Donald Trump’s national security adviser was already on thin ice after the “Signalgate” affair. When the US president sacked important members of his staff on Thursday, the ice sprang a whole new set of cracks.
Mike Waltz has been in the spotlight since he created a group chat on the messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information about a US strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen, and accidentally invited a journalist to join it.
Trump has refused to sack him over the incident. But the firings of key officials at the National Security Council — and Waltz’s apparent failure to protect them — show how much his standing has dwindled.
Washington insiders say rightwing activists are targeting Waltz because they view him as a classic neoconservative, out of step with the president’s “make America great again” foreign policy agenda.
They say the Maga camp is particularly troubled by Waltz’s support of Ukraine in its war with Russia, which they see as an obstacle to the rapprochement Trump seeks with Moscow.
“These people don’t stop — when they want you out, they keep going,” said an official from Trump’s first administration. “That’s their playbook.”
“You’ll see an effort to weaponise social media and the far-right conservative media to attack Waltz,” the former official added. “And the Russians will jump on that and reinforce it.”
The NSC dismissals on Thursday came after Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and conspiracy theorist, met Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday armed with detailed reports on staffers she accused of being disloyal to the president. Waltz was in the meeting.
Loomer posted on X on Thursday that it had been an “honour” to meet Trump and “present him with my research findings”, but declined to divulge any of the details of her encounter.
Among those dismissed was Thomas Boodry, a senior director for legislative affairs, who previously worked for Waltz when he was a member of Congress.
But the sackings were only the latest setback for the former special forces colonel in the wake of the Signalgate affair.
Earlier this week the Washington Post alleged he and other NSC members had used private Gmail accounts to conduct government business. NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes pushed back on the report, saying Waltz had “never sent classified material over his personal email account or any unsecured platform”, though he acknowledged the national security adviser had “received emails and calendar invites from legacy contacts on his personal email”.
The Wall Street Journal also reported Waltz had created and hosted multiple conversations on Signal with cabinet members that dealt with sensitive issues of national security, including separate threads on military operations and how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.
Hughes said Signal was an “approved, encrypted messaging app” and “any claim NSC officials sent classified information over these channels is false”. He said some federal agencies “automatically install” the app on government devices.
Former government officials say Trump — who on Sunday dismissed the negative press as “witch-hunts” — does not want to sack Waltz lest it appear that he had caved to pressure from Democrats and mainstream media. They say the president regretted his decision to fire national security adviser Mike Flynn in his first term, after Flynn admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia.
But Waltz could still be in trouble. “He’s living on borrowed time,” said one former White House official in Joe Biden’s administration. “He made the government look like idiots, which Trump would not have liked.”
“He doesn’t have a whole lot of get out of jail free cards left,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Department of State official.
Trump was reportedly less annoyed by the revelations about the Signal chat than by the fact Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at The Atlantic, stored in his list of contacts.
Critics say Waltz did not do himself any favours with the strange explanations he gave for the Signal affair. At one point he claimed Goldberg’s contact was “sucked in” to his phone via “somebody else’s contact”.
Waltz’s troubles are all the more striking in light of the praise heaped on him when Trump tapped him as national security adviser in November.
Decorated with four Bronze Stars, Waltz was the first Green Beret to be elected to Congress, and served as a special forces officer with multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa.
Trump hailed him as a “nationally recognised leader in national security, a bestselling author and an expert on the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran and global terrorism”.
“Mike is a very well-rounded guy — very smart,” said Peter Bergen, a security analyst at the New America Foundation, who has known Waltz since 2008.
“He served in the Pentagon, in the White House, as a special forces colonel on the battlefield, was a congressman, and also ran a successful business. So he brings a lot to the table,” Bergen said.
He had also long supported Trump and “was on the plane with him a lot” during last year’s presidential election campaign, Bergen added.
But Trump loyalists are also suspicious of his foreign policy stance. He denounced the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and espouses hawkish views on Russia, Iran and China that are anathema to some in the more isolationist Maga movement, with its sympathy for autocratic leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Waltz said in an op-ed in 2023 that Putin was to blame for the war in Ukraine, “like al-Qaeda was to blame for 9/11” — a view that clashes with some of Trump’s recent pronouncements.
Compared to the president’s other national security picks, “Waltz is more of a traditionalist”, Miller said.
“There’s still a lingering question mark hanging over Waltz,” said one diplomat in Washington. “The knives are definitely out for him.”
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