WASHINGTON ― Hours after his head of counterterrorism quit saying he couldn’t support the war against Iran, President Donald Trump claimed he didn’t really know him that well but that he had “always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.”
“I always thought he was a nice guy,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, not long after Joe Kent had announced he had stepped down from running the National Counterterrorism Center. “I didn’t know him well.”
That sentiment is at odds with his past praise of the conspiracy theorist who rose in Trump’s estimation for his embrace of the false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump and that the FBI had fomented the Jan. 6, 2021, violent attack on the Capitol.
In fact, Trump’s endless lying about a stolen election enraged his followers and he himself asked them to converge on Washington, D.C., on the day of the congressional election certification. It was his own speech hours before the assault, according to many of those who participated, that drove them to violence.
“I think this man has a tremendous future, a very special person,” Trump said of Kent in 2022 as he endorsed his run for Congress in Washington state.
