Vice President JD Vance said on Wednesday that he believed that the resignation of Joe Kent, the highest-ranking official to step down over the war in Iran, was appropriate because Mr. Kent did not support President Trump’s agenda there.
Mr. Vance’s remarks, delivered at a manufacturing facility in Auburn Hills, Mich., where he promoted Mr. Trump’s economic agenda, came one day after Mr. Kent, a top counterterrorism official, quit in protest of a war he said was a result of a pressure campaign by Israel.
The vice president, a longtime skeptic of overseas military engagements, has publicly endorsed the military intervention in Iran after he initially cautioned the president and his advisers against it. His comments in Michigan were closely watched, as he seeks to balance his allegiance to the anti-interventionist wing of Mr. Trump’s coalition with his loyalty to the president.
Mr. Vance said he knew Mr. Kent “a little bit” and liked him. He said that it was “one thing to have a disagreement of opinion,” which he claimed Mr. Trump welcomed, but that “if you are on the team and you can’t help implement the decisions of his administration — he has the right to make those decisions — then it’s a good thing for you to resign.”
“Whatever your view is, when the president of the United States makes a decision, it’s your job to help make that decision as effective and successful as possible,” Mr. Vance said.
He added, “That’s how I do my job, and I think that’s how everybody in the administration should do their job, too.”
Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that Mr. Kent was “a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security.”
“It’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said that Iran was not a threat,” he said.
In Michigan on Wednesday, Mr. Vance urged voters to continue supporting Republicans in the November midterm elections.
But looming over the event was a war that has already killed 13 U.S. service members, a conflict that remains deeply unpopular with much of the American public, with gas prices skyrocketing amid a cost-of-living crisis.
Mr. Vance also sought to quell concerns about how long Americans would feel the pain of the war, which Mr. Trump has offered shifting justifications for starting and elusive timelines for ending.
“I guarantee the president of the United States is not interested in getting us in the kind of long-term quagmires that we’ve seen in years past,” Mr. Vance said.
Mr. Vance in 2023 wrote that one of the reasons that Mr. Trump had his support was because he would not “recklessly send Americans to fight wars overseas.”
Mr. Kent’s resignation was one of the most high-profile indicators of how the war has fractured part of Mr. Trump’s base.
In a scathing letter to the president, Mr. Kent, who has long had a penchant for conspiracy theories, claimed that there had been a “misinformation campaign” by Israeli officials and the news media that had undermined Mr. Trump’s “America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”
He also undercut the administration’s initial justification for joining the war. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” he wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
The war, Mr. Kent added, was needlessly costing American lives.
In the letter, Mr. Kent also referred to his late wife, Shannon, a military cryptologist who was killed in a suicide attack in Syria in 2019.
While Mr. Vance visited Michigan, Mr. Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base to participate in the dignified transfer of an Air Force crew that was killed when its KC-135 tanker crashed in Iraq.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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