President Donald Trump lashed out Thursday night at Joe Kent, the 46-year-old former National Counterterrorism Center director who quit last month over his opposition to the war in Iran, and dragged Candace Owens into the fight with a post that mixed personal grievance, political fury and open contempt. Trump asked, “Who’s dumber, Tucker Carlson or Joe Kent?” and then called Kent a loser, a sleazebag and a leaker.
Kent had resigned last month, saying he could not in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. In his resignation letter, he wrote that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States and that the conflict had begun under pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. Trump’s attack came after he had already shared a 2020 message Kent posted on X that appeared to support intervention in Iran.
The 79-year-old president also reached back to one of the most painful parts of Kent’s life. Trump said he met Kent at Dover Air Force Base after Kent’s wife was killed while serving as a cryptologic technician for the U.S. Navy, and wrote that her casket was being brought there. Shannon Mary Kent was killed by a suicide bomber during a military operation in Syria in 2019. Trump said Kent married again quite quickly, in his view, after meeting visual artist Heather Kaiser a year after Shannon Kent’s death and marrying her in 2023.
Kent’s life in public service has long been bound up with that loss. He published a 2024 book about Shannon Kent’s life, Send Me: The True Story of a Mother at War, and Trump said he had told aides to find him a role in the White House after his failed congressional campaigns. Kent ran for Congress in Washington in 2022 and 2024 and lost to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez both times. In the same post, Trump said, “Hire him for the White House. Give him a job, make him feel good, he lost his wife and two Elections,” and added, “They did so and, while I rarely saw him, I certainly didn’t expect disloyalty, but that’s what I got.”
The blowup lands as Kent faces questions beyond the war itself. Semafor reported shortly after he announced his departure that he was being investigated for allegedly leaking classified information, though the FBI said the inquiry predates his resignation. Kent has denied any wrongdoing. Trump nevertheless wrote, “He was really a SLEAZEBAG, and some would say, on top of it all, A LEAKER!” and closed with, “I don’t know whether or not that was true, but next time, NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”
Trump’s final insult widened the blast radius well beyond Kent, putting Candace Owens and other prominent conservative critics in the same line of fire. He wrote that Kent is a “LOSER,” just like Tucker, Candace, Megyn and the rest of them, and said they were born low IQ. The post made clear the rupture is not just about one resignation or one war. Trump is punishing dissent, and he is doing it by name.
For Kent, the question now is no longer whether his break with Trump over Iran was real. Trump answered that for him, in public, with a post that turned a policy dispute into a personal and political execution.
