Inside Waltz’s ouster: Before Signalgate, talks with Israel angered Trump

President Donald Trump’s decision to oust his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, was the product of a slow accumulation of frustration with a former Green Beret officer who was seen as far more eager to use military force than his boss in the Oval Office.

Waltz’s fate was sealed by his inclusion of a journalist on a sensitive Signal group chat in March. But he had been clashing with other top officials since early in the administration, including over whether to pursue military action against Iran, senior officials and Trump advisers said Friday.

The episode has left some senior White House officials questioning the need for a traditional National Security Council and content to leave Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom Trump on Thursday named as Waltz’s interim replacement, in a caretaker role for quite some time, a decision that will likely diminish an institution that has had a powerful role in shaping the foreign policy of modern presidencies. And it sidelines a key figure in the White House with a long track record of favoring military intervention, officials said. Trump has nominated Waltz to be his ambassador to the United Nations, so he will remain in government.

Waltz’s troubles built up over time, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles increasingly felt he was not a good fit for the president, according to a senior White House official, a Trump adviser and one additional person familiar with the matter on Friday. They and others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel considerations.

In announcing the shift, Trump on Thursday vowed in a social media post that “together, we will continue to fight tirelessly to Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN.”

But Waltz also upset Trump after an Oval Office visit in early February by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when the national security adviser appeared to share the Israeli leader’s conviction that the time was ripe to strike Iran, two of the people said.

Waltz appeared to have engaged in intense coordination with Netanyahu about military options against Iran ahead of an Oval Office meeting between the Israeli leader and Trump, the two people said.

Waltz “wanted to take U.S. policy in a direction Trump wasn’t comfortable with because the U.S. hadn’t attempted a diplomatic solution,” according to one of the people.

“It got back to Trump and the president wasn’t happy with it,” that person said.

Netanyahu’s office released a statement Saturday confirming that he met with Waltz ahead of his Oval Office visit with Trump but denying that he had “intensive contact” with him.

A spokesman for Waltz did not respond to a request for comment. Wiles also did not respond to requests for comment.

“The President sets the agenda and it’s up to his Administration to implement those policies, and everyone was rowing in the same direction which is why he had the most successful First 100 days in history,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement following a Washington Post inquiry.

The view by some in the administration was that Waltz was trying to tip the scales in favor of military action and was operating hand in glove with the Israelis.

“If Jim Baker was doing a side deal with the Saudis to subvert George H.W. Bush, you’d be fired,” a Trump adviser said, referring to Bush’s secretary of state. “You can’t do that. You work for the president of your country, not a president of another country.”

The change reduces the number of competing visions coming to a president who has been eager to make his mark at home and abroad. During his first term, Trump had little choice but to draw from traditional Republicans to stock his White House. Now, thanks to a broader generational shift within the Republican Party, a younger cohort has known no one but Trump as their standard-bearer. And the president himself has grown more focused on finding people loyal to him who will execute his plans.

Rubio, the temporary replacement, hails from the same traditionalist wing of the Republican Party as Waltz. But he has more readily shed his old views, officials say, and has emerged as a forceful spokesman for Trump. That includes policy on Russia and Ukraine, where the secretary of state has threatened both sides that Washington could walk away from peace talks, with the consequences seemingly worse for Kyiv.

Waltz’s ouster came even as some other prominent members of the administration, including Vice President JD Vance, tried to throw him a lifeline, two senior White House officials said Friday. Vance took Waltz on a March trip to Greenland, which Trump has said he wants to acquire. The decision to take him along was in part to boost the embattled adviser days after the Atlantic reported that Waltz had inadvertently included the magazine’s editor on a planning chat coordinating military action in Yemen, one of the officials said.

The vice president — who in foreign policy matters is much more skeptical of military action than Waltz — also tried to introduce the national security adviser to other conservatives who fell in the Vance camp, the official said.

In the end, however, Wiles and other members of the White House senior staff grew to feel that Waltz wasn’t a good fit in the West Wing — and specifically with Trump. Even before Signalgate, the national security adviser was on thin ice, with some White House officials warning that he might be one of the first senior advisers to be swapped out. His handling of sensitive discussions on Signal — which is not approved inside the government for classified conversations — may have been the final factor, even though he held on for more than a month after it was publicized, officials said.

“Signal is an approved app for government use and is loaded on government phones,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Thursday, defending Waltz’s use of the app more generally.

Some officials question whether Trump truly needs a traditional National Security Council. They say they are seeking ways to serve Trump himself, rather than the White House as an institution. A National Security Council staffed with mid- to senior-level policy experts might not be part of the equation for a president who thinks he is his own best adviser and is deeply skeptical of conventional wisdom on world affairs, they say.

“Some of that just happens through the working process,” one senior White House official said. “So you have to adapt and build and grow and evolve based on your own reality. In some ways it’s just a product of doing this for a few months now and finding opportunities to do it differently.”

On foreign policy but more broadly across his presidency, Trump has hired MAGA true believers for roles that went to traditionalists in his first term. This week’s moves were another shift in that direction, not just sidelining an adviser whose views leaned traditional but also diminishing the influence of the National Security Council by handing temporary oversight to Rubio.

Waltz was always a surprise choice for the role. Though he was loyal to the president, his foreign policy preferences leaned hawkish. On Russia, he favored a tough approach to President Vladimir Putin. Trump has pursued far more conciliatory approaches to Moscow and Tehran, in both instances sending a close friend, Steve Witkoff, as his envoy in a quest to make deals.

The dual-hatted role will leave Rubio with little bandwidth to build out an institution that under ordinary circumstances is stocked with career experts from across the government whose job is to devise strategy, experts said. Traditional national security advisers ensure the country’s complicated foreign policymaking apparatus is moving in the same direction. Now they are expected to focus on Trump’s desires.

One senior White House official said the president made the final decision about Waltz’s move on Thursday by turning to his most trusted adviser: himself.

“Certainly, people give opinions,” the official said. But with decisions like this, “it’s him.”

The official played down the importance of policy differences in the decision to move him to the United Nations.

“I’ve known Mike for a while and at the end of the day, he implements what the president wants to do, especially on foreign policy,” the official said. “He doesn’t freelance.”

Matt Viser in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez in Phoenix contributed to this report.