President Donald Trump will nominate outgoing national security adviser Mike Waltz as the next ambassador to the United Nations, the president announced on Truth Social on Thursday.
“From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first. I know he will do the same in his new role,” Trump wrote.
News that Waltz would soon leave the White House — which two sources confirmed to NOTUS — circulated for hours Thursday before Trump announced Waltz would be nominated for the U.N. role. The White House press office had been uncharacteristically quiet since the initial news broke, declining to confirm the news to inquiring reporters.
In his post, Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio would take on the additional title of interim national security adviser.
“Things don’t happen until the president says it’s going to happen,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters during a briefing on Thursday, during which she learned about the changes.
“It is clear that I just heard this from you,” Bruce said to a reporter when asked about the move.
The move places yet another title on Rubio, who is actively managing the United States Agency for International Development and, of course, his role as the secretary of state.
The whipsaw news comes as Waltz has been under scrutiny since March, after The Atlantic revealed that he had accidentally added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a highly sensitive Signal group chat, and his standing inside the administration never recovered. Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong, is also expected to leave “soon,” one source said.
Another source told NOTUS it was not only the Signal chat that put Waltz at odds with the White House, attributing his departure to “many things,” including a lack of ideological compatibility. Waltz was seen as more hawkish than other officials in Trump’s orbit.
News of Waltz’s imminent departure came as a surprise Thursday. Waltz was on the White House grounds for a Fox News appearance Thursday morning discussing the Ukraine minerals deal. But he was absent from the president’s national prayer day event just hours later in the Rose Garden, as other members of Trump’s foreign policy team joined the president on stage.
If he’s confirmed, Waltz will sit in a key foreign policy role, though in the president’s eyes one that is not nearly as important or on the same level of influence on the day-to-day operations of the national security apparatus.
The nomination also comes with some added drama: The job was originally supposed to go to another House Republican, Rep. Elise Stefanik. After weeks of delay, Trump withdrew Stefanik’s nomination to be U.N. ambassador to keep her in Congress, where Republicans have only a slim majority. The ambassador’s residence is in her home state of New York.
“Poor Elise,” Sen. Josh Hawley told reporters when he heard about the news.
Waltz will now have to go through his own Senate confirmation process, sure to draw major headlines given what happened in his short tenure as national security adviser.
After a prolonged scandal in March and early April, Waltz had largely flown under the radar in recent weeks.
In an interview with Trump published this week, Trump told The Atlantic that Waltz “is fine,” but cautioned that “sometimes you learn about people later on.”
Waltz’s team has been navigating a tense political environment for weeks. Trump fired several national security officials in April in the days after the Signal scandal. Those firings happened after far-right activist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office.
Loomer has publicly campaigned to remove certain staff from the National Security Council, including Wong, bringing a stack of documents, including social media posts and personal records, to argue her case in the Oval Office. Loomer posted about Waltz’s and Wong’s imminent departures on X Thursday, writing that Wong “resigned.”
“Hopefully, the rest of the people who were set to be fired but were given promotions at the NSC under Waltz also depart,” Loomer wrote.
In early April, a national security expert closely familiar with Trump’s National Security Council told NOTUS that “the knives are out” for Waltz. “There’s clearly a political agenda here to change the trajectory of Waltz’s tenure,” the official said then.
Waltz joined the White House from the House of Representatives, where he was known for his TV presence championing Trump and his agenda.
Wong worked for Sen. Tom Cotton for three years before being hired by the National Security Council. As Loomer’s attacks online grew, Cotton posted in support of Wong and his wife, calling the two “complete and total patriots, 100% MAGA Warriors who always put America First.”
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. Shifra Dayak contributed reporting.