Even without Signalgate, the president wasn’t likely to keep his national security adviser around long.
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.
Multiple outlets reported this morning that Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, would be leaving the Trump administration. His firing comes roughly seven weeks after he added The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat in which top administration officials discussed a strike on Yemen before and after it took place. In legal and security terms, the mortal sin was conducting official business in an unsecured and unpreserved forum; in political terms, it was including Goldberg. Trump acknowledged last week in an interview with Goldberg, and my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, that the scandal was “a very big story” and that his administration had learned “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?” Trump reportedly hesitated to fire Waltz because he didn’t want to give the media a “scalp” or acknowledge that he cared, but his resolve apparently weakened.
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.
