A system is what it does: Why we must examine the betrayal of MAGA’s key promises. (Patreon)

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Joe Kent's Brief:How did President Trump end up taking us to war with Iran despite knowing it could become a disaster? And why is he staying in the war, even when it seems he wants to just walk away. This is the question many of his supporters have been asking since the conflict began in February. How could a president who campaigned against endless wars—and who avoided new ones in his first term—be tricked or manipulated into a situation that he had repeatedly described as foolish? How the hell did we get here?

Many of us, including myself, have offered partial explanations grounded in verifiable facts. From my vantage point inside the administration, I witnessed Israeli officials and their allies effectively use their influence to sabotage U.S.–Iranian negotiations and push us into attacking Iran. Despite denials from some officials, the administration’s own public statements have largely confirmed this pattern. But Israel’s access to the president and his cabinet—through Israeli officials, pro-Israel donors, and the media—is nothing new. These same forces attempted to influence previous presidents and Trump in his first term…but they failed.

So, what changed? What was the deciding factor that drove President Trump to attack Iran? This is the critical question that every American should be asking, because the answer will tell us who actually calls the shots in our republic.

As I stated in my resignation letter, I believe that President Trump was deceived by the Israelis and their supporters to get us into the war with Iran. However, it is possible that other factors could have influenced his decision. Since he entered the political arena over a decade ago, President Trump has consistently argued that wars in the Middle East, especially a war with Iran, are a fool’s errand. I was around him frequently in the lead-up to Operation MidnightHammer and during the early months of this administration, and he was firmly opposed to war with Iran.

I could have misread the President—I was obviously not around him at every moment, nor was I a member of his inner circle. But in the President’s intelligence briefings I attended, it was clear he understood that such a war would be a disaster and that he wanted to avoid it. I share all this to provide context as to why I have a hard time believing that President Trump was simply given bad advice or that he abruptly reversed course and suddenly believed that attacking Iran was a good idea.

President Trump had successfully avoided full-scale war and had crafted an effective strategy for dealing with Iran, yet each time he tried to implement that strategy, the rug was pulled out from under him, forcing him to take steps that he previously opposed that in turn escalated the situation into a full-blown war.

In his first term, pro-Israel and neoconservative voices in his cabinet lobbied forTrump to strike Iran after the Iranians shot down one of our unmanned drones. Instead, President Trump called off a retaliatory strike because he knew it would result in Iranian casualties and could have pushed us into a wider war.

In early 2020, when Iranian proxies killed an American contractor working with the U.S. military in Iraq, President Trump opted to conduct a surgical strike against the Iranian proxy master Qasim Soleimani and his Iraqi deputy AbuMahdi Muhandis. He ignored demands for all-out war while demonstrating that he would respond decisively to attacks. He also imposed an aggressive campaign of sanctions, applying economic pressure on the Iranian regime.

That policy was working. The Iranians’ behavior proved it. When Trump left office, and Biden took over, Iran took advantage of Biden’s weakness and, via its proxies, attacked U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan more than 200 times.

When President Trump returned to office in January 2025, Iran ordered its proxies to stand down. That restraint held until we struck Iran in February of 2026—clear evidence that the deterrence President Trump established by killing Soleimani had been effective up until that point.

When the issue of uranium enrichment became an obstacle in negotiations(largely because of Israel’s meddling), President Trump conducted Operation Midnight Hammer to take uranium enrichment off the table completely. This was effective—the Iranians returned to talks within days. In January 2026, the Iranian people took to the streets in protest of the regime, showing that the economic conditions imposed by President Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions were also working.

Despite this success and President Trump’s long-standing opposition to war, he was ultimately convinced to attack Iran. How? The simplest explanation is the one Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave after the initial strike: Israel was preparing to attack Iran, and we knew that Iran would, therefore, retaliate against us. This may be true, but it does not explain why the President would allow Israel to put us in this position in the first place.

So we are back where we started: What caused President Trump’s dramatic reversal?

The same question applies to President Trump’s handling of many other major issues. Why has he reversed course on releasing the Epstein files? Why is he granting immunity to glyphosate producers? Why has he all but abandoned mass deportations and other core 2024 campaign promises? What is causing him to act against the very principles he campaigned on—the principles for which 77million Americans voted? What is going on?

To fully assess and answer these questions, it is critical that we look beyond Iran to the broader pressures that could strongly influence his decision-making.

The most obvious yet under-discussed factor is the unrelenting threat of violence against President Trump and his family. For nearly two years, there have been repeated assassination attempts against President Trump and major breaches of his security—from Butler, Pennsylvania, to West Palm Beach, Florida, to the most recent attempts at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the killing of an armed gunman outside the White House, with numerous public security failures in between. It is impossible to believe that the president feels he and his family are truly safe.

Another factor that cannot be overlooked is the public assassination of CharlieKirk, one of President Trump’s most effective political organizers. In the lead-up to Operation Midnight Hammer, Charlie privately and publicly advocated against war with Iran. He had also begun publicly questioning the U.S. relationship with Israel, and had a falling-out with pro-Israel donors to Turning Point USA. After Operation Midnight Hammer, Charlie continued to support President Trump while arguing against further military action against Iran. He was killed in the fall of 2025, just as Israel was heavily pressuring the White House to “finish the job” in Iran.

These events—multiple assassination attempts, repeated security breaches, and the public assassination of a close ally—are data points, forming a clear pattern: the president is not fully in control, and he can be reached. President Trump has an extraordinary ability to sift through large amounts of information, identify key themes, and rapidly assess opportunities for leverage while pinpointing vulnerabilities. After two years of compounding data points, it is clear that he cansense powerful forces at work that he cannot control. He saw such powerful forces at play during his first term, when Jeffrey Epstein was killed in a maximum-security prison.

It also defies logic that no major changes have been made at the Secret Service despite its repeated failures. Why is leadership not being held responsible? The agency bumbles from one near-miss to the next with no apparent accountability. If the mission to protect the President were actually being taken seriously, leadership would have been replaced long ago. The purpose of a system is what it does—the Secret Service’s pattern suggests its effective purpose is to permit near-misses every few months.

There is no single smoking gun connecting all of these threats, but there is a consistent theme that points to a system, not random coincidences. Compounding the problem is the minimal investigation into the assassination attempts against President Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I know this firsthand: my former organization, the National Counterterrorism Center, was prevented from investigating key aspects of the Butler attempt (including the Iranian agent case)and the foreign links to Charlie’s assassination.

When we examine all the factors that could be influencing our President at such a critical time, it becomes clear that something deeper than the President simply receiving bad advice is going on.

If we were assessing a foreign government, we would factor all of these data points into our assessment to fully evaluate a leader’s behavior. We need to demand real answers about who or what is influencing our leaders’ decisions. Otherwise, it will not matter who we elect—the system will get what it wants, every time.