The gas-price data keeps rolling in, and it keeps looking grislier. Gas is up eighty cents a gallon nationwide from this time last month, which the New York Times notes is the second-biggest four-week increase in at least 30 years: “bigger than the one at the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, or the ones associated with the post-recession surge of 2009 and the OPEC production cuts in 1999.” Only Hurricane Katrina hit prices harder during that span. Happy Wednesday.

The MAGA Schism

by Andrew Egger

Something odd is going on with the MAGA would-be stars. For a decade now, politicians and posters alike have had a single path to relevance: grabbing tightly to Donald Trump and distinguishing themselves by the strength of their adoration for him and the purity of their hatred for his enemies. But another path is emerging.

Yesterday, Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, charged onto that path. He announced that he was resigning from the administration, effective immediately. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter. “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.” Trump, he wrote, had been “deceived” by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” into abandoning his antiwar instincts and charging into an unwinnable conflict in Iran.

Kent went on: “I 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.”

The letter went off like a bomb in the administration, which was completely blindsided by the news. They rushed to work trying to discredit Kent: He was, they quickly whispered to Fox News, a known leaker who had been cut out of Trump’s intelligence briefings, whom the White House had thought should be fired, who had not been part of Iran planning discussions at all. “I always thought he was weak on security,” Trump told reporters of a man he had given a senior counterterrorism job.

If you’d never heard of Kent before now, you should pause before rushing to crown him a top fighter of the #Resistance. A special forces veteran and two-time failed congressional candidate, Kent was notorious early in his political career for rubbing elbows with the white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes,¹ and later he enthusiastically embraced Trumpy conspiracy theories like the notion that the FBI was responsible for the Capitol insurrection on January 6th. His letter mixes understandable dismay over the course of the war and the Trump administration’s foreign-policy entanglement with Israel with some more broadly questionable anti-Israel tropes, like his claim that the Syrian Civil War—a conflict in which Kent’s wife died—was also “a war manufactured by Israel.”

But suspend for a moment the question of whether and to what degree Kent is a hero or a villain. The more interesting point now is that he sees political promise in turning on Trump at all.

For a while, it’s been clear that Trump—for all the chaos of his administration and for all his explosive hatred of the liberal establishment—now fully embodies a GOP establishment of his own. These days, your median empty-suit Republican congressman is more likely to make embracing Trump his entire personality than actual internet-poisoned true believers of the MAGA base are.

Now, we’re starting to see the corollary development: shades of MAGA countercultural revolt against that MAGA establishment. With a few exceptions—Tucker Carlson being the most obvious—you see this primarily among younger, smaller stars in Trumpworld. If you have a small right-wing following and you’re looking to make it a big right-wing following, and most especially if that following is concentrated among young right-wing people, it’s no longer the case that backing Trump to the hilt is the only move.² Kent isn’t the only recent example of a figure popular with young anti-Israel Republicans to go out of his way to break with the White House: I wrote last month about Carrie Prejean Boller, an influencer appointed by Trump to his Religious Liberty Commission. She tripled her social-media following after provoking Trump into firing her after she derailed commission meetings by demanding to know if other commissioners thought her anti-Israel positions made her an antisemite.

There’s no reason to believe that the MAGA base broadly opposes Trump’s war in Iran; Trump’s voters have always been more blandly fine with Trump’s wars than the doves in MAGA media would like to believe. But the anti-war and anti-Israel types, who are disproportionately young, have established a beachhead in the Republican coalition. Joe Kent won’t be the last would-be right-wing star to flee Trump in a play for their support.