President Donald Trump’s support for national security adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the other participants in the Signal group chat signals that, unlike Trump’s first term, “loyalty” is now a two-way street, according to White House officials and allies.
It’s a change from Trump’s earlier political and celebrity career, in which he was best known for his Apprentice phrase: “You’re fired.”
Officials close to the White House told the Washington Examiner that Trump doesn’t want to bow to calls from the Left to fire someone because it would admit to making a mistake. Waltz created a “Houthi PC Small Group” Signal chat and added Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. In the chat, Hegseth detailed attack plans on the Houthis in Yemen this month, a mission that Trump has deemed successful.
“Sure, the Signal thing doesn’t look great, but the president knows he can depend on this team, so he isn’t about to bow to a fake news lynch mob and fire anyone just because the Atlantic says so,” one White House aide claimed. “This group is the best of the best. There’s no reason to bench a starter just because of one mistake — one, which I might add, that had literally no impact on the outcome of the game.”
The president said last year that the “biggest mistake” of his first term was hiring “bad” or “disloyal” advisers, leading to outsize turnover in the White House and Cabinet, and he’s taking a much more hands-on role in the vetting process for new hires in his second term.
Sergio Gor, the director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, is sending Trump multiple candidates to review each day, each of whom has been determined to be “loyal” to the president and his stated mission.
A Brookings Institution analysis found that 13 Senate-confirmed members of Trump’s first-term Cabinet, out of 15 positions in total, were fired or resigned from their posts, more often than not under protest or duress. Trump additionally promoted his first Department of Homeland Security secretary, John Kelly, to serve as his second White House chief of staff before eventually giving him the Apprentice treatment.
Dating back to former President Ronald Reagan, no administration has come close to matching those Cabinet turnover numbers. Former President George H.W. Bush placed a very distant second, logging just eight departures during his first term.
But Trump has backed both Waltz and Hegseth this week, embracing both with open arms as opposed to fiery tweets amid the biggest scandal of his first two months back in office. Senior White House officials tell the Washington Examiner that the reason is simple: The president actually trusts this group of advisers and is more willing to cut them some slack.
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A second senior White House official stressed that there’s a level of trust and understanding between the president and Cabinet officials this time around, which has helped Trump maintain confidence in Waltz, Hegseth, and company despite the “optics” of the Signal story.
“The president’s most senior advisers are, one, committed to the agenda, work well together, and are able to deliberate like adults, put personal prerogative aside and execute what the president has tasked them to do, in stark comparison to the first term, where the likes of John Bolton, hypothetically, could have been in that group chat,” the aide explained. “You would have seen members of the administration undermine the president, and you don’t see that now.”
The Signal chat revealed to Trump “how happy” his national security team was to succeed on behalf of the president, the source continued.
“You’ve got the Vice President of the United States saying he’s going to pray for the operation. There were little tidbits in that where you saw the human side of being in government and being tasked with these really, really tough responsibilities, and in doing so, you saw a level of American spirit, love of country, and, really, faith drive the decisions of America’s top leaders,” the person continued. “And I would say that’s very refreshing.”
Despite the solidarity on display at the White House, a growing chorus of voices are calling for scalps post-Signal-gate, including some of Trump’s top influencer supporters such as media personality Piers Morgan and Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy.
Even some White House officials have reportedly broken privately from the White House’s public defense, telling news outlets that they think someone needs to face consequences for the scandal. The White House has denied those reports.
Five veteran Republican strategists with close ties to the Trump administration, however, predicted Trump will simply “ignore the noise.”
“Ever since Trump got into office, the media and Democrats have thrown everything, including the kitchen sink, at him, and nothing has stuck,” one operative mused. “Why would this instance, where the president himself isn’t involved in the drama at all, be any different?”
Another GOP strategist suggested that to “fire anyone here would be to admit a mistake.”
“Firings mean that someone f***ed up. By extension, that means President Trump would have made a mistake by hiring that person in the first place,” that person said. “Deny, deny, deny. That’s the play here, and this will all blow over by next week.”
“There might be little reactions. ‘Oh, you want us to investigate any potential Signal vulnerabilities? OK, we can do that,’” a third Republican strategist told the Washington Examiner. “But the more the TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] crowd calls for firings, the more the president will want to protect his guys.”
A fourth GOP operative concurred, noting that Hegseth and Waltz are “MAGA through and through.”
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“They’ve repeatedly proven that to President Trump, and he hasn’t forgotten. Loyalty goes both ways here.”
