Why Trump waited to make his move on Mike Waltz: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, Jonathan Allen breaks down President Donald Trump’s decision to remove Mike Waltz from his post as national security adviser and nominate him to an ambassadorship instead. Plus, Gabe Gutierrez and Suzanne Gamboa identify the defining theme of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

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— Adam Wollner

Why Trump waited to make his move on Mike Waltz

Analysis by Jonathan Allen

President Donald Trump could have booted national security adviser Mike Waltz from his post at any time since the Signalgate scandal broke in March.

To review, Waltz and his team let a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, into a private chat among national security officials about U.S. strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

Trump doesn’t seem particularly upset about Cabinet members and top White House aides using a commercial application to communicate about sensitive government information. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth alerted his colleagues to attack plans in the Signal chat, and Trump has given no indication that the Pentagon chief is on the hot seat.

Waltz’s sin wasn’t about evading record-keeping laws or leaving military planning visible to the wrong eyes. It was about letting a journalist in — and, in doing so, losing Trump’s trust. Trump let the story burn slowly before deciding to heave Waltz into a soft landing as his nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. 

After all, it was in the midst of the Signalgate furor that Trump withdrew New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination to the U.N. job. He had suddenly become worried that there would not be enough Republicans in the House to pass the “big, beautiful bill” for his agenda.

The delayed timing of the maneuver matters for at least two reasons.

First, by waiting until the story blew over, Trump gave himself room to argue that he wasn’t forced into it by criticism from Democrats and Waltz’s adversaries within the administration. 

But perhaps more importantly, the inside-baseball switcheroo — one that doesn’t affect most Americans’ day-to-day lives — comes at a time when Trump could use a distraction from a mudslide of tough economic news.

It’s true that the inflation rate has slowed a little since Trump took office, but he failed to eliminate inflation — a key campaign promise — upon being sworn in. Moreover, with his tariffs threatening to dry up supply and drive up prices, the U.S. economy shrank in the first three months of the year.

Trump and his allies have struggled to explain why his election did not immediately improve national economic conditions. In what might be called a dollhouse austerity pitch, Trump said this week that instead of 30 dolls, American children might have to make do with just two dolls.

Extending that metaphor, his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, told reporters at the White House on Thursday morning that consumers will be willing to spend more for an American-made doll — one produced with stronger safety regulations — than a cheaper Chinese-made one.

For a president elected on his vow to ease the suffering of American consumers, the short-term pain message shows how twisted he has become around the double helix of that promise and a tariff program that makes it harder to fulfill.

The Waltz news served to distract the national media from the economy storyline for a full day. Perhaps the broader implications of the move, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio adding Waltz’s job to his portfolio, will put focus back on Trump taking action — rather than sitting back and watching the economy gasp for air — for a few days.

It’s no shock that Trump wanted to remove Waltz from his job. It made a lot of political sense for him to wait.

Trump’s deportation campaign is capitalizing on a key hallmark: Speed

By Gabe Gutierrez and Suzanne Gamboa

A deportation flight carrying immigrants to El Salvador took off while a judge was ruling in the case. A mother of two U.S. citizens was sent to Honduras without speaking to anyone other than immigration officials. College students have been suddenly arrested on city streets and sent to detention centers hundreds of miles away. 

The Trump administration’s promise to carry out the biggest deportation campaign in American history has a distinct and potent hallmark: speed. Officials have fast-tracked deportation proceedings so that some people are removed without speaking to an attorney, family members or without a court hearing at all. 

Trump’s immigration efforts have broken norms and bent the law as he enacts his agenda with dizzying fervor, seeking to show his supporters he’s delivering, even as the overall number of deportations in February lagged behind the Biden administration during the same period last year. 

Trump’s first-term push to drastically reshape the nation’s immigration system was often stymied by the courts, slowed down because of the officials around him, or undone over a tide of public criticism. The president has been emboldened in his second term, surrounded by loyalists in a nation that has moved to the right on immigration. 

“This is a much more powerful presidency than I had the first time,” Trump recently told The Atlantic. “The first time, I was fighting for survival and I was fighting to run the country. This time I’m fighting to help the world and to help the country.”

Even as Trump slams individual judges publicly, he and his aides have stressed that they will abide by court rulings. Still, administration officials are testing that line. 

“I can’t have a trial — a major trial — for every person that came in illegally,” Trump said this week in an interview with ABC News.

Read more from Gabe and Suzanne →

The latest: A Trump-appointed federal judge rejected the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelans it alleges are members of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. 

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner.

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