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‘Should I Fire Him?’ Inside Trump’s Deliberations Over the Fate of Michael Waltz
For much of this week, President Trump was consumed by a single question. What should he do about his national security adviser, Michael Waltz?
“Should I fire him?” he asked aides and allies as the fallout continued over the stunning leak of a Signal group chat set up by Mr. Waltz, who had inadvertently added a journalist to the thread about an upcoming military strike in Yemen.
In public, Mr. Trump’s default position has been to defend Mr. Waltz and attack the media. On Tuesday, the day after Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic broke the story about being included in the chat, the president said Mr. Waltz was a “good man” who had nothing to apologize for.
But behind the scenes, Mr. Trump has been asking people inside and outside the administration what they thought he should do.
He told allies that he was unhappy with the press coverage but that he did not want to be seen as caving to a media swarm, according to several people briefed on his comments. And he said he was reluctant to fire people in the senior ranks so early in his second term.
But for Mr. Trump, the real problem did not appear to be his national security adviser’s carelessness about discussing military plans on a commercial app, the people said. It was that Mr. Waltz may have had some kind of connection to Mr. Goldberg, a Washington journalist whom Mr. Trump loathes. The president expressed displeasure about how Mr. Waltz had Mr. Goldberg’s number in his phone.
On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump met with Vice President JD Vance; the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House personnel chief, Sergio Gor; his Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, and others about whether to stick with Mr. Waltz.
Late Thursday, as the controversy swirled, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Waltz to the Oval Office. By the next morning, the president signaled to people around him that he was willing to stick with Mr. Waltz, three people with knowledge of the president’s thinking said.
People close to Mr. Trump say Mr. Waltz has been able to hang on in part because some in the administration still support him, and because Mr. Trump has wanted to avoid comparisons to the chaotic staffing of his first term, which had the highest turnover of top aides of any presidential administration in modern history.
And while Mr. Trump can always change his mind, the episode shows Mr. Trump’s willingness to disregard external pressures in his second term, while also grappling with the limits of the loyalty tests he imposed for staff across the administration.
Even before the Signal leak, Mr. Waltz was on shaky footing, viewed as too hawkish by some of the president’s advisers and too eager to advocate for military action against Iran when the president himself has made clear he prefers to make a deal.
An association with Mr. Goldberg, however hazy, gave Mr. Waltz’s opponents more fuel to feed the skepticism.
Some of Mr. Trump closest allies have questioned whether Mr. Waltz, a former George W. Bush administration official, was compatible with the president’s foreign policy. Mr. Waltz had gotten crosswise with Mr. Vance and Ms. Wiles in policy discussions, particularly regarding Iran, according to several people briefed on the matter.
In a statement, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Mr. Trump has a team whose members debate each other but know that he is the “ultimate decision maker.” “When he makes a decision, everyone rows in the same direction to execute,” she added.
Weeks ago, a discussion arose among some aides about whether Mr. Waltz was ideologically aligned with the president. Mr. Trump, who has at times been effusive in private about Mr. Waltz, made clear he did not want to start the cycle of dismissals so early in his second administration, according to two people briefed on the conversation. Mr. Trump, who regretted pushing out his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, after less than a month in 2017, believed it would feed a narrative that he engenders chaos.
After the Signal thread leaked, someone shared on X a snippet of a 2016 video of Mr. Waltz, produced by a group primarily funded by the billionaire Koch brothers. Speaking as a military veteran, Mr. Waltz looked directly into the camera as he condemned Mr. Trump as a draft-dodger and said, “Stop Trump now.” That snippet drew attention from Mr. Waltz’s critics.
By contrast, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s job appears to be safe, even though he shared detailed information about strike times for the attack on Houthi militants in Yemen in the Signal thread. MAGA stalwarts like Charlie Kirk have defended him online.
Mr. Hegseth “had nothing to do with this,” the president said on Wednesday.
Mr. Hegseth survived a bruising confirmation process in the Senate after being pushed through with help from Mr. Vance, and he has a solid relationship with Mr. Trump.
While Mr. Waltz may keep his job, the controversy has reminded Mr. Trump’s aides that the president’s strategy of crisis management — doubling down and denying, no matter how problematic the facts are — does not seem to work as well for them as it has over the years for Mr. Trump.
When the Atlantic story broke, Mr. Waltz denied meeting, knowing or communicating with Mr. Goldberg. But that claim was quickly called into question by photos that surfaced from a 2021 event at the French Embassy in Washington, where Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Waltz were pictured standing next to one another. Mr. Waltz’s allies dismissed the idea that the photo suggested the two men knew each other.
But the reality is that while Mr. Trump has demanded loyalty from his staff, some top officials are longtime Washington hands who have relationships, past experiences and contacts with people whom Mr. Trump despises.
“I would say the principle of getting a bunch of yes men and yes women around him is the guiding principle, a foundation of which is not having, or renouncing, any past that may be proof to the contrary,” said John R. Bolton, who worked as Mr. Trump’s third of four national security advisers and then wrote a revealing book about his time in the White House.
“Anybody who’s been around Washington 10 years, 15 years, has all kinds of backgrounds,” Mr. Bolton said.
In Greenland on Friday, Mr. Vance, who was traveling with Mr. Waltz on a visit to try to apply pressure for the United States to take over the territory, made clear that Mr. Waltz was at fault for adding Mr. Goldberg to the Signal thread.
But Mr. Vance, who was also in the group chat and has defended Mr. Waltz internally in the past, made a point of doing so again. It was a sign that Mr. Trump was ready to move on, for now.
“If you think you’re going to force the president of the United States to fire anybody, you’ve got another think coming,” he said. “President Trump has said it on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday, and I’m the vice president saying it here on Friday, we are standing behind our entire national security team.”
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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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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