Friday Briefing: A White House Shake-Up

Michael Waltz boarding Air Force One on Tuesday.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Trump removed his national security adviser

President Trump announced yesterday that he was removing his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, naming Secretary of State Marco Rubio as his interim replacement. It was the first major personnel overhaul of top White House aides, and the kind of move he had wanted to avoid in his second term.

Waltz had been on thin ice since he organized a group chat on the app Signal to discuss a sensitive military operation in Yemen and accidentally included a journalist. Trump has nominated Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

But even before the group chat leak, most of Trump’s advisers viewed Waltz as too hawkish to work for a president who was eager to reach a nuclear deal with Iran and normalize relations with Russia.

Rubio will hold both positions for now, something that no other official has done simultaneously since Henry Kissinger held the titles under the Nixon and Ford administrations.

What’s next: The selection of the next national security adviser will be a critical one, at a moment when the president’s top aides have differed sharply on how to handle China, Russia and Iran.

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