his personality, or whether it represented a genuine policy realignment toward populism, isolationism and "America First” nationalism.

After more than a decade of Trump as the GOP’s lodestone, it remains unclear whether the party has truly traded the Bush era’s interventionism for a skepticism of foreign entanglements — one that now sits uneasily alongside what some worry might become a “forever war” in the Middle East.

Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative, said Kent and those like him are fighting against an attempt to turn the party back into a “hawkish, neoconservative, cut taxes, corporate right-wing party."

The constituency of right-wing populism should be taken seriously, Mills said. He pointed out how critical disaffected voters — especially young men — were to Trump’s 2024 victory and how Trump’s own advisers touted their success with this demographic.

“If you concede that this was what differentiated Trump from, say, Mitt Romney, electorally, if you believe any of that crap, then the idea that none of these people's opinions matter now, I think, is kind of silly,” Mills added.

The intraparty fracture has the potential to upend the fragile coalition that the GOP needs to hold together ahead of a midterm election that will determine who controls Congress for the final two years of Trump’s term — and, by extension, whether he will face a spate of Democratic-led investigations and impeachment inquiries.

The White House and its allies insist none of this amounts to much. The anti-war populist right, they argue, has mistaken its megaphones for a movement — confusing online influence with actual electoral weight in a party that remains, at its core, is hawkish and broadly supportive of the president.

"What's actually going on here is that you've got Tucker and Joe Kent and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie all pretending that what's happening here is somehow unforeseen, a betrayal of MAGA — that somehow they all speak for MAGA better than the president who actually designed it," said conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro. "Ninety percent of MAGA is with Trump. There's a bunch of horseshit being driven by [social media site] X algorithmic traffic, and it is not reflective of reality."

White House aides, in response to questions about the anti-war backlash, pointed to a long list of polls that largely back that assessment. An NBC News poll released days after the conflict began found 77 percent of Republicans — including 90 percent of self-described MAGA Republicans — supported the strikes on Iran, though that support drops dramatically when people are asked about their support for putting American troops on the ground.

“The president does not make these incredibly important national security decisions based on fluid opinion polls or podcast hosts, but on the best interest of the American people,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle.
Ingle described Kent’s letter as “self-aggrandizing” and “riddled with lies,” disputing the assertion that Israel forced the U.S. to strike Iran and insisting that Iran did in fact pose an “imminent threat” and was “preparing to strike Americans first.”

Kent did not respond to a request for comment.

While Republican support has slipped — a POLITICO Poll this week showed 70 percent of 2024 Trump voters and 81 percent of self-described MAGA Republicans support the Iranian strikes — it remains robust.

“The influence of the kind of neo-isolationist, restrainer wing of a party is waning as real life hits them over the head with a frying pan,” said Tim Chapman, president of Advancing American Freedom, the organization founded by Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence. “It’s not a tenable position anymore in the White House, because the White House is dealing with the real world — and they're dealing with their online world that they want to be real, but it just isn't the reality.”

Chapman's organization became something of a refuge for conservatives drawing exactly those lines. Last December, more than a dozen Heritage Foundation staffers defected to AAF following turmoil over its president Kevin Roberts' defense of Carlson's friendly interview with far-right influencer and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is an avowed white nationalist whose audience is predominantly young men with a significant online presence.

Following that interview, Carlson was labeled “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America” by Shapiro and “the single most dangerous demagogue in this country” by Sen. Ted Cruz — and Vice President JD Vance, whose rise was fueled by the party’s populist wing, was left awkwardly trying to walk the line between the two camps.

Kent has the potential to disrupt the GOP in much the same way. His resignation has already reignited a conversation about anti-semitism within the GOP, with his letter drawing on tropes of Jews as shadowy manipulators in its criticism of Israel, and surfacing Kent’s past associations with Fuentes.

The GOP’s hawkish wing insists that the party would be healthier without this contingent of podcast populists and any votes lost because of its excision could be replaced. They believe the populist, isolationist, “podcast bro” wing of the party is a drag on its electoral aspirations — and Kent is offering yet another moment for what they see as a course correction.

“It is the extremity of the podcast wing of the movement that is turning off voters. It's not that the president is taking action in Iran. It's that you have all these crazy voices out there who are dabbling with anti-semitism — if not complete outright anti-Semites themselves — and who are espousing extreme positions across the board, not just on foreign policy, but on domestic policy as well,” Chapman added. “That's what threatens to make the Republican Party unelectable.”

Whether this proves the start of something larger remains to be seen. When Biden administration staffers began resigning over the U.S.’s support for Israel' s war in Gaza, the White House dismissed them as fringe voices out of step with the American mainstream.

It was months before it became clear the resignations were an early warning sign of a generational fracture in the Democratic coalition, one that would haunt the party in 2024. Republicans now face a version of the same question, only now it’s about whether the voices on the anti-war populist right — and particularly the younger ones who represent the next generation of Republican voters — represent a fringe loud enough to be ignored, or a fault line deep enough to matter.

Unlike the Biden era resignations, Kent is no ordinary disgruntled official. A retired Green Beret who served 11 combat deployments and lost his first wife to a suicide bombing in Syria, he was Trump's pick for the job and confirmed by the Senate last year. His resignation letter was addressed directly to the president — and is viewed by his allies as a plea as much as a rebuke.

“If Kent’s resignation is successful, in my view, it will make the president reconsider his decision to continue the war,” Mills added. “The president can still declare victory and come home right now. This will have been a mistake, a sunk cost.”