Photo: White House/CNP/Getty Images
There’s no catchphrase name (Thursday Afternoon Massacre, anybody?) for the abrupt shuffle the Trump administration announced on May 1, but it was something else. First, there were widespread reports that national security adviser Michael Waltz (along with his top deputy) was getting fired, partly because of his mishandling of the Signalgate mess and partly because of MAGA-land claims that he was a warmongering neocon. Even as Washington insiders wondered if something this momentous had really been engineered by right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who had earlier secured the dismissal of several Waltz aides, Donald Trump himself dropped this bombshell on Truth Social:
I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations. From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first. I know he will do the same in his new role. In the interim, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as National Security Advisor, while continuing his strong leadership at the State Department. Together, we will continue to fight tirelessly to Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN. Thank you for your
attention to this matter!
There are obviously two surprises in this maneuver. First of all, you had to wonder if Elise Stefanik’s head exploded at this news. Up until very recently, she greatly outranked Waltz in the House GOP hierarchy (she was chair of the House Republican Conference, the fourth-highest position). As the second Trump administration began, she was announced as the next U.S. ambassador to the U.N., but her move into that plum position was delayed and then canceled — even though she had already given up her leadership post — because Mike Johnson decided he needed her vote more than she needed a Cabinet-level gig. Waltz had already made his escape from the House as a first-day White House appointee. Now Trump was giving Waltz her dream job as a consolation prize after he got fired. That must have been really humiliating to the very ambitious New Yorker.
But the second part of Trump’s maneuver was equally odd. Marco Rubio, who has been an underwhelming Trump toady at State, will get (at least temporarily) to straddle U.S. foreign policy and national-security policy in a dual role. Last time that happened was when the ultimate foreign-policy mandarin, Henry Kissinger, served in both those jobs in the Nixon and Ford administrations. But any parallel in the power exercised by the two men is almost certainly illusory. During much of Richard Nixon’s presidency, national security adviser Kissinger was the de facto secretary of State, regularly outflanking if not outranking the hapless figurehead William Rogers. When Kissinger formally got the dual role in 1973, nothing much changed. (He did lose a bit of power when Gerald Ford insisted on hiring Brent Scowcroft in the NSA position, though Kissinger was powerful enough to survive repeated conservative efforts to get Ford to fire him.) Only Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976 finally brought Kissinger’s reign of global power to an end, and then, of course, he spent multiple decades as the ultimate eminence grise of American foreign-policy thinking.
To put it bluntly, Marco Rubio is not about to ascend to Kissingerian levels of influence and fame, as Edward Luce of the Financial Times noted:
Please people resist writing about Rubio’s growing power. Holding NSA and Sec State is not Kissingerian. Rubio’s just been a more pliable toady than Waltz. That’s it.
It’s also reasonably clear that the whole shuffle wasn’t some sort of carefully thought-out gambit premeditated by the stable genius in the White House or his staff. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce had to be informed by reporters of Trump’s moves during a briefing she was allegedly holding.
All in all, it’s just another day of chaos in the court of the Chaos King.
