The first high-profile casualty of Team Trump 2.0 emerged today, after the US President fired his scandal-ridden National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.
Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, are expected to leave their posts by the end of the day. Trump has nominated Waltz for UN ambassador.
The timing of this first major upheaval of Trump’s second administration is unlikely to be a coincidence - the US President may well have postponed the firing because he was determined to make it to day 100 in office without any major sackings.
“Mike Waltz has left the chat”, jibed Kamala Harris’s former running partner, Tim Walz, in reference to what we can wager a pretty good guess is the main reason for the departure of Trump’s principal adviser on national security issues: Signalgate.
Waltz made a mighty blunder back in March when he accidentally added a senior journalist at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal group chat in which top-level Trump administration officials were discussing highly sensitive attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen.
Within this highly confidential chat, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth had shared the timings and sequencing of US airstrikes on Houthi rebels on 15 March - information which could have put the lives of US military personnel at risk if leaked.
The former Florida congressman took responsibility for the incident though offered a rather bizarre explanation for how the error occurred. "I can tell you for 100% I don't know this guy," he told Fox News in the wake of the scandal, adding that Goldberg’s contact information must have got “sucked in” to his phone.
At the time, Trump downplayed the security breach, insisting Waltz was "doing his best" with "equipment and technology that's not perfect". But today’s leak development suggests he was far more rattled than he let on.
Could Hegseth be next?
While Waltz took responsibility for the Goldberg group chat blunder, Trump's defence secretary has since been linked to another separate security breach, in which he shared messages on Signal with his wife and brother about military strikes. Hegseth has also faced a tumultuous past few months amid reports of chaos and dysfunction in the Pentagon, and the sacking of several of his top aides.
The defence secretary will, however, be reassured by the praise Trump heaped on him in the Rose Garden only this evening - “Pete Hegseth is doing a fantastic job" - after reports of Waltz’s imminent departure broke.
Even Waltz has survived longer than the US President’s first-term National Security Advisor. Michael Flynn lasted less than a month after Trump’s inauguration, after it emerged that he had misled then-Vice President Mike Pence and other top White House officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
More generally, Donald Trump's first administration had already endured a slew of firings and resignations by the time he hit his 100 days in office.
Anthony Scaramucci survived just 10 days in his post as communications director, before Trump fired him in July 2017 for telling the New Yorker magazine that then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was a "paranoid schizophrenic".
That Trump 2.0 has made it this far without more major upheavals speaks largely to the fact that the US President has, this time round, surrounded himself with loyalists. Meaning less room for dissent. The trade off? Many of these loyalists also lack political experience. Meaning plenty of room for blunders.
Caitlin Allen
Deputy Editor
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