Mike Waltz, under the spotlight, takes ‘full responsibility’ for Signal group-chat breach

“That man is a very good man, right there, that you criticized,” Trump said, pointing to Waltz after a reporter asked if the president would order practices to be changed. “So he’s a very good man, and he will continue to do a good job. In addition to him, we had very good people in that meeting, and those people have done a very, very effective job.”

Waltz said later Tuesday that “I take full responsibility” for the sharing of military plans on the messaging app Signal, telling Laura Ingraham on Fox News that he had “built the group” and added the Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to it.

Most of the Republican Party leaped to Waltz’s defense, seeking to blame the news media for the uproar.

But in interviews, several close allies of the president characterized the national security adviser’s standing as precarious, more so than it was when The New York Times reported on his uneasy status over a week ago. Those who discussed Trump administration views on Waltz did so on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. His fate, they say, rests on Trump’s caprices, with several competing factors coming into play.

On the one hand, it is Trump’s nature to defy a media firestorm rather than try to quell it by offering up a sacrificial lamb. He parted from this tendency at the beginning of his first administration when he fired his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for not divulging his encounters with Russian officials to the FBI. According to one adviser from that era, Trump soon regretted that act of acquiescence.

This time around, according to several people who have spoken to Trump over the first two months of his term, he wants to avoid firing people because of the narrative of chaos that it will quickly engender. Once he starts firing people, one person familiar with his thinking said, it will be very hard to draw a line if problems arise with other aides down the line. And Trump has appeared increasingly more concerned with holding his perceived enemies at bay than anything else.

Waltz also benefits from a much closer relationship to the president than Flynn had. As a Republican member of Congress from 2019 until his current appointment, Waltz had been an unflagging defender throughout Trump’s political and legal travails. He spent much of last year campaigning for Trump, often traveling aboard the candidate’s private plane. He aggressively questioned the director of the Secret Service at a hearing after an assassination attempt on Trump at a rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, and became a defender of Trump against the agency.

Perhaps more significantly, Waltz frequently served as a campaign surrogate on Fox News, thereby passing the eyeball test for Trump, who prefers his senior aides be telegenic.

But Waltz has now given Trump reason to second-guess his loyalty, two people familiar with the matter suggested. The detail that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, appeared to be in Waltz’s list of contacts to begin with -- and possibly mistaken for another “JG” to be invited into the Signal group chat -- has sent up alarms among the president’s allies, according to people familiar with their thinking.

In his appearance on Ingraham’s Fox News show Tuesday evening, Waltz suggested that Goldberg’s number had been saved under another person’s contact information in his phone. “I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number,” he said.

In The American Conservative, a founding editor, Scott McConnell, wrote Tuesday, “I don’t see how National Security Adviser Mike Waltz organizing a group chat with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg goes away without Waltz’s resignation.”

In The Atlantic article, Goldberg recounted that Waltz had sent him a connection request on Signal on March 11, adding that he “didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me.” Asked about the Signal fiasco in a news conference with Trump Tuesday, Waltz described Goldberg as someone “I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with.” In an interview for this article, Goldberg said that he had met Waltz a few years ago at two events but had never interviewed him.

Ironically, it was Waltz’s familiarity with members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including Goldberg, that provided relief to some quarters after he was named to second Trump administration. A former Green Beret and four-time recipient of the Bronze Star, Waltz had served in the national security apparatus for the Bush and Obama administrations before working for a defense contracting firm and then running for Congress.

“Mike’s exceptionally well-rounded,” said Peter Bergen, an author and national security analyst who wrote the foreword to one of Waltz’s books. “I saw it as an inspired choice on Trump’s part.”

Others saw Waltz as a curious selection. An avowed hawk, he staunchly defended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in his 2014 book “Warrior Diplomat.” In a podcast interview in 2021, he warned that withdrawing U.S. troops from the latter, as Trump had proposed doing, was “the best way to cause another 9/11 to happen.” Waltz instead advocated a sustained troop presence like the one that has been in Colombia -- “a great model” -- for over three decades. Such views have caused Waltz to be branded a “neocon” in right-wing circles.

Many of those who have heralded Waltz’s capabilities now find themselves at pains to explain his breach of security protocol. At the news conference Tuesday, Trump reiterated that Waltz was “a very good man” and that attacks on him were “very unfair.” But some of the president’s allies have speculated that this appraisal could change if Waltz is increasingly viewed with ridicule.

Those who have known Trump throughout the years point to a striking constant: While he has a high tolerance for lightning rods, he has a very low one for laughingstocks.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.