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National News
Ex-Trump official pinpoints exact moment Trump’s ‘mentality changed’ — for the worse
Joe Kent, the former senior intelligence official who resigned from the Trump administration in protest of the Iran war, made a stunning claim Monday that “something” happened to President Donald Trump that “changed” him from that point forward.
“Something in the late spring, early summer time frame happened – I don’t know what happened,” Kent said during an appearance on the “Julian Dorey Podcast” published on Monday.
“I can’t tell you why his mentality changed, but it went from, ‘we’re gonna create the most space we can for [Iran] negotiations and we’re not interested in the war,’ to, ‘okay, we’re gonna support the Israelis, do Midnight Hammer and we’re gonna continue to entertain this.’”
A key pledge of Trump during his 2024 campaign was that he would not send Americans “to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end,” reiterating that promise during his victory speech: “I’m not going to start a war,” he said.
And yet, in late February, Trump launched Operation Epic Fury with a large-scale attack on Iran that months later now risks sparking a broader war.
Kent, who's long championed Trump's anti-interventionist rhetoric, said he was confused by the president's apparent shift, and while he could narrow down roughly when it happened, he still couldn't say what caused it.
“I don’t know what happened. And so for me, when something like that happens, from an intelligence background, you do have to step back and look at what else could be influencing the president,” Kent said.
“Did he just change his mind? For him to go through with [launching the Iran war], ultimately, I do think there’s potentially other factors there: so what could those other factors be? Why would a president make decisions that he doesn’t agree with?”
Other conservative figures have speculated as to why Trump launched a war against Iran despite his frequent anti-war rhetoric, including prominent conservative figure Tucker Carlson, who in April floated a disturbing theory that a “blackmail” operation perpetrated by the Israeli government could potentially have forced the president’s hand.
National News
Trump ‘really angered’ during his speech by act that left him vowing ‘revenge’: journalist
A journalist pointed out that Trump's speech revealed what angered him much more than election meddling.
During an episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, executive editor Hugh Dougherty looked back at Trump's Thursday night speech on election security. Trump had touted it as a "primetime" speech earlier in the week, and what left him fuming more than election meddling was how it was snubbed by major television networks like ABC and NBC.
"That's the thing that really angered him," Dougherty said. "He wanted this speech to be on prime time. There's nothing he loves more than being on prime time. There's nothing he loves more than ratings, and he was boycotted. Effectively, he was switched off."
Trump showed that he was enraged by the snub more than anything because "the rest of the speech was, if I'm honest, a bit low T," Dougherty said.
"He was raspy," Dougherty said. "He was not quite slumped, but he was not standing energetically, and he went through a whole lot of grievances."
Dougherty noted that Trump did seem "very sore" about losing a presidential election. "He's very sore about what happened six years ago," Dougherty said. "And he became president again, but he can't get over that. He lost."
By contrast, "the most alive bit of this speech on Thursday night was when he demanded that they face revenge for not showing their speech," Dougherty said, referring to how Trump complained that networks such as ABC and NBC were "part of a plot."
Trump suggested that ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses for not airing his remarks, reporting by The Daily Beast noted, adding that the White House Rapid Response Team even went after members of the press for their coverage afterwards.
