Outside the Beltway

Michael Waltz Out as National Security Advisor [But in as UN Ambassador!]

A major reshuffling of the foreign policy team 100 days into the administration.

James Joyner · Thursday, May 1, 2025 · 15 comments

WaPo (“Trump plans to replace national security adviser Michael Waltz“):

President Donald Trump plans to replace national security adviser Michael Waltz, one current and one former official said Thursday, marking his administration’s most significant foreign policy shake-up to date as the president seeks to advance his “America First” agenda while managing internal divisions, staff turmoil and serious security lapses.

The expected exit of Waltz, a combat veteran and former member of Congress from Florida whose selection was among the least controversial of Trump’s senior picks for his second term, follows embarrassing revelations in March that Waltz had inadvertently included the editor of the Atlantic magazine in a highly sensitive chat among top administration officials as they coordinated an imminent military strike in Yemen.

The impending move came after weeks in which Waltz, initially a ubiquitous presence on Sunday television news shows and Fox News interviews, seemed to fade from view amid widespread speculation and media reports that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was heading a search for his replacement.

His expected departure may also signal a tightening focus on loyalty and ideological cohesiveness following Trump’s purge last month of National Security Council staff aides who reported to Waltz and whom the president deemed out of step with his priorities.

WSJ (“Trump to Oust National Security Adviser Mike Waltz“):

President Trump is replacing national security adviser Mike Waltz roughly a month after he put a journalist on a group text chat in which advisers discussed a sensitive military operation, according to people familiar with the matter, making him the first top official to lose his job in Trump’s second term.

Waltz lost favor with the president and senior advisers after the Atlantic revealed that he added a journalist to a chat on the nongovernment messaging app Signal, a crisis that dominated headlines and became one of the first major embarrassments for the administration. Trump declined to fire Waltz immediately, but privately expressed his frustration with Waltz.

Trump and senior administration officials, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, had been frustrated with Waltz even before the Signal debacle. Waltz hired aides that his critics said didn’t appeal to Trump’s MAGA base and struggled to relay the president’s national-security priorities on television—once seen as the former Florida congressman’s strength, according to administration officials. He also was sometimes ideologically out of step with Trump, pushing more traditionally hawkish views on Ukraine and Iran, and clashed with other White House officials, people close to Trump said.

Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong, is also being ousted, the people said. The former aide to Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and senior negotiator during Trump’s first-term nuclear diplomacy with North Korea was seen by the president’s allies as a Waltz loyalist. Wong had been attacked by outside Trump allies, who asserted without evidence that he was pro-China. Other National Security Council staffers Waltz hired are also likely to lose their jobs, the people said.

Waltz was planning to travel to Michigan on Tuesday for the president’s rally marking the first 100 days in office. But Trump told him not to attend, according to administration officials.

Senior U.S. officials said Waltz had been marginalized during debates on key decisions, namely starting talks with Iran over its nuclear work and brokering a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to both of those negotiations, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio proved more influential in those deliberations, the officials said, noting that Rubio had recently been spending much of his time at the White House.

POLITICO (“Trump plans to oust national security adviser Mike Waltz“):

President Donald Trump is planning to oust national security adviser Mike Waltz, who has lost the confidence of other administration officials, according to five people familiar with the decision.

He could leave imminently but the move is not final, the people said. Trump is known to pivot away from plans he tells staff and even announces publicly. All five people were granted anonymity to discuss information that is not public.

Names for a replacement have been discussed around the West Wing for weeks, but the plans to remove Waltz potentially as soon as this week gained steam in recent days, according to two of the people, and another person close to the White House.

[…]

It is unclear who would step in to run the influential White House National Security Council if Waltz is removed. Currently, a leading pick is Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff who is shepherding negotiations with Russia, Iran and Hamas in Gaza, according to the three of the people.

Other possible contenders include Trump’s top policy chief Stephen Miller, NSC senior director for counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka and Trump’s special envoy for special missions Richard Grenell.

Waltz’s departure would jolt a national security team plagued by chaos and turmoil as Trump’s team tries to broker diplomatic ends to conflicts in three theaters and wages a global trade war.

The Atlantic‘s David A. Graham believes “Mike Waltz Was Doomed From the Start.”

For weeks, Washington has been waiting to see how long National Security Adviser Michael Waltz could hold on. The answer, we now know, was 101 days.

[…]

Any other national security adviser would have been deservedly fired after the leak, but even without Signalgate, it’s hard to imagine that Waltz would have survived very long. (He did, at least, outlast the first national security adviser of Trump’s first term, Michael Flynn, who didn’t reach the one-month mark.) Waltz was one of the more respected and expert hands on Trump’s team, and that would have doomed him sooner or later.

Waltz’s demise was foretold shortly after Signalgate, when the 9/11–conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who holds no government role, persuaded Trump to fire several NSC staffers whom she believed were insufficiently loyal. Implicit in her critique and Trump’s acquiescence was a belief that Waltz wasn’t really on the team, either. Waltz is a right-winger and a convert to Trumpism, but he is not a blind loyalist. He won four Bronze Stars while serving in U.S. Special Forces. He worked at the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration, and was elected to four terms in Congress. As national security adviser, he tried to bring his expertise to the service of the president.

The problem is that Waltz was trying to serve two masters. As I wrote in January, Trump doesn’t care about national security. He’s not against it, or actively trying to undermine it; he’s just not interested. He’s not interested in hearing reasoned advice, developed through a careful process, as the National Security Council has done—especially if this advice contradicts his impulses or ideology. On an issue like the strikes on Houthis in Yemen, where Trump has fewer interests to balance, problems don’t tend to arise. But on marquee issues that Trump can’t ignore, and where tough trade-offs and complicated strategy enter the picture—such as with Ukraine or China—someone has to start giving him news he doesn’t like.

Trump doesn’t want expertise. He started his presidency by sweeping out dozens of career officials whom his team viewed as Democrats in disguise or creatures of the establishment. Since then, the ground has continued to shift. My colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker reported recently that as Waltz’s control of the NSC slipped away, the real powers on the council were the longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff. These two represent very different models: the ideologue and the old pal, respectively. Miller treats the NSC “not as a forum to weigh policy options,” Stanley-Becker wrote, “but as a platform to advance his own hard-line immigration agenda.” The handy thing about ideology is that it effaces all the hard choices that a pragmatic approach to the world requires. Witkoff, meanwhile, seems to have neither an ideology nor any expertise that might interfere with his fidelity to Trump. Though he lacks diplomatic experience, he has been friends with Trump for years, and the president has sent him ricocheting around the globe—with little to show for it so far.

Trump’s allergy to expertise also helps explain why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears to be on more solid footing than Waltz despite worse scandals: He, too, was involved in Signalgate. Though Hegseth was not the one who added Goldberg to the chat, Hegseth did share detailed attack plans in it. He also shared sensitive information with his wife and others who had no need for it, installed an insecure line into the Pentagon, and can’t manage to keep his staff from turning over. (“I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump told my colleagues in an interview last week. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”) Waltz’s ouster might be an ominous sign, however, for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a traditional Republican and Trump critic turned vassal who holds another delicate foreign-policy job.

The National Security Council was created as part of a massive reinvisioning of the defense and foreign policy apparatus of the country in 1947. The staff role commonly known as “National Security Advisor” arose in the early days of the Eisenhower administration. There are two archetypes for the job, exemplified by Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. The first is as the chief foreign policy advisor to the President and primus inter pares of the foreign policy team, usually a prominent media figure as the chief spokesman for the President’s policy. The second is a behind-the-scenes coordinator who ensures that the principals, notably the Secretaries of State and Defense but also the intelligence community, are all playing from the same set of music, smoothing over differences out of the limelight. Almost everyone agrees that the latter is the preferred model.

Waltz, alas, was unable to play either role. He wasn’t a Trump loyalist, so none of the other players feared him.

And, while Graham is certainly correct that Trump is sui generis in his vision of American foreign policy, a National Security Advisor who isn’t seen as a team player can’t survive, regardless of his expertise. A case in point was General Jim Jones, the former Marine Commandant and Supreme Allied Commander who served as President Obama’s first NSA. He was widely admired on both sides of the aisle and, indeed, there was talk that he might have gotten the post had John McCain won the election. But, precisely because he was his own man and not someone who had been on Obama’s Senate staff and presidential campaign—indeed, the two man had only briefly met before Obama’s election—the knives were out for him from the beginning by junior staffers who didn’t see him as a team player. He lasted less than two years.

UPDATE: Trump has nominated Waltz as UN Ambassador. He had initially nominated US Representative Elise Stefanik, but withdrew her nomination when it became clear it threatened the Republican majority in the House.

NYT (“Trump Administration Live Updates: President Shuffles Team, Moving Waltz to U.N. and Adding to Rubio’s Titles“):

President Trump announced on Thursday that he is removing his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, nominating him as ambassador to the United Nations and installing as his interim replacement Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will remain the nation’s top diplomat.

It is the first significant personnel overhaul of top White House aides, and the kind of shake-up that Mr. Trump has sought to avoid in his second term.

“From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on social media. “I know he will do the same in his new role. In the interim, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as National Security Advisor, while continuing his strong leadership at the State Department.”

Mr. Waltz had been on thin ice as national security adviser for months, but his position became more precarious after it became public that he organized a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal to discuss a sensitive military operation in Yemen and accidentally included a journalist.

Most of Mr. Trump’s advisers had already viewed him as too hawkish to work for a president who campaigned as a skeptic of American intervention and eager to reach a nuclear deal with Iran and normalize relations with Russia.

Mr. Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong, who worked on North Korea issues in Mr. Trump’s first term and who is considered a moderate Republican with substantial national security experience, is also expected to be removed, according to a senior administration official with knowledge of the situation. The official and others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions.

Mr. Rubio will now hold both positions, something that no other official has done simultaneously since Henry Kissinger held both titles under the Nixon and Ford administrations. One person with knowledge of the discussions said Mr. Rubio had indicated some time ago that he would be willing to serve for roughly six months if Mr. Waltz was being replaced and Mr. Rubio was asked.

The Kissinger experiment has not been considered a success by most historians, because the national security adviser is supposed to help adjudicate among competing arguments inside a national security establishment, and thus must often resolve differences among the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, among others. Mr. Kissinger was ultimately removed from post of national security adviser, and replaced with Brent Scowcroft.