Transcript: Trump Case for War Undermined by Bombshell as MAGA Breaks

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

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 Strait of Hormuz. 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 U.S. This is going to further roil 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 Horne, 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.

Emily Horne: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: 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 it 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?

Horne: Sure. So the NCTC, as it’s often referred to, is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 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, Homeland Security, the FBI, et cetera, 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.

Sargent: And importantly, Joe Kent reports to the director of national intelligence and is neck-deep in the kind of stream of information that’s swirling around in the intelligence world.

Horne: That’s exactly right. And I think it’s important to note that Kent is something of an outlier among NCTC directors. Traditionally, the people who hold this role are career national security and intelligence professionals. They’ve come up in this system. They know how the bureaucracy works. They know how to get policymakers 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.

Sargent: 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?

Horne: Absolutely. And look—to be generous—any former, now-former national security official cannot 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 has now left office. But it also, I think, really bears repeating that the administration has not presented a coherent case 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 success looks like, what our goals are, and why we’re there in the first place.

Sargent: 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?

Horne: 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 U.S. launching a war. And then there’s what’s happening in the second Trump administration. And those are two different things.

Traditionally, the NCTC director is going to be right in the thick of the assessments of the intelligence—surfacing policy options for the president to consider, making sure that everything that goes to the National Security Council and the White House is thoroughly vetted and stress-tested, that if there are any ambiguities, those are either being addressed or, if they can’t be resolved within the intelligence community, that they’re being presented as ambiguities to the president, so that the president has as clear as possible an understanding of what the intelligence says and can then make an informed decision about where to go. So that’s what normally would happen with the NCTC and the DNI.

There’s very confusing and conflicting information as to whether the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and her team are actually playing that role in the Trump administration’s war on Iran.

Sargent: It strikes me that it’s still big news for such a senior intelligence official to come right out and directly undermine the entire rationale for war that the president offered, right?

Horne: I would say undermine a rationale—because again, they’ve cited a lot of rationales for this war. They’ve cited supporting the Iranian people and their aspirations for democracy—that was an early rationale that Trump almost immediately abandoned. They’ve cited regime change. They have cited protecting regional security interests and American security interests in the region. But of course, as our troops and our embassies and our citizens have come under fire, one of the things that they didn’t have a plan for was how to protect our diplomatic facilities and how to evacuate a million American civilians from across the Middle East.

So again, if those threats had been present, then you would have expected a lot more substantial planning for how to mitigate them in real time. You would not have seen this slapdash announcement in the middle of the night.

And so to your question—I think, yes, normally the assessment of someone like the former director of the NCTC saying there was no imminent intelligence threat here would be pretty damning. I would argue that in this case, it is but one more piece of evidence that there was no plan, likely because there never was a threat to begin with—or if there was a threat, it was not such that there was any planning for how to mitigate it in any serious way other than starting kinetic strikes.

Sargent: Well, speaking of that, let’s switch here to Trump’s anger at NATO allies. He posted this on Truth Social: “The U.S. has been informed by most of our NATO allies that they don’t want to get involved with our military operation against the terrorist regime of Iran, despite the fact that almost every country strongly agreed that Iran cannot in any way, shape, or form be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump then added, “I always considered NATO to be a one-way street. We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us.”

So Emily, this is just horseshit of the highest order. Our allies objected because Iran did not pose the imminent threat Trump claimed—and because Trump screwed up the planning here, creating the mess, he’s asking them to come clean up. Can you talk about this oddity?

Horne: Yeah. Look, normally, if you are thinking about taking military action, one of the first things that you do is coordinate with your allies and partners—whether that is acting in defense of your interests, giving people a heads-up if there’s going to be overflight, requesting base access, or even just letting people know, hey, we’re going to be doing this—no surprises.

As our ally, you shouldn’t find out about this on the news, because we have a security agreement or a treaty or a history of cooperation. That is how you nurture alliances and partnerships. None of that happened in this case, except perhaps with the government of Israel—that’s the only ally with whom we apparently coordinated prior to Trump’s launching strikes on Iran.

So yeah, it’s quite something to see the administration so put out that—after not briefing any of our allies and partners about what the threat allegedly was or why we’re taking this action at this particular moment—these countries are understandably skeptical about the prospect of involving their own boots on the ground or other military assets in an open-ended conflict where we don’t have any clear definition of what success looks like.

Sargent: It’s just amazing. We should probably note that Kent is not a great guy—he appears to be a virulent antisemite—but the letter that he sent to Trump is still pretty striking. Here’s another line from it: “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people.”

This is striking because Kent isn’t just directly contesting Trump’s central rationale for the war—or one of them—that Iran posed an imminent threat. He’s also suggesting that Trump appears ready to support sending in troops, and that 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?

Horne: It seems like the sort of thing he’d be privy to.

Reading Kent’s resignation letter, I was reminded of that infamous Onion article that makes the rounds every once in a while—”Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point.” Look, the letter has some incredibly ugly antisemitic tropes. It evokes some really nasty rhetoric that I frankly recoiled 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 and 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 success looks like or a clear explanation to the American people of why we’re 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 6th. 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, that case just has 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 the substance, I think, even as the rhetoric here can be pretty ugly.

Sargent: 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 verge of sending in troops and you’re going to have a quagmire on your hands. That’s what I’m hearing.

Horne: I think that’s right. And you know, I think—again, I have no idea, nor do I think anyone on the outside knows, 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 you don’t have to have a TS/SCI 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.

Sargent: Absolutely. And to your point, Kent really is an ultra-MAGA figure himself. Now you have MAGA really at war with itself over this conflict. There are figures like Megyn 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 borders on the antisemitic in some of these guys’ cases.

And then on the other side, you’ve got people like Fox host Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro. Megyn Kelly just ripped Mark Levin as “micro penis Mark,” which, you know, whatever. Shapiro called Kelly an “unbelievable coward.” You’ve got very high-level debates going on over there in MAGA. What do you make of all that?

Horne: 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.

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 foreign policy is made not by the consensus of experts or data or even the will of the people. It is made by trying to dominate a news cycle, or trying to get a week of good headlines, or trying to 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 as much a media and attention economy operation as I do traditional foreign policy.

Sargent: Well, we have a piece on this up at NewRepublic.com—folks can check it out. But one really interesting dimension to this is that when you have figures like Megyn 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 kinds of circles, in those constituencies, against war. It’s not just conspiracy theorizing, if that makes sense. Like, there are elements of MAGA that seem in good faith to oppose foreign intervention—though a lot of it is kind of bullshit. There are a lot of MAGA voters out there, maybe rank-and-file grassroots, who are genuinely opposed to war. And that’s a real thing.

Horne: 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 constant aggression, one of constant use of military force where diplomacy might have prevailed. So far 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 non-Americans have died as well.

I would say that there’s no evidence that the world is any safer, more 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 state 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. So this is wildly unpopular across the board, not just with MAGA.

Sargent: 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 House Speaker Mike Johnson talk about Joe Kent’s resignation.

Mike Johnson (voiceover): 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 Defense, and everyone—the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine—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.

Sargent: 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? It seems like there’s a real opportunity to try and pin down what it is he actually knew.

Horne: 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 and change into the second Trump administration, are looking at how this is going and asking themselves whether this is what they really want to be tied to for the rest of their careers and public lives.

And so I suspect there will be a lot of folks who, before this administration is out, are going to claim that they didn’t know, that they were fighting it from the inside, that they were trying to push back against this. But these are people who all chose to go in the second time, knowing what we all knew. So yes, have the hearings—yes, listen to what they have to say—but never forget that these guys, mostly guys, all chose to be a part of this, knowing what we all knew at the time.

Sargent: 100 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 Horne’s Substack, Spin Class. Emily, wonderful to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Horne: Thanks, Greg.