Hours after nearly every major news outlet reported that national security adviser Mike Waltz was the first big casualty of the Trump administration, President Donald Trump announced that—surprise!—he’s nominating Waltz to be ambassador to the United Nations.
“I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “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.”
The U.N. ambassador role requires Senate confirmation, so Waltz—who is responsible for inadvertently adding a journalist to an unsecured group chat in which top Trump administration officials shared highly secret attack plans—will have to publicly defend his egregious mistakes as national security adviser.
This will also put Republican senators on the record about whether they’ll support someone who so carelessly jeopardized national security. And it will allow Democrats to highlight the “Signalgate” scandal, giving them an easy way to attack the Trump administration.
It’s hard to see how voters will approve of this switcheroo, either.
A Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos found that voters wanted accountability for the group-chat snafu—not a promotion for one of the people involved in it.
The poll found that 51 percent of registered voters wanted the person who was responsible for sharing classified information to be fired, with another 24 percent saying that person should face disciplinary action. Just 17 percent of voters said there should be no consequences for the scandal.
Getting a promotion to be U.N. ambassador—which comes with a sick residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—doesn’t sound like accountability.
As for who will serve as Trump’s next national security adviser, the president announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will take on the role.
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as National Security Advisor, while continuing his strong leadership at the State Department,” Trump wrote in the Truth Social post. “Together, we will continue to fight tirelessly to Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
It’s unclear how Rubio will be Trump’s main adviser on national security as well as the country’s top diplomat, the acting archivist of the United States, and the acting head of the United States Agency for International Development, an organization the Trump administration is trying to shut down.
But amid all of this, the maddest person must be Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who Trump initially nominated as U.N. ambassador before pulling her nomination because he feared Republicans would lose her seat in Congress.
Stefanik remains in the House without her top House leadership role and without the sweet mansion in New York.
Sad!
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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