Did Mike Waltz Just Go Down John Bolton's Path?
Trump has hired a notorious hawk as his national security adviser—and fired that adviser after getting in the way of delicate diplomatic talks—in each of his two terms.
The year is 2019. President Donald Trump has fired his hawkish national security adviser for being an obstruction to diplomacy. The year is 2025. President Donald Trump has demoted his hawkish national security adviser for being an obstruction to diplomacy.
Trump announced in a May 1 post to Truth Social that Mike Waltz, formerly national security adviser, will now serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will take over the White House's National Security Council in the interim. Although Trump praised Waltz's service, the move was clearly a demotion, and officials told CNN that Trump had "lost confidence" in Waltz.
The firing came after a free-for-all struggle over foreign policy staffing involving Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Waltz stands out as a hawk among the three. Although Hegseth is far from a principled peace dove, he pushed back on plans to attack Iran. And Witkoff, who seems to have supplanted even Secretary of State Marco Rubio as Trump's most trusted diplomat, is negotiating to wind down several wars.
Waltz's rise and fall had some striking parallels to the story of John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018 and 2019 during the first Trump administration. Both of them were old-school Republican hawks, never really at home in Trump's movement, and both were fired after (quite predictably) becoming an obstacle to diplomatic initiatives. Bolton served as U.N. ambassador before the Trump administration; Waltz seems to be ending this stage of his career in that same post.
And both of them drew staff from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a nonprofit that has become a central incubator for Washington's hawks. Bolton brought FDD senior adviser Rich Goldberg onto the National Security Council, and FDD controversially continued to pay Goldberg's salary while he worked under Bolton. Similarly, Waltz hired Merav Ceren, a former Israeli defense ministry official and a former national security fellow at FDD.
In Trump's first term, it was negotiations with North Korea and Iran over their nuclear programs, and with the Taliban over ending the war in Afghanistan. Today, Trump is (again) negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, and with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine.
Trump said that he initially brought on Bolton in order to project strength: "I'd be with foreign leaders, and I didn't even have to act tough because they said, look, that moron John Bolton, he's crazy…They'd give me everything I wanted because the guy's a nut job."
But months after being hired, Bolton had "become a vocal internal critic" of Trump's Iranian and Afghan talks, PBS News reported. His most infamous example of obstructionism—the one Trump cited in his firing—came during talks with North Korea.
Bolton told CBS News in April 2018 that he was "looking at the Libya model." Given that Libya's leader was tortured to death on camera after giving up his nuclear program, North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un was offended by the comparison, and Trump said that talks "were set back very badly" by Bolton's comments.
Waltz undermined Trump's messaging toward Iran, although in a less dramatic way than the "Libya model" comments. At the beginning of his term, Trump had said that "the only thing" he wanted from Iran was to avoid building a nuclear weapon, a demand that the Iranian government called "doable." Waltz, however, hinted that he was going to make maximalist demands on Iran's conventional military forces.
Before joining the administration, Waltz had tried to tie Trump's hands on Afghanistan, voting alongside former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) to restrict any U.S. troop withdrawal from the country, all while Trump was talking to the Taliban. Waltz was also a maximalist hawk on the Russian-Ukrainian war, although he tried to pitch escalation as a way for Trump to end the war more quickly.
More than his position on any specific issue, Waltz's unreliable image in Trump's eyes may have done him in. During the 2016 primaries, Waltz had appeared in an attack ad calling Trump "a man that I don't think is tough in any way, shape, or form. He's been fed through a silver spoon." In March 2025, Waltz accidentally added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, a personal enemy of Trump, to a White House group chat to discuss the war in Yemen.
"Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he's a good man," Trump told NBC News after the leak.
Reportedly, Trump didn't want to give The Atlantic a victory lap. Nevertheless, he fired six members of Waltz's staff after conservative journalist Laura Loomer showed up at the White House on April 2 with a list of National Security Council members she considered disloyal.
Yet it wasn't Waltz who took the most heat for the group chat scandal in the following weeks. Reports began to emerge in the press about Hegseth's sloppy handling of classified information on group chats. And the Department of Defense fired three of Hegseth's staff in a leak investigation.
"I think there clearly is a very strong coalition within the United States that wants to see another war in the Middle East, and it crosses both parties," one of the fired officials, Dan Caldwell, told the Tucker Carlson Show last week. "We were threatening a lot of the established interests in our own separate ways, and we had people who had personal vendettas against us, and I think they weaponized the investigation against us," he added.
Earlier this week, the New York Post released an article accusing Witkoff, the special envoy, of getting steamrolled in negotiations with Russia and Iran. It was filled with unfavorable claims from anonymous "administration insiders" and on-record criticisms from FDD experts. Trump's hardline supporters mobilized quickly in response.
Conservative journalist Charlie Kirk shared a screenshot of Reason's earlier coverage of internal administration debates, writing that "anti-Witkoff forces are anti-MAGA." Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted the post and added that "Deep State neocons are smearing Steve Witkoff because they're trying to undermine my father's foreign policy agenda. The establishment wants forever war!"
Kirk had named the FDD as the center of the "anti-Witkoff operation." FDD head Mark Dubowitz quickly took to X to deny any kind of conspiracy. "We completely agree with Secretary Hegseth and NSA Waltz that Iran must fully dismantle its nuclear capabilities," he wrote.
The next day, Waltz was fired. As with Bolton's case, no amount of political cunning could save someone whom Trump considered disloyal. But unlike Bolton's downfall, Waltz's demotion is not just about bureaucratic obstructionism. Trump's base of support now has a bloc that is opposed, on principle, to what the hawks are offering.