President Trump has taken on many ancillary roles in Washington: chairman of the Kennedy Center. The de facto chief architect of the city’s landmark properties. And now, the nation’s chief intelligence analyst.

This revelation came from Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. She had the unenviable task at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday of squaring Mr. Trump’s comments about an urgent nuclear threat from Iran with a letter from one of her trusted aides that the country posed no “imminent threat.”

Her answer? Only the president can decide what is an “imminent” threat. In other words, she was turning one of the key roles of the intelligence community’s 80,000 employees — to make nonpolitical judgments about threats to American security — over to Mr. Trump.

Ms. Gabbard’s comments were necessitated by the decision of Joe Kent, her close adviser, to quit his counterterrorism position over his opposition to the war in Iran and his belief that Israel had pressured the United States into the conflict.

Democrats, long critical of Mr. Kent and his penchant for conspiracy theories, jumped on his comments about the war — creating at least a short-term communications crisis for the Trump administration. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Mr. Kent wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

Ms. Gabbard does not quickly turn on her allies, and she showed little desire to throw Mr. Kent under the bus or attack him. But she has remained in her position by being a careful student of Mr. Trump, and knows how to stay on his good side. And critiquing the president’s view of the threat from Iran was clearly not the way to keep your job.