Mike Waltz: A ‘Smart Hawk’ Who Shares Trump’s Worldview

A few days after Donald Trump announced Mike Waltz as his choice for national security adviser, the Florida congressman appeared on Fox News and offered the expected praise for the president-elect.

“I think the president has been very focused on America, Americans, and American interests and both defending those and promoting those and in line with those values all over the world,” he told host Sean Hannity. “We can have allies, we can have friends, but we can have tough conversations, and we need to share that burden against our adversaries. And at the end of the day, our adversaries have to respect, and will respect, strength. That will be Donald Trump in this White House.”

That language is very different from how he spoke about Trump during the 2016 presidential primary. Waltz appeared in a political ad in which he accused Trump of essentially dodging the draft in Vietnam and encouraged voters to “stop Trump now.”

“He essentially called anyone who was captured in combat a loser,” Waltz said of Trump in the ad from an advocacy group called American Future Fund. “It’s something that I just personally can’t stomach and am sickened by, as should every veteran and every soldier in the United States military. Here is a man that I don’t think is tough in any way, shape, or form. He’s been fed through a silver spoon. He’s hidden behind the laws of our nation in terms of bankruptcy. He’s hidden behind veterans organizations, and he certainly has not really stepped forth and stepped forward in terms of personal sacrifice to serve this country.”

Waltz is far from the only congressional Republican to have changed his tune on Trump over the past eight-plus years, though he’s not the only former Trump critic to break through, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio, the nominee for secretary of state. And his background places him more in the Reagan-Bush-Cheney wing of the GOP than Trump’s MAGA movement. But Waltz has found a way to appeal to Trump, especially on issues of foreign policy.

That’s why, come January, he will have the ear of a president he once encouraged Americans to vote against. He will bring extensive experience in national security, both on the ground and behind a desk. Waltz, the first Green Beret to be elected to Congress, has received four Bronze Stars and served both as a soldier in Afghanistan and as a policy adviser in the Pentagon and the White House. Members of the House of Representatives The Dispatch talked to for this article—both Republicans and Democrats—offered high praise for his character and national security bona fides.

“I have the utmost faith and confidence in Mike. He’s highly qualified for that position,” said fellow Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who serves with Waltz on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He added: “I think he’s got the experience … I think he’s balanced in his approach.”

And, like most of Trump Cabinet picks, he has had the requisite amount of exposure on Fox News. As of last month, Waltz had made 169 weekday Fox News appearances, the most of any member during the 118th Congress, according to Media Matters, a left-wing media monitoring group.

Before he was a Fox News regular, he switched between fighting in Afghanistan and working for the Pentagon during George W. Bush’s presidency. Late in the administration, Waltz served as a counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. When President Barack Obama took office, Waltz went back to the Pentagon for a brief time. Following his government service, he entered the defense contracting industry.

Waltz supported fellow Floridian and former Gov. Jeb Bush for the 2016 presidential nomination. In a 2015 article for War on the Rocks, Waltz described attending a speech Bush gave at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that compared the former Florida governor’s understanding of foreign policy to that of Reagan.

“Reagan understood that tough credibility lessened the chance of boots being deployed on the ground. So does Jeb Bush,” Waltz wrote. “After spending several hours at the Reagan Library and hearing this speech, I was reminded of the power of positive leadership, big ideas, and realistic plans to achieve them.” In the same piece, Waltz also took a swipe at Trump’s insistence during that cycle that he would seize oil fields in Iraq.

Waltz then ran for Congress in 2018, winning election in the deep-red district that Ron DeSantis had represented before becoming governor. During the primary, Waltz fended off accusations that he was less than enthusiastic in his support for Trump. His opponents, vying to represent a district that went for Trump over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 57 percent to 40 percent in 2016, attacked him for the support he was getting from American Patriots PAC. That super PAC’s biggest donor was Paul Singer, a billionaire who funded several Never Trump operations in 2016 (before eventually donating to Trump’s inaugural committee).

During that campaign, Waltz said Trump was not his first choice for the 2016 Republican nomination, but he backed him once Trump won the nomination. “I have supported President Trump since he became our nominee, voted for him, and have made dozens of appearances on Fox News since the election supporting his agenda,” Waltz told the Daytona Beach News-Journal at the time.

Over the course of his three terms in Congress, Waltz has shown himself to be sufficiently loyal to Trump that he was one of the first appointees announced by the president-elect this month. 

“Michael Waltz is one of the most steadfast supporters of President Trump’s campaign and agenda to restore America’s prominence on the world stage,” Trump transition spokesman Brian Hughes said in an email. “As a congressman, Mike fought for common sense policies that are completely aligned, and that’s why Waltz supported President Trump this year and in past elections. The President has tapped him with one of the most important roles for our national security because of their shared commitment to defending the American people.” Hughes did not say whether the campaign was aware of Waltz’s appearance in the 2016 ad. Waltz’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Waltz has developed an especially hawkish reputation in Congress as a member of the House Armed Services Committee and House Intelligence Committee, in addition to Foreign Affairs. He has called for arming Taiwan to fend off increasing militarism from China and for “a new Monroe Doctrine that specifically looks to block the economic and military influence of China.” 

A critic of President Joe Biden’s execution of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he also pushed for the redesignation of Yemen’s Houthis as a terrorist organization and has said that the United States should not stop Israel from striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. A strong supporter of Israel, he recently criticized the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over the war in Gaza. Waltz tweeted Thursday that Americans could “expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias” of the court and of the United Nations.

On Ukraine, Waltz has been clear that he believes Russian dictator Vladimir Putin would not be satisfied by taking Kyiv and would push through Ukraine to attack NATO countries, but he has also criticized the flow of aid to the beleaguered nation without what he sees as a clear strategic objective for the war. Early in the conflict, he supported legislation to give aid to Ukraine. He wrote in a Fox News op-ed in April 2022 that it was “time to help Ukraine win this war,” arguing that America should support the country’s effort to retake both the Donbas regions and Crimea.

However, in a piece for the same outlet in fall 2023, he defended Congress’ previous provision of lethal aid to Ukraine but argued that Biden “has neither explained the American objective in Ukraine nor his strategy to achieve it” and declared that “the era of Ukraine’s blank check from Congress is over.” Waltz signaled openness to providing more aid, but he also called for pairing it with other measures, such as funding U.S. border security and making European allies bear more of the costs of deterring Putin. “Stopping Russia before it draws NATO and therefore the U.S. into war is the right thing to do,” he wrote. “But the burden cannot continue to be solely on the shoulders of the American people, especially while Western Europe gets a pass. There must be policy space between Biden’s current strategy of ‘as long as it takes’ and those demanding ‘not another dollar.’” Waltz voted against the most recent aid package for Ukraine in April, but supported aid for Israel and Taiwan.

“I think he is broadly what I call a smart hawk, someone who believes that we need to have a forward, engaged posture in the world but recognizes that you need to pair that with a bit of prudence and, ultimately, the way we achieve peace and stability is by having a credible military deterrent,” former Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who served on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees with Waltz before resigning earlier this year, said at The Dispatch summit Nov. 12.

Though his fellow House members may disagree with Waltz on some matters of policy, they are exceedingly friendly with him. None of the congressmen also representing Florida or serving on committees with Waltz who spoke to The Dispatch had a negative thing to say about him.

Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a Republican member of the Armed Services Committee who is also in the House Freedom Caucus, described Waltz as a “quiet and powerful man.” On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a progressive Democrat who sits on Armed Services, said Waltz has “always been substantive and straightforward and civil even when we have disagreements.” 

In an interview, Khanna recalled a tense interaction with Waltz on Capitol Hill and how the Florida Republican resolved it. 

“There was one time on a committee hearing where he went off on me on some issue and said, ‘Oh, is he sympathetic to China?’” Khanna told The Dispatch. “I called him, and I explained my view, and he said, ‘Oh, Ro, I appreciate that. I’m not going to say that on cable news because you’ve explained it.”