It was put best yesterday by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in talking about Donald Trump’s dismissal of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz: “they’re firing the wrong guy. They should be firing Hegseth,” as in Pete, the unqualified and unfit defense secretary who blabbed secret military information on the commercial Signal app, amid his many other flaws.
Hegseth is a disaster at the Pentagon, ratifying the qualms of senators of both parties who opposed his confirmation, which required the tie-breaking vote of Vice President JD Vance. His nomination should have been doomed, but it was saved by raw, angry MAGA lobbying against Republican senators fearing right-wing primary challengers.
Waltz was never part of that Trump-MAGA cult, which is why we were glad that he was in the West Wing and why influential right-wing kooks like Laura Loomer wanted him out.
So Waltz is taking the fall for SignalGate and Trump gave him a consolation job as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations left open when upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik was needed to stay in the House because the GOP control is so narrow.
Waltz is shipping out of the West Wing to the East Side to argue with dictators and tyrants. His instincts are correct about who the bad guys are in the world (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea) and we expect him to do well at Turtle Bay. He also gets that lux $16 million government apartment covering the whole 37th floor at 50 UN Plaza at 46th and First. A very soft landing indeed.
Filling in as NSA is now Marco Rubio, who already has another job as secretary of state, making only the second time ever that those two positions are combined in one person since Henry Kissinger did double duty for Dick Nixon and Jerry Ford a half century ago.
Rubio, who is also the acting chief of USAID and the acting archivist of the United States (Trump having fired the people in those jobs) thankfully has a normal view of the world and the allies and adversaries out there: NATO good, Russia bad, while the isolation nuts like Vance scorn our friends and encourage extremist right-wing parties.
With Waltz exiled to New York, Rubio must keep striving to keep Trump and the U.S. government true to friends like Ukraine and wary of deals with Putin.
There are many very bad people who Trump could have made his sixth national security adviser (he had four during his first four years) and so we are are relieved that he picked Rubio and not someone like Loomer. But the departure of Waltz is still a blow to an erratic and shaky foreign policy that has been dominated by the past month of a crazy trade war launched by Trump with his “beautiful” tariffs.
Meanwhile, the heat and attention should not be off of Hegseth, who is mismanaging the Pentagon as too many people feared that he would. Schumer is right, Hegseth still needs to be fired. Maybe he could be Waltz’s deputy at the UN. It’s still a job, and it comes with a Manhattan apartment, but just not the fancy $16 million one.
