The Daily Blast: Trump Case for War Undermined by Top Official as MAGA Crack-Up Worsens

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Donald Trump is very unhappy with our NATO allies. On Tuesday he angrily ranted that most of them won't clean up his mess by helping to reopen the straight of her moves. Trump ridiculed them by saying they agree with the need to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,

then praised himself for doing that without them.

But this message was badly undermined by the sudden resignation of a senior Trump intelligence official, who said explicitly that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the US. This is going to further royal maga, which is in a civil war over the Iran conflict.

“So how damaging is this resignation to Trump's case for war?”

We're discussing all this with Emily Horn, who served on Joe Biden's National Security Council and worked for nearly a decade at the State Department. Emily, nice to have you on. Thanks for having me, Greg. So we just had the resignation of Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, in a letter to Trump, Kent said, "I cannot in good conscience support the war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,

and that is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel." Emily, can you describe for us what the position of head of the National Counterterrorism Center entails? Sure, so the NCTC as it's often referred to is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And the NCTC was created out of the 9/11 Commission, one of the recommendations from that work, was to bring together specialists from across the intelligence community and other federal agencies,

the CIA, DOD, the Homeland Security, the FBI, etc. to have a central clearinghouse for all information relating to potential terror attacks on the homeland. And so the NCTC is the hub for organizing the executive branch's terrorism work. It assesses potential domestic threats, it monitors international and domestic communications for potential threats, it generates intelligence to support investigations by law enforcement. It coordinates across the executive branch and brings together all of those actors to try to prevent terrorist attacks on the homeland.

And importantly, Joe Kent reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is knee deep or neck deep in the kind of stream of information that's kind of swirling around in the intelligence world, right?

“That's exactly right. And I think it's important to note that Kent is something of an outlier of NCTC directors.”

Traditionally, the people who hold this role are career national security and intelligence professionals. Come up in this system. They know how the bureaucracy works. They know how to get policy makers the information that they need to make informed decisions. Kent is something of an outlier. He's former army special forces. He's a veteran. He's a former congressional candidate. He's a lot of things, but a career national security official is not one of them. Right. I want to bear down on Joe Kent's claim in the letter that Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.

Obviously, Trump has said his attack on Iran was necessary because Iran was about to develop a nuke, but he varies how long it would have taken. Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's two. Sometimes it's three. The New York Times reported that American officials don't believe that about Iran.

“But the point is, Kent would have been in a position to see intelligence on this correct?”

Absolutely. And look to be generous. Any former now former national security official can not talk publicly about what they saw when they were inside, even if they've resigned their position. And so I'm sure there's a lot he knows that he is constrained from saying, even as he's now left office. But it also, I think, really bears repeating that the administration has not presented a coherent case for the for Trump's war on Iran from day one.

And so it's not surprising that three weeks in the public is still confused about what to success look like, what are our goals, why are we there in the first place?

Can you talk a little bit more about where Kent is in this kind of information hierarchy? Would he be privy to the best information of all about this? So I think you need to break it into two categories. There's what normally the NCTC director would have access to and would be doing in the run up to the US launching a war.

And I think that the question is, is that the president is going to be looking for everything that goes to the national security council in the White House is thoroughly vetted and stress tested that if there's any ambiguities that those are either being addressed or if they can't be resolved but within the intelligence community that they're being presented as ambiguities to the president so that the president has as clear as possible and understanding of what does the intelligence say.

“And then he can make an informed decision about where to go.”

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It's almost over here. The school of the school? And then it's open. No, not at all. I mean, my safe space.

Do you think everything is safe? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like a door to a door to the door. I mean, a door to the door to the door. I mean, it's like a door.

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I mean, a door to the door. I mean, a door. I mean, a door to the door is to be a virulent anti-Semi, but the letter that he sent to Trump is still pretty striking. Here's another line from it, quote,

"I cannot support sending the next generation "off to fight and die in a war "that serves no benefit to the American people." "Quilis quote." This is striking because Kent isn't just directly

"contesting Trump's central rationale for the war" or one of them that are on post and imminent threat,

but he's also suggesting that Trump appears ready to support

"sending in troops" but this has the makings of the sort of Quagmire that Trump campaigned against.

“Emily, where would Kent be in that sort of information stream?”

Might he be in a position to know more about the likelihood of a Quagmire as well? It seems like the sort of thing he'd be able to. Reading Kent's resignation letter, I was reminded of that infamous onion article

that makes the rounds everyone's in a while. Worst person you know was right about something. Look, the letter has some incredibly ugly anti-Semitic tropes. It evokes some really nasty rhetoric that I'm frankly required at while reading it.

There's no denying though that it also evokes a particular strain within maga that as you rightly note is very anti-interventionist as very skeptical of open-ended foreign conflicts. And I think in its most generous reading,

I would say that that strain of anti-interventionism is not necessarily tied to maga. It has its own folks on the progressive left and even in the center who are very skeptical of open-ended U.S. boots on the ground,

especially again when there's not a clear definition of what to success look like or clear explanation to the American people of why are we doing this now. So again, there's a lot there. And I want to be very clear here that this is not a person

who we should hold up as a hero. This is someone who evoked conspiracy theories around government involvement in January 6. This is someone who has close ties to white supremacists like Nick Fuentes.

“This is someone who I think for a whole host of reasons”

we should have a lot of skepticism towards. But there's no question that he is articulating a view that a lot of people on both the left and the right have, which is that if we're talking about engaging boots on the ground and sending American forces overseas,

well, that case just does not been made to the American people. And the American people are tired of war. They don't understand what we're doing. They don't understand how this makes their lives better or safer. So we've got to pay attention to,

I think the substance, even as the rhetoric here, can be pretty ugly. Right, and he's forcefully saying that the intelligence simply does not support Trump's main rationale of an imminent threat and saying, you know what, Trump seems to be on the birth

sending in troops and you're going to have a quiet mind on your hands. That's what I'm hearing. I think that's right. And you know, I think he's, you know, again, I have no idea, nor do I think anyone knows

on from the outside how closely involved the DNI and her team are in war planning right now. But this stuff has all been publicly reported. Every reporter in town is chasing all of this. And so it, you know, you don't have to have a TSSCI security

clearance to be saying, hey, I don't think there's actually a plan here. And I'm really worried about the prospect of boots on the ground. Absolutely. And to your point, can't really is an ultra-mag a figure himself. Now you have mag a really at war with itself over this conflict.

There are figures like Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson arguing that the war is just doing Israel's bidding.

“I think a lot of that stuff is very anti-Israel”

and reporters on the anti-Semitic and some of these guys cases. And then on the other side, you've got people like Fox host Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, Megan Kelly just ripped Mark Levin as micro penis Mark, which, you know, whatever.

You got very high level debates going on over there in maga. What do you make of all that?

I am reminded that a lot of these folks are media figures first.

And they are extremely adept at manipulating the information economy and even traditional media to advance their objectives. And frankly, make a lot of money. This is a great gig that a lot of them have going. And the more outrage that they generate,

the more clicks they get, the more they get people tuning in. You know, this is an administration that functions more or less like a reality TV show. And I keep going back to that framing for how to think about this moment

because truly, we all seem to be living within a reality program

right now, not actual reality, where, you know, the foreign policy is made not by, you know, the consensus of experts or data or even the will of the people. It is made by trying to dominate a new cycle or trying to get a week of good headlines or trying to, you know, get someone to demonstrate their loyalty to you.

A lot of this is personal, a lot of this makes people a lot of money. And so what I see here is, you know, as much a media and attention economy operation as I do traditional foreign policy. Well, we have a piece on this up at tnr.com, folks can check it out.

But one really interesting dimension to this is that when you have figures like

Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson saying all this stuff, it's got all the bad dog whistles in it and so forth. But on some level, they must have swaths of their constituencies who really do not want this war, right? There's actually some sort of genuine groundswell in those kind of circles

in those constituencies against war.

“It's not just conspiracy theorizing if that makes sense, right?”

Like there are elements of maga that seem in good faith to oppose far and intervention though a lot of it is kind of bullshit. There are like a lot of maga voters out there. Maybe rank and file grass roots who are genuinely opposed to war. And that's a real thing.

And not just maga, this war has been spectacularly unpopular from day one. You know, Trump ran on the idea of no more foreign wars. And his foreign policy since taking office has been one of, you know, constant aggression, one of constant use of military force where diplomacy might have prevailed. So far he's been able, he's been really lucky, frankly. He's been able to avoid a major attack on the homeland,

a major catastrophe. American soldiers have died on his watch and Lord knows a lot of other non-American, non-Americans have died as well. I would say that there's no evidence that the world is any safer or stable or more secure since he's taken office, he's trashed our alliances. He has made the world far less predictable, thanks to his tariffs, as well as his foreign interventions.

Whether you are a European head of stage or trying to do business in Southeast Asia or build American industry, you're just not able to predict what the world is going to look like in a few months or even a year from now. It's very difficult to do. So this is filed the unpopular across the board, not just with maga.

“Right. And I think it's important that we are seeing some segment, however big it is,”

of Trump voters starting to peel off because it splits the Trump coalition and that has political importance. Just to close out, let's listen to how Speaker Mike Johnson talk about Joe Kent's resignation. I got all the briefings. We all understood there was clearly an imminent threat that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability and they were building missiles at a pace that no one in the region could keep up with. I don't know where Joe Kent is getting his information, but he wasn't in those briefings clearly because

the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War and everyone, the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Cain, they had exquisite intelligence that we understood that this was a serious moment for us. Had the president waited, I am personally convinced that we would have mass casualties of Americans. So the reporting actually indicates that intelligence officials did not think Iran posed the nuclear threat that Trump claimed here, as I mentioned before. It's also amusing that Johnson says he doesn't know where Kent is getting his information.

I mean, he was a top intelligence official. Whatever, it seems like it would be a good idea for Democrats to bring in Joe Kent to testify if they take back the House majority, right? Or is he too crazy a figure to do that? I mean, seems like there's a real opportunity to try and pin down what it is he actually knew.

“I think Joe Kent is a relatively young figure in American politics. He's only I think 45 years old.”

And he is one of many folks who a year in change into the second Trump administration are looking at how this is going and asking themselves that this is what they really want to be tied to for the rest of their careers and public lives.

But these are people who all chose to go in the second time knowing what they we all knew.

“So yes, have the hearings, yes, listen to what they have to say, but never remember these guys mostly guys all chose to be a part of this knowing what we all know at the time.”

A hundred percent and Kent is really at the forefront of this. He's doing it pretty early relatively in the process, which is pretty striking.

Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Emily Horan's substock spin class. Emily, wonderful to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Greg.

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