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Signal Leak Puts Mike Waltz, Trump’s National Security Adviser, in Hot Seat
Despite President Trump’s insistence on Tuesday morning that his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, “has learned a lesson” after inadvertently including the editor of The Atlantic in a cabinet-level chat session on Signal, speculation continues to build about Mr. Waltz’s job security.
Mr. Trump vigorously defended Mr. Waltz in front of television cameras during an event a few hours later, saying he should not have to apologize for the breach.
“That man is a very good man, right there, that you criticized,” Mr. Trump said, pointing to Mr. 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.”
Most of the Republican Party leaped to Mr. 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 already was when The New York Times reported on his uneasy status over a week ago. Those who discussed Trump administration views on Mr. Waltz did so on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. His fate, they say, rests on Mr. Trump’s caprices, with several competing factors coming into play.
On the one hand, it is Mr. 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 T. Flynn, for not divulging his encounters with Russian officials to the F.B.I. According to one adviser from that era, Mr. Trump soon regretted that act of acquiescence.
This time around, according to several people who have spoken to Mr. 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 Mr. Trump has appeared increasingly more concerned with holding his perceived enemies at bay than anything else.
Mr. Waltz also benefits from a much closer relationship to the president than Mr. Flynn had. As a Republican congressman from 2019 until his current appointment, Mr. Waltz had been an unflagging defender throughout Mr. Trump’s political and legal travails. He spent much of last year campaigning for Mr. Trump, often traveling aboard the candidate’s private plane. He aggressively questioned the director of the U.S. Secret Service at a hearing after an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump at a rally near Butler, Pa., and became a defender of Mr. Trump against the agency.
Perhaps more significantly, Mr. Waltz frequently served as a surrogate for the Trump campaign on Fox News, thereby passing the eyeball test for a president-elect who prefers his senior aides to be telegenic.
But Mr. Waltz has now given Mr. 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 Mr. Waltz’s list of contacts to begin with — and therefore 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 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, Mr. Goldberg recounted that Mr. 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 Mr. Trump Tuesday, Mr. Waltz described Mr. Goldberg as someone “I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with.” In an interview for this article, Mr. Goldberg said that he had met Mr. Waltz a few years ago at two events but had never interviewed him.
Ironically, it was Mr. Waltz’s familiarity with members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Waltz’s books. “I saw it as an inspired choice on Trump’s part.”
Others saw Mr. 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 Mr. Trump had proposed doing, was “the best way to cause another 9/11 to happen.” Mr. 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 Mr. Waltz to be branded a “neocon” in right-wing circles.
Many of those who have heralded Mr. Waltz’s capabilities now find themselves at pains to explain his breach of security protocol. At the news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump reiterated that Mr. 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 his national security adviser is increasingly viewed with ridicule.
Those who have known Mr. 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.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
The US is planning to board and seize Iran-linked oil tankers and commercial ships in the coming days, according to a Saturday report by The Wall Street Journal.
The report noted that these actions would take place in international waters, potentially outside of the Middle East.
The US “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran,” US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said. “This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil.”
“As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions, or insurance requirements,” Caine continued.
Caine was further quoted as saying that the new campaign, which would be operated in part by the US Indo-Pacific Command, would be part of a broader US President Donald Trump-led campaign against Iran, known as “Economic Fury.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the WSJ that Trump was “optimistic” that the new measures would lead to a peace deal.
The potential US military action comes as Iran tightens its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, including attacking several ships earlier on Saturday, the WSJ reported.
The report cited CENTCOM as saying that the US has already turned back 23 ships trying to leave Iranian ports since the start of its blockade on the Strait.
The expansion of naval action beyond the Middle East will provide the US with further leverage against Iran by allowing it to take control of a greater number of ships loaded with oil or weapons bound for Iran, the report noted.
“It’s a maximalist approach,” said associate professor of law at Emory University Law School Mark Nevitt. “If you want to put the screws down on Iran, you want to use every single legal authority you have to do that.”
Iran claimed earlier on Saturday that it had regained military control over the Strait, intending to hold it until the US guarantees full freedom of movement for ships traveling to and from Iran.
“As long as the United States does not ensure full freedom of navigation for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz will remain tightly controlled,” the Iranian military stated.
In addition, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei declared on Saturday in an apparent message on his Telegram channel that the Iranian navy is prepared to inflict “new bitter defeats” on its enemies.
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By Jodi Kantor, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, June Kim and Luke Piotrowski
April 18, 2026
A Pakistani Ranger walks past a billboard for the U.S.-Iran peace talks in Islamabad on April 12, 2026. The talks, led by Vice President JD Vance, produced no concrete movement toward a peace deal.
Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
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Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
Despite stalled talks with Iran and a fragile ceasefire nearing its end, President Trump expressed optimism this week that a permanent deal is within reach — one that may include Iran relinquishing its enriched uranium. However, experts who spent months negotiating a nuclear agreement during the Obama administration say mutual mistrust, starkly different negotiating styles make a quick truce unlikely.
Referring to Vice President Vance’s whirlwind negotiations in Islamabad last week that appear to have produced little beyond dashed expectations, Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal finalized in 2015, says the administration’s approach was all wrong.
“You cannot do a negotiation with Iran in one day,” she told NPR’s Here & Now earlier this week. “You can’t even do it in a week.” To get agreement on the JCPOA, she said, it took “a good 18 months.”
The talks leading to that deal highlighted Iran’s meticulous style of negotiation, says Rob Malley, who was also part of the JCPOA negotiating team and later served as a special envoy to Iran under President Joe Biden.
Summing up the two sides’ differing styles, Malley said: “Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership [is] stubborn and tenacious.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference on the Iran nuclear talks deal at the Austria International Centre in Vienna, Austria on July 14, 2015.
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Pool/AFP via Getty Images
In 2015, patience led to a deal
The talks in 2015, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, culminated with a marathon 19-day session in Vienna to finish the deal, says Jon Finer, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration. Finer was involved in the negotiations as Kerry’s chief of staff. He said his boss’s patience “was a huge asset” in getting the deal to the finish line, he said.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister during the negotiations for the Obama-era nuclear deal, speaks on April 22, 2016 in New York.
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“He would endure lectures … ‘let me tell you about 5,000 years of Iranian civilization’… and just keep plowing ahead,” Finer said, adding that a tactic of Iranian negotiators seemed to be “to say no to everything and see what actually matters” to the U.S.
“They’re just maddeningly difficult,” he said. “You need to go back at the same issue 10 or 12 times over weeks or months to make any progress.”
Even so, Finer called the Iranian negotiators “extremely capable” — noting that, unlike the U.S., they often lacked expert advisers “just outside the room,” yet still mastered the details of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials and U.S. sanctions.
“They were also negotiating not in their first language,” Finer added. “The documents were all negotiated in English, and they were hundreds of pages long with detailed annexes.”
Vance’s trip to Islamabad suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have the patience for a negotiation to end the conflict that could be at least as complex and time-consuming. “The Trump administration came in with maximalist demands and actually just wanted Iran to capitulate,” Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state during the Biden administration, told Here & Now. “No nation – even one as odious as the Iran regime – is going to capitulate.”
Distrust but verify
Iran was attacked twice in the past year. First in June of last year, as nuclear negotiations were ongoing, Israel and the U.S. struck the country’s nuclear facilities. Months later, at the end of February, Iran was attacked again at the start of the latest conflict. This time around, “the level of trust is probably almost at an all-time low,” Malley said.
“It’s hard for them to take at their word what they’re hearing from U.S. officials,” Malley said. The Iranians, he said, have to be wondering how long any commitment will last and “will be very hesitant to give up something that’s tangible” – such as their enriched uranium – in exchange for anything that isn’t ironclad or subject to suddenly be discarded by Trump or some future president.
“Once they give up their stockpile … they can’t recapture it the next day,” Malley said.
Even during the 2013-2015 nuclear deal talks, the decades of mistrust between Tehran and Washington were impossible to ignore, Finer said. “Our theory was not trust but verify — it was distrust but verify,” he said, adding: “I think that was their theory too.”
Malley cautions about relying on the JCPOA as a guide to how peace talks to end the current war might go. The leadership in Tehran that agreed to the deal is now gone — killed in Israeli airstrikes, he says. The regime’s military capabilities are also greatly diminished and “whatever lessons were learned in the past … have to be viewed with a lot of caution, because so much has changed,” he said.
Negotiations have a leveling effect
Mark Freeman, executive director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, a peace and security think tank based in Spain that advises on conflict negotiations, says several factors shape the U.S.-Iran relationship. Going into talks, one side always has the upper hand, he says, but negotiations have a leveling effect. “The weaker party gains just by virtue of entering into a negotiation process,” he said.
Each side is looking for leverage, he adds.
In Iran’s case, it has used its closure of the Strait of Hormuz to exert such leverage, while the White House has shown an eagerness to resolve the conflict quickly. “If one side perceives the other needs an agreement more … that shapes the entire negotiation,” he said.
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