Joe Kent’s wife, a crypto linguist in the Navy, was killed in action in Syria on her fifth deployment as part of a special operations task force. But that’s not why the Republican from Washington state is running for Congress.
“The simplest answer was Jaime voting for impeachment,” Kent said in an interview with the Washington Examiner, explaining why he decided to challenge Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in the 2022 GOP for southwest Washington’s 3rd Congressional district. Under Washington state’s election system, the top two finishers in the first round of voting run against each other in November.
Herrera Beutler voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in the waning days of his administration for his alleged role in the ransacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6. It pushed an already dissatisfied Kent over the edge.
“I was a huge Trump supporter in the military and in the CIA as well — in particular, his America First foreign policy and trying to get us out of these endless wars,” Kent said.
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The 41-year-old project manager for a technology company is a military veteran, having served in a paramilitary unit of the Central Intelligence Agency and in the Green Berets, the special forces branch of the Army. Kent is raising two children, ages 4 and 6, on his own. He first met Trump when he traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in early 2019 to receive his wife’s remains.
“I told him, basically, ‘You’re getting the foreign policy right,'” Kent said he told the 45th president.
Kent blames the national security establishment in Washington, D.C., for his wife’s death. Its resistance to Trump’s push to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria (and other global hot spots), he believes, led directly to her death. Kent became a political activist. He proceeded to work on the former president’s 2020 reelection campaign, and he expected to serve in the administration had Trump defeated now-President Joe Biden.
About that: “I really felt, and still feel, that the election was rigged — stolen,” Kent said. This brings him to the other reason he is challenging Herrera Beutler in primary in a district that delivered 50.6% of its vote to Trump. “The woman I voted for voted to certify the election. I had major issues with that,” Kent said, referencing Congress’s vote to certify the Electoral College results. “She was derelict with her duties to stand up for our most sacred social contract.”
Kent is part of a new wave of Trump Republicans running for state and federal office in the midterm elections. Some are running of their own volition, attracted to politics by Trump, and are seeking to emulate his style and promote his agenda. Others, including Kent, are answering appeals by the former president for Republicans to run against his GOP critics and expunge them not just from office, but from the party altogether.
But Kent, who has been endorsed by Trump, emphasized that his platform involves much more than expanding the former president’s army in the House of Representatives.
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He wants to crack down on illegal immigration, expand choice in education for parents children who attend public schools, eliminate vaccine and mask mandates at the state and federal level, revitalize Washington’s timber industry, bring back American manufacturing, reduce overseas deployments by the U.S. military and stop “saber-rattling” as it relates to Russia and Ukraine, and strengthen American defenses to prepare for a potential conflict with China.
And Kent has another goal in mind, as well, should he find himself in Washington in January 2023. “We have to obstruct” the Biden administration, he said. Republican voters “don’t want compromise for a little bit of pork,” he added. “That’s not what voters want from Republicans.”
