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.
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-deletes texts, thus violating all sorts of laws about handling classified information and preserving administration documents for FOIA and Presidential Records Act reasons:
Two U.S. officials […] said that Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations.
Imagine talking about all this stuff on a fucking text chain to begin with. OMG, Zelenskyy is such a little bitch!!! IKR? Did you see that shirt he was wearing today? Hello, a 1980s Chuck Norris movie called, it wants its wardrobe back! Cry-laughing emoji cry-laughing emoji cry-laughing emoji.
Also, sidenote, what is it with Trumpers and their propensity for discussing “peace plans for Ukraine” as far away from official channels as they can get? We just don’t know.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t the sharing of classified data on Signal that pissed Trump off so much as it was something much more obvious:
For Trump, the officials said, Waltz’s biggest sin wasn’t starting a Signal chat to coordinate strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, or even posting Israel-provided intelligence onto an unclassified network, it was having the Atlantic magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his phone and inadvertently adding him to the conversation.
An insider with a reporter’s info in his phone, presumably because he might want to leak at some point? How very first-term. But maybe there’s an innocent explanation. Maybe Waltz and Goldberg are in the same fantasy baseball league.
Waltz denied even knowing Goldberg, and claimed his number must have gotten accidentally “sucked” into his phone, whatever the hell he thinks that means.
Goldberg told Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Waltz is lying that they do not know each other, and someone else came up with a picture of the two men standing together at a small book launch a few years ago.
For now, Trump has told Waltz that he’s not getting fired. But both the Journal and The New York Times reported that the president needed a few days of venting and cursing and asking anyone he could whether he should kick Waltz to the curb. Just like the good old days!
Trump’s anger spilled over into many private discussions last week, including multiple calls with allies in which he unloaded expletives and blamed Waltz for the administration’s first big national-security crisis.
He should be pissed at everyone on that Signal chat: JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, even Stephen “Discount Goebbels” Miller. All of whom could apparently use a lesson in cybersecurity protocols for their personal devices.
Der Spiegel reported last week that it found all sorts of data and passwords to private accounts linked to some of those Trump officials online, using search engines and hacked data that has been released:
As such, the reporting has revealed an additional grave, previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Washington. 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. 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.”
You have to be pretty damn imperious for people who work for Donald Trump to not only notice, but also leak to reporters about it.
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.
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.
[WSJ / NYT / Der Spiegel / CNN]
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𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐞𝐲𝐞𝐬 𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐬𝐞𝐭 '𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧' 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬: 𝐍𝐘 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬
The Trump administration “is weighing a new round of emergency aid to farmers, who are likely to be caught in the middle if America’s trading partners retaliate.”
“The early discussions offer a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Trump’s expansive tariffs could unleash financial devastation throughout the U.S. agricultural industry, a crucial voting base that the president similarly tried to safeguard during his 2018 trade war with China,” the Times reports.
The American taxpayer ended up paying farmers about $23 billion during the first Trump administration’s trade war with China. Trump’s new tariffs could push that number far higher, if he decides to protect the agriculture industry.
This quiet acknowledgement that Trump’s tariffs could be calamitous to farmers, likely requiring billions to offset their losses, would appear to destroy his claims that tariffs will enrich the government’s coffers. A top aide, Peter Navarro, has claimed, in what has been described as “Orwellian” remarks, that tariffs are a “tax cut.”
***
Fuck them.
They voted for this. They can burn down with their choice.
No love for Matt "I quit my job just to fail the fucking interview?!!?" Gaetz?