Hours after his head of counter-terrorism quit saying he couldn’t support the war against Iran, President Donald Trump claimed he didn’t really know him that well but that he had “always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.”

“I always thought he was a nice guy,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday, not long after Joe Kent had announced he had stepped down from running the National Counter-terrorism Centre. “I didn’t know him well.”

That sentiment is at odds with his past praise of the conspiracy theorist who rose in Trump’s estimation for his embrace of the false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen and that the FBI had fomented the January 6, 2021, violent attack on the Capitol.

In fact, Trump’s endless lying about a stolen election enraged his followers, and he himself asked them to converge on Washington DC, on the day of the congressional election certification. It was his own speech hours before the assault, according to many of those who participated, that drove them to violence.

“I think this man has a tremendous future, a very special person,” Trump said of Kent in 2022 as he endorsed his run for Congress in Washington state.

That year, Kent defeated the sitting Republican who had earned Trump’s wrath by voting to impeach him for his coup attempt but then lost the general election to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Kent ran again for that seat in 2024 but lost to Perez a second time.

Trump, after winning back the White House in that election, appointed Kent to a top position in the national security world. “Joe will help us keep America safe by eradicating all terrorism, from the jihadists around the World, to the cartels in our backyard. Congratulations Joe!” Trump wrote in a February 3, 2025, post.

That history apparently was no longer relevant Tuesday for Trump. “I realised that it’s a good thing that he’s out because he said that Iran was not a threat,” he said.

Kent had cited his opposition to Trump’s 17-day-old war. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he wrote in a social media post that included an image of his resignation letter.

While Kent has embraced anti-immigrant and white nationalist positions over the years, the theory that Israel pushed Trump into the war was actually laid out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio days after the attack began on February 28.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman known for her longtime opposition to a war with Iran and Kent’s supervisor, on Tuesday afternoon released a statement that neither addressed Kent’s departure nor the wisdom of Trump’s decision to attack Iran.

“As our commander in chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country,” she wrote. “After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.”

While Trump in his public comments on Tuesday called Kent “a nice guy,” Trump’s aides and supporters were far less charitable.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to Kent’s letter with a lengthy, 450-word post of her own. “The absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable,” she wrote.

Taylor Budowich, a former top White House aide, claimed that Kent was about to be fired. “Joe Kent is a crazed egomaniac who was often at the centre of national security leaks, while rarely (never?) producing any actual work,” Budowich wrote. “He spent all of his time working to subvert the chain of command and undermine the president of the United States. This isn’t some principled resignation—he just wanted to make a splash before getting canned. What a loser.”

Olivia Troye, once a national security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, said the White House likely feels the need to damage Kent’s credibility because of his assertion about Iran. “He actually calls out the lack of imminent threat,” she said.

National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent resigned abruptly on Tuesday in protest of President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, now in its third week, accusing Israel of repeatedly luring the United States into conflicts.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in his resignation letter to Trump.

He criticised Israel in harsh and at times feverish terms, bizarrely accusing the country of also being responsible for US involvement in the 2003 Iraq War and of “manufacturing” the Syrian civil war.

A political appointee who was confirmed last summer, Kent served under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a longtime critic of overseas military entanglements who has nonetheless been silent on Trump’s decision to start another war in the Middle East.

Trump has struggled to explain why he agreed to attack Iran when he did, alluding to vague threats the nation posed to US interests, as Americans start seeing higher costs at home. Thirteen US service members have been killed and around 200 injured in the conflict so far.

Kent said in his letter that he supported “the values and foreign policies” that Trump campaigned on in his past three presidential campaigns. Trump went so far as to dub himself the “President of Peace” in the last election cycle.

Kent believes, however, that “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined” Trump’s platform and “sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”

He went on, delving deeper into the supposed conspiracy: “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

“You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos,” Kent wrote. “You hold the cards.”

Kent is a military veteran with 11 combat deployments under his belt. His wife, Shannon, was working in Navy intelligence when she was killed in Syria in 2019.

He mentioned both of these facts in his letter, saying that he “cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed back on the letter’s contents.

“I don’t know where Joe Kent is getting his information,” Johnson told reporters.

He said that he attended national security meetings with other Gang of Eight lawmakers — top Republicans and Democrats in both chambers of Congress — and that the group was shown evidence of an imminent threat.

But Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who was also in the meetings, has said that was not the case.

Taylor Budowich, a former deputy chief of staff in the Trump White House, smeared Kent as a “crazed egomaniac who was often at the centre of national security leaks, while rarely (never?) producing any actual work.”

“This isn’t some principled resignation — he just wanted to make a splash before getting canned. What a loser,” Budowich said on X.