He’s a 45-year-old former Army Special Forces officer. He’s a former politician with ties to far-right conspiracies. He’s also out of a job.
Meet Joe Kent, who up until this morning, was serving as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a now-viral post on X, Kent officially resigned from his role due to a disagreement with how President Donald Trump was handling the U.S. and Israel war with Iran—saying the country should have never been involved in the first place.
Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation,” he said, adding the war was launched “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent’s departure from one of the country’s most sensitive intelligence posts marked a dramatic break from a man long considered among Trump’s most committed loyalists.
Kent spent two decades in the military
Kent enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 17, completed Airborne School and the Ranger Indoctrination Program, and earned his Green Beret as a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant in 2003 after arriving at the qualification course just days after the 9/11 attacks. Over 20 years, he rose through the ranks to become a Warrant Officer and was selected for a Special Missions Unit—an elite tier-one designation comparable to Delta Force—deploying across Iraq and Yemen.
He deployed on 11 combat missions primarily in Iraq before retiring in 2018 with six Bronze Stars. He then became a paramilitary officer with the CIA and later served as a counterterrorism advisor to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. After leaving the government, he became a fixture on conservative cable shows and podcasts and ran twice for Congress, in 2022 and 2024. He ran in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District and lost both times to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
Kent’s ties to the Far Right
His political career was defined as much by his extremist associations as his military record. During his 2022 campaign, a political consultant arranged a call that included Nick Fuentes—a white nationalist who participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville; praised Hitler; and even said Jews hold the U.S. “hostage.” Fuentes later claimed in a livestream he told Kent “I love what you’re doing” and his network actively boosted Kent’s social media following. Kent denied any formal agreement and claimed he was barely aware of who Fuentes was, saying at the time: “The last, whatever, 24, 48 hours is really the biggest, deep-dive I’ve done on him.” He said this despite his chief consultant, Matt Braynard, having attended Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference that same year. Kent also paid a Proud Boys member for consulting work and collaborated with the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer.
Beyond his associations, Kent spread rhetoric the DCCC described as adjacent to the “Great Replacement Theory,” backing calls to halt all legal immigration for 20 years. He called for a national abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the woman, and compared abortion access to slavery and segregation. He also described COVID-19 as a China-designed “vehicle” to suppress freedoms. While he later said he rejected all “racism and bigotry,” he declined during Senate confirmation hearings to distance himself from his 2020 election denialism.
He believes in anti-Interventionism for a personal reason
Kent’s foreign policy worldview is shaped by personal tragedy. His first wife, Navy cryptologist Shannon Smith, was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in 2019 while aiding in the U.S. fight against ISIS, with her death hardening his skepticism of U.S. foreign intervention. During the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, he tore into the defense industry and Washington’s “permanent ruling class,” arguing the wars had been prolonged “on the backs and dead bodies of U.S. soldiers” by people “making money and making their careers at the other end of it.”.
His appointment and subsequent resignation
In February 2025, Trump nominated him to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, praising him as someone who would help “eradicate all terrorism, from the jihadists around the World, to the cartels in our backyard.” He was confirmed in July on a 52-44 vote that split almost entirely along party lines.
The Iran Resignation
That anti-interventionist conviction ultimately ended his tenure in the Trump administration. In his resignation letter, he accused “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” of running a “misinformation campaign” to push the U.S. into conflict, language critics noted drew on antisemitic tropes about Jewish Americans’ political influence.
It was a striking end for someone Senate Democrats had unanimously opposed at confirmation—every Democrat citing his right-wing ties—and who even one Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, had voted against.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
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