Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby.

Tonight, I’ve got more exclusive new polling from Echelon Insights, demonstrating why Donald Trump keeps bragging about stopping a nuclear war: because it’s one of the only rationales for the Iran conflict that Americans are willing to tolerate. The new data also shows that Americans really don’t like Pete Hegseth, and that they’re divided on Congress continuing to fund the war. Also, no surprise, Trump’s approval rating on foreign policy keeps tumbling…

By the way, if you aren’t already a devoted listener of my partner John Heilemann’s incredible podcast, Impolitic, he’s been on a tear lately—and his coverage of the Iran war is second to none. Last week, he talked to former Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan, a key architect of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, about how Trump’s war went off the rails. And on Friday he hosted Wendy Sherman, Biden’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the president’s ever-changing reasons for the war and whether he’ll put boots on the ground. Subscribe here or here.

Finally, before we get going, a few words from Julia Ioffe on the Trump administration’s first big resignation over the war.

Mentioned in this issue: Joe Kent, Nick Fuentes, Micheál Martin, Greyson Arnold, Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Collins, Megyn Kelly, Pete Hegseth, Tucker Carlson, and more…

This morning, Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center—part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—very publicly resigned over Trump’s war on Iran. In his letter, Kent raged that Trump had betrayed his isolationist principles as well as his wise understanding that Middle East wars are “a trap.” He pleaded for him to reverse course. It was a dramatic display of the MAGA base’s convulsions over Iran, and the first high-profile resignation from the Trump administration since the three-week-old war began. (Looking at you next, Bridge Colby!)

Kent, like all good disillusioned revolutionaries, didn’t blame the revolution’s leader, but rather a certain nefarious cabal of wreckers and saboteurs that had seduced the leader into deviating from the revolution’s true course. That’s right, the Jews. Kent blamed Trump’s decision to attack Iran on Israel’s “misinformation campaign,” which had been deployed to “deceive” the president into going to war. On one hand, okay, Bibi Netanyahu did work very hard to get Trump on board, both now and last June. On the other hand, Israel is not, as Kent claimed in his letter, responsible for the death of Kent’s first wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptographer who was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in Syria in 2019.

This is hardly surprising coming from Kent, who is well known for his white nationalist sympathies. He courted Nick Fuentes for support when he first ran for Congress—and went on to lose, twice. He also hired a Proud Boy for ill-defined campaign “consulting,” and has been associated with violent far-right groups like Patriot Prayer and the Oath Keepers. He’s also been tied to self-proclaimed “Christian American nationalist” Greyson Arnold, who has said the Nazis were a “pure race” and that Hitler was a “complicated” figure. Kent, for his part, has said, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white-people special interest group.”

That fringe right-wing, conspiracy-theory-addled personalities have come to hold positions of power in this administration is, unfortunately, nothing new. In fact, Kent was once chief of staff to left-wing conspiracy theorist and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. He gained notoriety in that position when, last March, he made Michael Collins, the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, redo his intelligence assessment, which had concluded that the Tren de Aragua gang had not, in fact, been acting on orders of the Venezuelan government. That conclusion undermined the legal basis for Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of said gang. So Kent asked Collins to “rethink” his analysis. Now Kent has rethought his job.

Gabbard, on the other hand, has not (so far). Constantly rumored to be on you’re-fired watch, the notoriously anti–Iran war Gabbard issued a definitive statement on X, saying it was Trump’s decision to go to war—implying it was based on intelligence her agency provided—and that it is Trump, and only Trump, who can decide what the true path of revolution is.

Trump may have stumbled into the best-possible messaging with his tough talk about nukes, but amid a flurry of bad headlines about dead American soldiers, rising gas prices, and fed-up European allies, the war remains unpopular with the American public, Echelon found. Only 43 percent of voters said they support the American military campaign in Iran. And Trump’s approval rating on foreign policy now stands at just 38 percent—a drop of four points from only a month ago, and down almost 10 points since he took office.

On top of that, only a fraction of Americans (14 percent) rank national security as the biggest issue facing the country, with 64 percent saying either the cost of living or the economy is more important. That number will almost certainly grow, with gas prices on the rise as a direct result of the war: According to AAA, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline is up almost a dollar compared to just one month ago.

The poll also found that one of the primary faces of the war—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—has fast become one of the most unpopular figures in Trump’s cabinet. Hegseth’s unfavorable rating is now at 41 percent—up nearly 10 points since last year—with only 26 percent of Americans having a positive view of the former Fox News host. He does, after all, like to boast about “warfighting” and “lethality” to an American public that elected a president who promised to scale back warfighting. (Granted, his decision to change the Defense Department’s name to the “Department of War” was a bit of a tell, in retrospect.)

MAGA voters, though, still support the military action in Iran—even if prominent podcast voices on the right, like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, are loudly questioning whether the war is justified. Echelon asked “Trump-first” Republicans whether the war is an “America First” policy. A big majority of those Republicans (70 percent) said it was. But the conflict is less popular with “party-first” Republicans, who are split: 53 percent of them called the war an “America First” policy, with 18 percent saying it wasn’t and 29 percent saying they were unsure.

There’s at least one place where Americans can agree: The poll found they are overwhelmingly against the idea of sending ground troops into Iran, with 69 percent opposing the idea and a near-majority (46 percent) saying they’re “strongly opposed.” Voters are more narrowly divided on the idea of Congress passing additional funding to pay for the military campaign, which has already cost tens of billions of dollars. But Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested that Congress will have to pony up more money—an idea fiercely opposed by House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has called the Iran campaign “reckless” and “a war of choice.” Almost half of voters (47 percent) oppose the idea of Congress passing additional funding to pay for the war, while 43 percent support it.

Join Puck’s chief political columnist, John Heilemann, as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you beyond the headlines with the people who shape our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected… and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.

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