MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace Gushes Over Joe Kent’s ‘History’-Making Resignation Letter

Sarah Butler
March 18th, 2026 5:15 PM

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On Tuesday afternoon, MS NOW’s Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace opened her show by fawning over National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent’s surprise resignation letter over the Iran War, declaring it will be written about in history books.

Unsurprisingly, this marked a 180-degree shift for Wallace on Kent seeing as how, back on May 21, 2025, she lambasted Kent as dangerous.

In the present, though, Wallace described a particular sentence in Kent’s letter as a “sort of sentence, that’ll live on forever in the history of this chapter.” The historic sentence she referred to was the following:

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing 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 and its powerful American lobby.

 

Wallace then zeroed in on Kent’s dramatic exit, highlighting him as the “first senior national security official to depart Donald Trump’s isolationist political coalition in the aftermath of the Iran war being launched.” Trump weighed in after Kent’s departure stating that he was “very weak on security.”

A fellow Republican-turned-liberal, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols unsurprisingly agreed by saying the “truest part” of Kent’s letter was that “there was no imminent threat from Iran.” He emphasized that “there was no forcing function behind this war” and that “it’s not like we knew that they were days or weeks or months from a nuclear bomb.”

Nichols criticized the administration's reliance on the threat narrative, concluding that it “is the talking point the President seems to be holding on to for dear life.” He ended by mocking Trump’s confidence, stating that “just today, he [Trump] talked about if it had, but not for me, there would have been a nuclear holocaust.”

Wallace had led off the show a few minutes prior, hawking Kent’s concerns as emblematic of those from everday Americans about the war:

Click "Expand" to view the transcript:

MS NOW’s Deadline: White House
03/17/2026
4:07 p.m. Eastern

NICOLLE WALLACE: Tom Nichols, Mr. Kent writing this sort of sentence, that’ll — that’ll live on forever in the history of this chapter is written and the chapter on the war in Iran is written. I believe the sentence will be there: “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing 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 and its powerful American lobby.” So writes the first senior national security official to depart Donald Trump’s isolationist political coalition in the aftermath of the of the Iran war being launched.

THOMAS NICHOLS [CONTRIBUTOR TO ATLANTIC DAILY NEWSLETTER]: Well, the truest part of that was Kent saying that there was no imminent threat from Iran. There was nothing. There was no forcing function behind this war. It’s not like we knew that they were days or weeks or months from a nuclear bomb, although now that is the talking point the President seems to be holding on to for dear life. Just today, he talked about if it had, but not for me, there would have been a nuclear holocaust.

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