Mike Waltz gave up one of the safer seats in Congress to serve as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser (Trump won the district by 30 points in November). In return, he was subjected to one humiliation after another before finally being shown the door 101 days into the job and given the consolation prize of a nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The conventional wisdom about Waltz will likely focus on his epic Signal group chat screw-up, in which he inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to a high-level discussion about U.S. military strikes against Yemen.
Signalgate is hardly the sole reason for Waltz’s downfall.
Surely that didn’t help, but considering Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sent military attack plans to the same group chat — and also shared them with his wife and brother — and still has his job, Signalgate is hardly the sole reason for Waltz’s downfall.
Waltz’s problem was that in an administration of know-nothing America firsters, solicitous Trump sycophants, and national security novices, Waltz knew a bit too much and drank too little of the MAGA Kool-Aid.
Waltz is a fairly conventional Republican foreign policy hawk, but unlike many in Trump’s foreign policy inner circle, he had actual national security experience. He won four Bronze Stars while serving in the U.S. Special Forces, worked in the Pentagon and on Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff during the Bush administration and served on the House Armed Services Committee.
But Waltz’s even greater sin was assembling a National Security Council staff that included individuals who, like him, had focused their careers on foreign policy. They included his assistant, Alex Wong, who served as a foreign policy adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and helped organize Trump’s 2018 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Wong, too, was let go on Thursday.
Waltz and Wong followed a host of NSC staffers who were fired after the intervention of Laura Loomer, a noted conspiracy theorist and Trump whisperer. In early April, she had an Oval Office meeting with the president, at which she reportedly accused multiple NSC staffers of the ultimate MAGA sin: disloyalty to Trump.
Loomer’s accusations reportedly led to other ousters, including those of Brian Walsh, a former top aide to Marco Rubio, who was allegedly dismissed in part because he kept a transgender detailee from the intelligence community on his staff.
Waltz seemed to forget the cardinal rule of MAGA — experience and intelligence matter little to Trump. After all, this is a president who has given the briefs of ending the war in Ukraine and reaching a nuclear deal with Iran to a guy, Steve Witkoff, who has spent his career doing real estate development. Moreover, Trump’s frustration over Waltz’s Signal screw-up seemed to have as much to do with the fact that he was apparently friendly with Goldberg, a true Washington insider, than with showing such poor judgment in discussing national security matters on a commercially available social messaging app.
His calls for a tougher stance on Russia, as well as his general bellicosity toward Iran and China, almost certainly contributed to his political downfall. Waltz also stood out from the MAGA crowd on matters of policy. He seemed to grasp that Trump’s appeasement of Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine was a poor strategy (he apparently was one of the loudest advocates within the administration for sharpening sanctions on Russia if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire). His calls for a tougher stance on Russia, as well as his general bellicosity toward Iran and China, almost certainly contributed to his political downfall. If not for Signal or even his hiring decisions, Waltz’s lack of fealty to Trump’s America First agenda meant that his tenure in the White House was likely always going to be short. Indeed, Waltz could have learned much from the man who is temporarily replacing him as national security adviser, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In the not-too-distant past, Rubio was as much a foreign policy hawk as Waltz. He, too, once talked tough on Russian aggression against Ukraine and supported U.S. foreign aid and, at one point in his Senate career, even tried to broker a compromise immigration bill. Now he says the conflict in Ukraine is “not our war,” he has played a key role in demolishing the U.S. Agency for International Development, and he has zealously defended Trump’s illegal deportation policy. The symbolism of Rubio taking Waltz’s job is almost too on the nose — even for this administration. It’s not merely an indication that MAGA world will flush out the unrepentant hawks who once dominated Republican foreign policy — and are now as close to extinction as the once-flourishing “Republican free trade” caucus. It’s also a reminder that the key to staying in Trump’s good graces is to simply parrot — and help implement — whatever insane policy idea pops into the president’s head. Waltz was, at best, a replacement-level national security adviser for a Republican president — the kind of person one could imagine a President Nikki Haley or a President Ron DeSantis appointing as their national security adviser. But, in Trump world, being an adequate foreign policy hand is as much a scarlet letter as it is a key qualification. Waltz’s mistake was in believing that there’s anything normal about our current political moment.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
