What kind of advisers do you give the president who knows everything?
Answer: As few as possible.
Donald Trump does not want advice. He does not like people around him who have views that differ from his. He does not like or read briefing documents.
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These are among the reasons that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is out and that with the appointment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to fill on an interim basis the role briefly held by Waltz, Trump is now on to the sixth person assuming the role of national security adviser in the just over four years he has served—non-consecutively—as president.
Waltz made two errors. One was that he accidentally added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to an infamous Signal chat on which national secrets were recklessly shared. But clearly, that alone was not enough to bump him from his high perch in the government since there were other senior officials on chat, one of whom, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth actually posted national secrets in violation of policy, good sense, his oath of office, and the law.
No, the reason Waltz became the fall guy for the Signalgate fiasco was less well-known. According to multiple sources in and near the administration, he actually committed the cardinal sin of both trying to give Trump advice and, worse, giving him the kind of advice he least wanted to hear, which is to say the kind that ran contrary to Trump’s views. For example, it is believed Waltz suggested getting tougher on Russia than Trump wanted to get.
Waltz also tried to set up actual processes within the NSC, the kind of inter-agency coordinating functions that the council was set up to perform when it was established in 1947. Big mistake as past Trump national security advisers who tried to be professional and also held views that diverged from the president—like John Bolton and H.R. McMaster—will tell you.
While Waltz’s tenure was brief, it was more than four times as long as Trump’s first national security adviser, General Mike Flynn. But Flynn had actual rabid bats in his belfry and also happened to break the law in much too public a way. Trump’s fourth national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, was actually a much better model for Trumpworld—comparatively quiet, sufficiently sycophantic to Trump, a man who knew his place and did not make visible waves.
In a move designed to make it look like the administration was not in complete disarray, Trump went on social media to announce that he was throwing Waltz overboard but he framed it as though he was giving him a promotion by naming the former Florida congressman to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Given the deep antipathy for the U.N. felt by Trump and those closest to him, this was akin to transferring a military officer to Greenland—except Greenland is far more important to us than the U.N. these days.
At the same time, by announcing that Waltz would for the moment be replaced by Rubio, Trump put L’il Marco in a position only ever occupied by Henry Kissinger, the only person until now to serve as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser simultaneously.
It is somewhat remarkable that Rubio would be considered capable of serving in both positions, especially given that Rubio not only is nominally top dog of America’s foreign ministry but he is also currently serving as acting administrator of the picked-over, rotting carcass of USAID and as acting National Archivist, a role in which he oversees all the original documents Trump is choosing to ignore and in which he is responsible for oversight of the sensitive documents that Trump likes to store in the bathroom of his beach house.
With all these titles and the parallel with Kissinger, you would think Rubio is so powerful that he might be seen as the second coming of Jared Kushner. But the reality is, unlike Kissinger who held both roles because he was powerful, Rubio holds all these roles because he comparatively weak.
That is because many of the key jobs that would normally be done by a Secretary of State are actually currently being done by Trump golf buddy Steve Witkoff. It is also because the main thing Rubio has been focusing on at State has been the dismantling and consequent diminution of the department.
Finally, Rubio has also demonstrated his smallness by emerging as one of the truly accomplished lickspittles of the administration, going so far as to publicly embrace Trump positions (forcing Ukraine to given up land stolen by the Russians) that actually run contrary to laws that were actually sponsored by, wait for it, Rubio himself.
Better still from Trump’s perspective, for the moment at least, he has one less adviser giving him advice he does not need. (After all, at Thursday’s National Day of Prayer ceremonies, Trump asserted that he and his administration were actually sent by God, which suggests he’s getting his guidance from a higher power than even a member of his glittering Cabinet.)
Rubio, already frequently seen at the White House, will spend more time there, which could help him regain some of the influence he has lost to Witkoff. After all, as Kissinger once said re: the relative power of the two jobs Rubio now holds—and as real estate mogul Witkoff would appreciate—in D.C. power games what matters most is “location, location, location.” Being down the hall from the Oval Office is a big advantage national security advisers have.
On the other hand, holding those two jobs also puts you in the position of having to give much more advice to a guy who hates it and it sets you up to be a big fall guy for future problems. Presidents find it threatening. Gerald Ford, in fact, once told me that the most important thing he did as president was taking the national security adviser job away from Kissinger to make his role more manageable.
Which could mean that the revolving door at the Trump National Security Council will soon be spinning again. Which would matter a great deal if the current National Security Council were a significant institution in this government. But as history shows, Trump, a man who seldom has seen an institution he didn’t seek to destroy, has made less use of the NSC than any of his predecessors since the early ’60s.
And why not? If he didn’t know everything, why would God have made him king?
