The Last Waltz

My editor and I spent a half-hour in Slack this morning trying to tease out some policy salience to Mike Waltz’s dismissal as national security adviser, hoping to deliver an argument crackling with insight for today’s newsletter. We gave it our all. Dispatch subscribers deserve nothing less.

But we had to give up.

The closest thing to a smart policy read on Waltz’s ouster came from The Dispatch’s Mike Warren, who flagged the now-former NSA as a rare example of an old-school hawk in Donald Trump’s inner circle. Dumping Waltz could be read as an omen that the president is about to go full Tucker, pivoting to a pro-authoritarian foreign policy on everything from Ukraine to Taiwan to Iran.

Especially Iran. At The Free Press, Eli Lake noted that Waltz’s views of that country’s nuclear program are out of step with those of more dovish aides like Steve Witkoff, Trump’s lead negotiator with Tehran. Waltz believes the program needs to be dismantled entirely, whereas Witkoff is willing to let Iran go on enriching uranium to sub-weapons-grade levels. Waltz is now out, exiled to a largely meaningless ambassadorship at the United Nations, and one of the leading candidates to replace him as national security adviser is—ta da—Witkoff.

So there’s the argument, clear as can be. The doves have prevailed. Full Tucker, at last. Except….

Except that Waltz was fired at the very moment that the White House has suddenly gotten more hawkish about the authoritarian menace in Moscow. Huh.

On Wednesday, the United States signed a months-in-the-making deal with Ukraine that gives our country a stake in their country’s minerals. The terms are much more favorable to the Ukrainians than the infamous first draft of the agreement was; more importantly, the fact of the new partnership suggests (although it doesn’t guarantee) that Washington will continue supplying military aid to Kyiv. On the day the bargain was struck, the White House informed Congress of its intentions to sell $50 million in military equipment to Ukraine. That’s a small amount, but significant in that it implies Trump isn’t about to pull the plug on the war effort.

The president has also developed a sneaking suspicion that his friend Vladimir is making a fool of him by ignoring his demands for a ceasefire. Admittedly, his anger at Putin is around a 1 on the Trump Rage Scale versus the 9 or 10 it routinely reaches when some panelist mildly criticizes him on Fox News, but progress is progress. There’s an effort afoot in Congress to impose new sanctions on Moscow that’s being spearheaded by Lindsey Graham, who I assume wouldn’t have proceeded without the president’s tacit support at least.

Why, the text of the new minerals deal even explicitly blames Russia—Russia!—for starting the war.

In short, Trump seems more hostile to Moscow right now than he ever has. (And the Russians have noticed.) Which is a big problem for the “full Tucker” theory of Mike Waltz’s firing, no? Good luck making policy sense of that.

I think Waltz’s departure is better understood as a personnel problem than a policy problem. His exit raises an inevitable question: Is turnover in Trump’s second term likely to be as common and chaotic as it was in his first?

‘Imperious and abrasive.’

Don’t get me wrong. Policy did have something to do with Waltz leaving.

“Waltz’s traditionally hawkish views of national security created tension with more isolationist players in the White House,” Semafor observed on Thursday. As far back as February, before the Signalgate fiasco put him on thin ice, Politico was writing about the “intense internal scrutiny” that the new national security adviser was under from “America First” doves in Trump’s orbit. In March the New York Times identified J.D. Vance and chief of staff Susie Wiles as Waltz’s primary antagonists, “particularly regarding Iran.” Last month the two allegedly urged Trump to seize the opportunity presented by Signalgate to fire him.

Waltz’s approach to foreign policy made him an odd man out in Trump 2.0. The closest thing the administration now has to a hawk in a position of influence is Pete Hegseth (no, sorry, Marco Rubio no longer counts as a hawk), but Hegseth knows where his political bread is buttered. He’s also on thin ice over Signalgate, among other things; he won’t dare make trouble for the regnant doves, certainly not after watching Waltz’s banishment to the U.N.

Mike Waltz’s foreign policy views mattered enough that some of his “secret neocon” choices for positions on the National Security Council were blocked by other White House staffers. But they didn’t matter so much as to keep him from landing a Cabinet role in the first place, did they?

At least as problematic as his hawkish opinions, according to the reporting about him, was the “imperious and abrasive” tone he took with his colleagues—particularly Wiles, the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff and the closest thing to an untouchable in Trump’s orbit this side of Stephen Miller. “He’s a staff, but he was acting like a principal,” one ally of the president told Politico of Waltz; “too big for his britches” is how another source described him. Read any account of his short tenure in the West Wing and you’ll find similar complaints. It’s weird that an underling would dare to behave arrogantly around a black hole of narcissism like Trump and doubly weird that he’d do so knowing MAGA diehards viewed him suspiciously due to his Reaganite tendencies, yet here we are.

He was a bad fit policy-wise and personality-wise. But then came the debacle over the Signal group chat, which apparently changed the “vibes” around Mike Waltz irreparably.

“Vibes” is the word Axios used to explain how the president came to sour on him. “In Trump’s mind, Signalgate was the first time he was unable to control the narrative or win the day,” Marc Caputo reported. Supposedly “Waltz came to symbolize Trump’s first obstacle,” the end of the early “momentum” of his second term. One White House official told Caputo that the president “came to look at Waltz like he was bad luck, bad news.”

The reason to dump him after Signalgate shouldn’t have been “vibes,” it should have been incompetence. He used a platform not secured by the U.S. government to discuss imminent military strikes with the Cabinet’s most powerful members and somehow managed to mistakenly invite a journalist from The Atlantic to participate. In a normal administration he’d be bounced for recklessness. In this administration, recklessness is fine so long as it goes undetected. Spoiling the White House’s preferred “narrative” by creating a few days of bad press for the president was the unpardonable sin for which Waltz was punished.

How many more top Trump officials are likely to suffer that fate before January 2029?

Stability, sort of.

Whether you expect staffing in the president’s second term to be more stable than it was in his first depends on why you think his first-term staffing was unstable. If you believe it was due mainly to friction between a populist authoritarian leader and a team of traditionally conservative Reaganite deputies then you should assuredly expect fewer firings during Trump 2.0.

Take the chief of staff position. Trump cycled through four chiefs in the four years of his first term, not one of whom had impeccable MAGA credentials. Reince Priebus was a Republican National Committee apparatchik, the epitome of an establishment Republican. John Kelly was a military man who, we’ve since learned, didn’t think much of Trump. And Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows were Freedom Caucus refugees, men who came to Congress during the pre-Trump Tea Party era vowing ruthless discipline on spending. They were populists, no doubt, but ruthless discipline on spending is, er, not the stuff of which authentic Trumpism is made.

In Wiles, Trump has a chief who shepherded his 2024 campaign to the first popular-vote win for a Republican in 20 years. Unlike Priebus, Kelly, Mulvaney, and Meadows, Wiles is one of “his people,” someone who ascended through the ranks of his operation instead of being plucked from some less trustworthy party enclave to fill a vacancy. Despite Trump’s personal volatility, I can’t think of a single report of him and Wiles butting heads since she started working for him. There’s every reason at the moment to believe she’ll last longer as chief than any of the four men who preceded her.

Which was the whole point of Trump winning a second term, no? This time he’s going to do things his way. No more civic-minded RINOs like James Mattis or Christopher Wray the second time around; from now on he’s appointing nothing but flunkies who’ll serve him as devotedly, and potentially unethically, as he demands.

Logically, then, we should expect far less turnover in this Trump administration than in the previous one. Yes-men like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel won’t create any static for the president by sharply disagreeing with him on policy or refusing on principle to carry out unlawful orders. No one’s going to resign in protest after the next January 6. He has the team he truly wants. Why would he break it up?

Another reason Trump is more likely to be content with staffing this time is that his staff has never mattered less. One former U.S. diplomat told Politico that Marco Rubio becoming interim national security adviser in addition to Secretary of State is a demotion of sorts because “in a real Cabinet, with the world on fire and all of these trade deals and ceasefire negotiations, the only way for one person to do both [jobs] is if that person doesn’t actually matter, and they are really just a gofer for the big guy shooting from the hip.” As I predicted a week after the election, Trump’s top deputies give every appearance of being “glorified press secretaries” taking dictation from the real power brokers in the West Wing.

So why fire any of them? Kristi Noem can and probably will spend the next four years dressing up as an ICE agent for photo ops while rubber-stamping Stephen Miller’s latest orders on immigration. Barring some Signalgate-level “vibes” disaster, I can’t imagine why Trump would need to replace her.

With Waltz’s departure, he also increasingly has a team that’s like-minded on policy. Not all policy, of course: The divide over tariffs between financiers like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on the one hand and nationalists like Miller and Peter Navarro on the other is shaping up to be the central ideological conflict of the president’s term. But on issues ranging from immigration to foreign policy, his deputies seem to be behind him four-square. If his first administration was a matter of getting a staff of Mike Pences to carry out his wishes, his second is a matter of getting a staff of J.D. Vances to do so. That points to much less personnel upheaval over the coming four years.

Waltz’s “departure” isn’t even a departure, in fact, since he’s lateral-ing over to the U.N. job. A soft landing for a disfavored yet still loyal deputy is itself an early sign that this time will be different.

It can’t be a coincidence, my editor pointed out, that there were surprisingly few leaks from inside the government during these first 100 days given the track record of the infamously leaky first Trump administration. During Trump 1.0, America might not have needed a mole from The Atlantic to expose Mike Waltz’s Signal chat; some hawkish official involved in the conversation who was troubled by Waltz’s poor operational security may well have whispered to the media about it. Not this time, and no wonder: A team with more loyalists is destined to have fewer tattlers.

So it’s settled. There’ll be less staffing turnover during Trump 2.0, right?

Inherent instability.

Well, not so fast.

If turnover is mainly a product of Trump clashing with deputies over policy or ethics then sure, we should expect fewer firings in his second term. There’ll be fewer such clashes. But if it’s mainly a product of the president being a volatile blame-shifting drama queen, especially during periods of adversity, then all bets are off.

The most notorious firing spree of his first term came during the tumult after the 2020 election. He fired defense secretary Mark Esper, whom he had chosen to replace Mattis. He fired Chris Krebs, the man in charge of digital security for America’s election infrastructure. He butted heads with Attorney General Bill Barr so violently that Barr “resigned,” then came thisclose to firing the acting AG and replacing him with a toady.

Each of those four was canned (or nearly canned) for perceived disloyalty, mostly because they resisted Trump’s “rigged election” nonsense, but it remains to be seen whether a more loyal team can avoid his wrath if another crisis descends that leaves the president angry, paranoid, and desperate for scapegoats. He’s not exactly a cool head when he feels cornered politically, as you may recall from watching the news circa January 2021.

For example, his aides have taken pains lately to explain to him that threatening to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will do more damage to markets. Trump seems to have taken their advice to heart. Even so: If we end up in a recession, his job approval drops to 30 percent, and the Fed resists lowering interest rates for fear of “stagflation,” would you put it past him to belch up a Truth Social post dismissing Powell in an angry moment?

If he can’t make China blink in the current trade-war standoff and American retailers’ shelves are suddenly bare, do we think he’ll weather that storm with grace or begin hunting around for someone on his team to blame? A devout disciple like Peter Navarro is probably safe, but Bessent is a latecomer to the MAGA movement whose loyalty isn’t as certain. I get strong Esper vibes from him insofar as Esper was also fired for the crime of giving Trump good advice that contradicted his worst impulses.

America will experience a lot of bad news over the next four years, on all fronts. It will make the president look bad. Someone will need to take responsibility. That someone will not be Donald Trump.

There will be firings—and maybe sooner than we think. Here’s a tantalizing bit from a story about Waltz’s dismissal published Thursday in Politico:

After three months of relative restraint, Trump may be ready to fire others.

A planned wave of White House firings may come as early as late next week, two administration officials familiar with the matter granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said.

Inside the West Wing, aides have started referring to the potential shakeup as “The Purge,” one administration official said. The plan, according to the official, is to carry out the firings in a single, decisive wave rather than to do it piecemeal.

Not even four months in and there’s a “purge” in motion. Could Trump 2.0 actually see more turnover than Trump 1.0?

Character is destiny.

Why not?

For one thing, staffing up with incompetent yes-men instead of competent RINOs guarantees a stream of embarrassing screw-ups like Signalgate that will create more bad “vibes” for the White House. Hegseth is the supreme example: No Cabinet member better exemplifies the personnel philosophy of Trump’s second term, yet no Cabinet member has given the president more political black eyes. The hunt for a new defense secretary might already quietly have begun. A kakistocracy based on loyalty may have fewer tattlers, but it’ll also have many more scandals, and thus more reason to replace tainted deputies for the sake of damage control.

Another problem has to do with the sort of person who’s most likely to work for a government as comprehensively rotten as this one. To a much greater degree than even his first term, Trump’s second administration is selecting for ruthlessness in its personnel. It has conducted actual loyalty tests to that end, ensuring as best it can that new hires will prioritize the president’s wishes above all other considerations. If the point of Trump 1.0 was to build the wall, the point of Trump 2.0 is “retribution” and his staffing choices reflect that.

The thing is, when you stick a bunch of aggro authoritarian alpha bros in a room together and encourage them to demonstrate their ruthlessness, vicious personality clashes are destined to ensue. According to Politico, the recent dismissals in Hegseth’s inner circle weren’t due to policy disagreements between hawks and doves but rather to aides battling for influence, “creating festering distrust and gamesmanship that has rocked the world’s premier defense agency.” True to authoritarian form, Hegseth himself reportedly became so paranoid about threats to his power that he warned the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he’d “hook you up to a f—ing polygraph” in order to sniff out leakers.

A kakistocracy will produce fewer internal leaks driven by the civic-minded impulse to expose corruption. But leaks driven by petty infighting and vengeful egos? We might soon be swimming in those.

Finally there’s Trump himself and his insatiable appetite for drama. Marc Short, Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, reminded NOTUS that the president “likes the chaos—like for him, he wants the ratings. And so if it’s orderly and boring, then it’s not gonna have the same ratings.” A current White House official was blunter, admitting, “We thrive on chaos.” Can an operation like that really resist occasional firings and purges, even if they’re not strictly warranted?

We’re talking about a guy who’s willing to gamble with the economic stability of the United States because he can’t resist the drama of keeping the planet guessing about his next move on tariffs. Uncertainty is the single worst thing he can inflict on investors right now, yet he continues to do so every day because he plainly relishes being at the center of global suspense. He wants the ratings. He can’t quit the show.

And a good show sometimes requires new characters to keep the plot moving.

Character is destiny. There will be plenty of turnover in this administration, I suspect, because a political project as volatile as postliberalism led by a personality as volatile as Trump’s can’t avoid it. Revolutions aren’t supposed to be “stable.” Why would this one be?