Mike Waltz Somehow Not Fired Yet, But The Week Is Young

If he'll lie about knowing Jeffrey Goldberg, WHAT ELSE WILL HE LIE ABOUT? As of Monday, the second reign of Donald Trump is exactly 10 weeks old, which seems very late to get our first death watch for a Cabinet member in imminent danger of being cast out of the White House, AKA Bigot Eden. Remember how in Trump’s first term, some Cabinet member or high administration official was on the bubble about every ten minutes? This time it has taken 70 days, unless you count that DOGE bro who was briefly fired for being a huge racist and then rehired in about 24 hours because career-ending racism just isn’t a thing these days.

Somewhere, Jimmy the Greek is screaming. A Wonkette subscription is good for the soul. Who is the lucky member of the Amazing Donald’s Cabinet of Horrors to find himself with a metaphorical guillotine blade dangling over his head? Why, it’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who is under fire for last week’s Signal chat fuck-up.

Waltz seems to have been the person who added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to a group chat in which high-level administration members jerked each other off over their bombing of Houthi militants in Yemen along with the 50-odd civilians killed in an apartment building they leveled to get one guy. War crimes, man. As Will Ferrell once said in a different context, they get the people going.

And if that wasn’t enough, as The Wall Street Journal reports, this was not the first time that Waltz had taken government business to group chats on a commercial texting app that auto-destructs after 24 hours. This is called Signal-Gate, and it’s a whole new level of gross.

Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices. It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth discussed a military strike. Seems bad!

But either Vance and the others are better at sucking up to Trump, or Waltz’s enemies are better at leaking to reporters than his allies are. For all the amateur Kremlinologists out there, this would seem like the most obvious reason.

Shaky Ground

Both the Journal and The New York Times report that Waltz is on “shaky” ground in the administration. Some of Trump’s other insane advisors think Waltz is too much of a disloyal RINO squish whose views do not “align with the Trump agenda.” Also, he’s kind of a jerk who has pissed off his colleagues by “seeming imperious.”

A History of Loyalty (Sort Of)

However, a point in Waltz’s favor is that Trump allegedly remains “haunted” by his first-term firing of Michael Flynn, his first national security advisor, and has been proud that so few of his hires this time around have provoked calls for their firing. Waltz himself has already lasted almost three times as long as Flynn did (the general was fired after 24 days over his lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador).

Or, to put it another way, he’s lasted for about six and a half Scaramuccis.

The Fallout

If Waltz does get fired, he is in the hilarious position of having resigned his seat in the House of Representatives to take this job. So he’ll be another unemployed government employee. The only difference is that he’ll have been fired for a pretty good reason.

Speaking of Waltz’s former House seat, the race to replace him in Tuesday’s special election is very close. And while Republican Randy Fine is still favored to win, his Democratic challenger, Josh Weil, is reportedly within four or five percentage points. This is in an R+14 district that Waltz won by over 30 points in November.

A Democrat winning would be a major upset. So to sum up: Mike Waltz has endangered national security, embarrassed his boss (to the extent his boss is capable of embarrassment, anyway), alienated colleagues to the point where they are anonymously bad-mouthing him and threatening his job in two of the nation’s largest newspapers, and he might also help narrow the Republicans’ already razor-thin majority in the House.

That’s some fine work. Who says Trump only hires incompetent boobs? Besides everyone.[/h1]