White House officials are privately saying President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz should be fired after concluding he’s the “f---ing idiot” responsible for the administration’s humiliating war group chat fiasco, according to a report.
At least two senior aides have suggested that Waltz should resign to avoid putting Trump in the “bad position” of having to decide whether to fire him, Politico reported.
On Monday, The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell account of how Waltz inadvertently added him to a group chat on Signal—a commercial messaging app—discussing potential military strikes in Yemen targeting the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group wreaking havoc on shipping traffic in the Suez Canal.
Other members of the group included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. None of the senior administration figures were seemingly aware a journalist was also in the chat.
At first, Goldberg thought it was fake, until Hegseth shared detailed information about targets and weapons that aligned perfectly with a March 15 strike that killed 53 people.
So far, Trump has stood by Waltz, telling NBC’s Garrett Haake, “Michael Waltz has learned his lesson, and he’s a good man,” Haake wrote in a post on X. Trump also said he wasn’t frustrated by the media attention the story had generated.
But officials told Politico that Waltz’s fate would depend on how coverage of the embarrassing story plays out over the next day or two. The outlet also pointed out that Trump’s lack of social media posts suggested he was weighing his options.
“It was reckless not to check who was on the thread. It was reckless to be having that conversation on Signal. You can’t have recklessness as the national security adviser,” one senior official said.
“Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a f---ing idiot,” another person close to the White House told Politico.
Officials told the outlet that Waltz’s future would ultimately come down to Trump’s personal feelings on the matter.
The president is so unpredictable that his big takeaway from the story could be that Vance—who at one point said he disagreed with the planned strikes—was out of line for questioning the administration’s foreign policy.
Alternatively, he could conclude that Hegseth was the one who messed up by sharing confidential military intel in a group chat. Or he could just decide it’s no big deal.
“As President Trump said, the attacks on the Houthis have been highly successful and effective. President Trump continues to have the utmost confidence in his national security team, including national security adviser Mike Waltz,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Monday statement.
Even the official who called Waltz a “f---ing idiot” didn’t think there would be any long-term “political consequences for Trump or the administration, outside of this potentially costing Waltz his job.”
Defense hawks have tended to view Waltz as a voice of reason among Trump’s more isolationist MAGA advisers. He previously advised former Vice President Dick Cheney on counterterrorism, but he has since tried to shed his neocon image.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told Politico that Waltz should “absolutely not” resign.
