BATTLE PLANS

Trump’s Most Dangerous War Isn’t in Iran. It’s in MAGA-land

This is the ideological problem facing the modern MAGA movement: It cannot decide whether Trump is an infallible genius or a gullible victim of global conspiracies.

Mom, the white supremacists are fighting again! This week’s MAGA temper tantrum began with the abrupt resignation of Joe Kent—a former Green Beret, CIA officer, two-time failed Congressional candidate and FoNF (Friend of Nick Fuentes)—from his position as head of the National Counterterrorism Center.

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Kent was already a controversial pick for the job. Critics have pointed to his association with Patriot Proud Boy Graham Jorgensen, his appearance on a Nazi-adjacent podcast, and his stated admiration for the self-described white nationalist writer Sam Francis. Kent has also complained that American culture has become “anti-white” and “anti-straight-white-male.”

So, naturally, he was put in charge of counterterrorism, reporting to Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

In his resignation letter, Kent blamed Israel and its “powerful American lobby” for dragging the United States into the current war with Iran. According to Kent, “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” had tricked Donald Trump into betraying his America First platform.

Kent then went further, blaming Israel not only for America’s invasion of Iraq but even for the suicide bombing in Syria that killed his wife. In other words, the Jews did it.

Here, then, we’re finally exposing the live wire of antisemitism that has been crackling beneath the MAGA project since its beginning. Any political movement fueled by grievance and paranoia will eventually wander into antisemitism. Now that we’ve invaded Iran for no discernible reason, the Joe Kents of the world prefer to blame Israel rather than the great and powerful Oz in the red baseball cap.

Trump was deceived, you see. Hoodwinked. Betrayed. Bamboozled, even!

Which is convenient. Because the alternative explanation—that Trump knowingly launched another Middle East war while screaming “America First” through a megaphone made of Diet Coke cans—would require a level of accountability the MAGA universe simply cannot stomach.

Well, some of the MAGA universe at least. Because while Kent was busy rage-quitting his job, his former boss was offering a very different explanation.

Testifying before Congress this week, Tulsi Gabbard, who spent the last few years rebranding herself from an anti-war Democrat to a populist-nationalist MAGA-adjacent figure, gave lawmakers a surprisingly sober account of America’s Iranian adventure.

According to her testimony, the attack was justified under the familiar national-security buzzword: “deterrence.” Deterrence from what, exactly, is a wee bit murkier.

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After all, Gabbard’s own office had previously assessed that Trump’s much-ballyhooed “Operation Midnight Hammer” had successfully obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. And as she testified to Congress, the intelligence community had seen no evidence that Iran had taken steps to reconstitute it.

Which prompted Senator Jon Ossoff to ask the obvious question: Was the US intelligence community’s assessment that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat?

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and isn’t an imminent threat,” said Gabbard. I imagine that came as news to them.

Still, whatever the precise rationale for the strike, Gabbard made one thing clear: the Iran war was not the result of yarmulke-wearing puppet masters and cable news hosts pulling America into a holy war. It was the result of the same Trumpian mix of strategic miscalculation, political bravado, and chest-thumping that has dragged the United States into every stupid Middle East adventure since the invention of the iPod.

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Gabbard’s testimony, therefore, introduced a somewhat novel idea into the MAGA ecosystem: that American leaders might actually bear responsibility for American wars. Crazy, I know, to have to consider that the current president is perfectly capable of shooting the country in the foot all by himself.

This is the ideological problem facing the modern MAGA movement. It cannot decide whether Trump is an infallible genius or a gullible victim of global conspiracies. When Trump does something they like, he is a strategic grandmaster operating on a plane the rest of us cannot comprehend. When he does something they don’t like, he’s a helpless pawn manipulated by shadowy elites.

It’s a remarkably flexible system.

Yet Kent’s meltdown reveals something deeper than the usual MAGA contradictions. For years, the movement cultivated a political culture steeped in grievance, paranoia, and conspiratorial thinking. Once you convince millions of people that shadowy cabals secretly control the world, it’s only a matter of time before those cabals begin acquiring familiar historical identities.

This is not a new phenomenon. Antisemitic conspiracy theories have been the junk food of reactionary politics for centuries: cheap, satisfying, and completely devoid of nutritional value. Which is why figures like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly are currently splashing around in those dank waters. Their audience wants the pure stuff. The uncut paranoia. Why stop at Soros when you can implicate an entire religion?

Meanwhile, American bombs continue falling and the Middle East grows more unstable by the hour.

As a certified Trump-hater, I suppose I should be delighted that his coalition is fracturing. And I am. I’m just less thrilled that the crack threatening to bring the whole thing down runs along this most familiar fault line. Then again, we always knew this was coming. Hatred of their shared enemies can only hold a coalition together for so long. Yes, the white supremacists are fighting again. Forgive me for not enjoying the show.

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Michael Ian Black

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