Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Malek Dudakov
[REGNUM] Washington lasted exactly one hundred days before the first major reshuffle in the White House began. Right on that date, the disgraced US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was dismissed.
Rumors of his dismissal have been circulating for a long time. After all, it was Waltz who managed to find himself in the epicenter of the drama with secret chats in the Signal messenger. He “accidentally” added journalists there, who revealed the inner workings of Donald Trump’s team.
However, the Signal scandal is more of a pretext for Waltz's dismissal. The real reasons lie somewhat deeper.
The figure of the now-retired adviser initially provoked a less than positive response from many MAGA activists and Trump supporters.
Waltz looked to them like a typical hawkish neocon of the 2000s. Incidentally, he had even managed to work for a time in the George W. Bush administration.
Waltz's choice in forming the team was made for several reasons.
First, he was part of a club of Florida politicians who have serious influence in Mar-a-Lago. Waltz has been a congressman from Florida since 2019 and was involved specifically in the international and military agenda. His previous military service experience was evident.
His military background is the second reason why he was chosen. He was a colonel in the US Army Special Forces. The current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is also from there.
Trump wants to bet on these special forces in the context of his major reform of the US military machine. In his first term, he paid more attention to the Marines, but now the priorities have changed.
Waltz tried his best to adapt to the president's agenda and hide his hawkish views, but he did not always succeed.
Waltz's wife, Julia Nesheiwat, was also criticized. She worked as a military intelligence officer in several American administrations, specializing in the Middle East region. She also collaborated with the Davos Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations, although they were ideologically closer to the Democrats.
In recent times, Waltz has been the most vocal proponent of escalation in the Middle East among Trump's apparatchiks.
He proposed not only waging war against the Houthis, but even launching a missile strike on nuclear facilities in Iran.
At the last moment, these intentions were stopped by the realists in the White House - J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard. After all, the consequences of such radical militarism could be catastrophic - with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and chaos on the world oil market.
After the Signal chat scandal, Waltz was asked to step back for a while. Trump promised to give him a talk but not fire him.
But then the situation began to change. The first hundred days of the presidency were approaching, and there were not many successes to brag about to voters.
The trade wars have ended in complete chaos and attempts to quickly negotiate with individual countries to remove tariffs. Dialogue with Russia and Iran is ongoing, but it will clearly take longer to achieve any significant deals.
The White House's standoff with European hawks continues. However, in the end, they managed to force Kyiv to sign the forced "rare earth" deal.
Ukraine ultimately received neither security guarantees nor promises of new investments. For Trump, this is now a reason to announce the possibility of earning $350 billion from the development of Ukrainian mineral resources. Regardless of how many minerals will actually be extracted on the territory of this country.
They tried to sign the deal on Ukraine just in time for the 100th day of the presidency, so that the White House could be told of some success. But this is clearly not enough.
And now Waltz has simply been made the scapegoat for all the mistakes and failures of Trump's first three months in office.
It is the president's prerogative to fire his advisers, and this can be done by simple executive orders. There is no need to wait for Senate approval and confirmation, as is the case with ministerial appointments.
The positions of the other two hawks in the White House, Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are also quite shaky.
The first one also managed to get into trouble due to leaks of secret data. For some reason, he took his wife to closed meetings of NATO defense ministers.
Rubio, like Waltz, simply cannot boast of any successes in his first hundred days.
However, replacing them is a much more difficult process. It will take too long to push new candidates through the Senate.
Waltz could be replaced by Steve Witkoff, the current special envoy for contacts with Russia and Iran. He is now literally carrying the entire US foreign policy on his shoulders.
Witkoff, unlike Waltz, is a realist and does not want to allow a major escalation - be it in Ukraine or the Middle East. This may mean that, for example, the Trump team is now abandoning the concept of a direct military attack on Iran.
However, for now, Rubio will serve as acting national security adviser.
Whitkoff will certainly be under pressure to achieve progress in Russian-American negotiations.
The White House has already set itself the next deadline - the second hundred days, which expire closer to mid-August. During this time, it is necessary to show results both in contacts with Russia and in dialogue with Iran.
After today's reshuffle, Waltz received a consolation prize: the job of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Trump's team had originally wanted to appoint New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, but that idea was ultimately abandoned.
The reason is that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is very fragile: every vote is worth its weight in gold. So the retired Waltz is sent to the UN, where he can criticize China, Iran and other opponents of the United States with a clear conscience.
The White House shakeup could be seen as an admission by his team that their first 100 days have not gone according to plan, although Trump's second term has been far less chaotic than his first.
But if serious progress is not achieved in the second hundred days, there will be a reshuffle with ministers.
Recently, news appeared about Rubio's possible presence at the Victory Day celebrations on May 9 in Moscow. Washington has not confirmed the information, but the White House may well send some emissary to Russia.
The US administration needs to intensify negotiations on Ukraine, sanctions, Iran and other important topics. For Trump's foreign policy team, this is now an obvious priority.
She wants to act again using the carrot and stick method. Offer Russia her own version of a deal on the Ukrainian crisis and at the same time threaten to introduce 500% secondary tariffs on oil if the negotiation process drags on.
Rubio could very well play the role of the bad cop in this dialogue.
However, in any case, the apparatus positions of the hawks in the White House will gradually weaken after Waltz’s resignation.
In the future, much will depend on the current international situation and the ability of the American administration to influence it.
Overall, the intra-apparatus confrontation between hawks and realists in Trump’s team will likely be long-lasting and will determine the White House policy for the next four years.
#1
Where are the MAGtards who said Trump "learned his lesson" as #45 and wouldn't hire neocons? Oh, wait, never mind. I guess it's that 5D chess. That explains everything.
[NYPOST] In retrospect, I can see that the sources of error lay within me. Trump is one of a kind and escaped my ready-made categories. He's also a mixture of popular culture and personal weirdness — the hair, the hand gestures, the dancing — which everything in my background told me was not to be taken seriously.
Let me offer a significant example: political oratory. My models of eloquence in political speech are Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. When, on YouTube or television, their voices speak to me from beyond the grave, my heart beats faster and I'm overcome with sadness that nobody today delivers such an effect.
Trump's rhetoric leaves me cold. When he spoke of ''American carnage'' in his first inaugural address, I had no idea what he was talking about. When he proclaimed a ''golden age'' to coincide with his second presidency, it sounded like empty bragging.
How he deals with important issues is perplexing to me. He berates adversaries, high and low, in a manner that seems petty and often childish. His style of talking, which he calls ''the weave,'' spins around and around and seldom arrives at its destination.
All this could be interpreted as a criticism of Trump, but I intend it rather as a partial explanation of why I failed to obtain an accurate picture of the man. Trump, after all, is a performer who carried a trivial reality TV show to popularity for more than a decade — he well knows how to communicate with the American public. And I get the humor.
Watching Trump be Trump can be vastly entertaining; there's no predicting what he will say next.
The key to the Trump rhetoric may be found in that unique ritual — part county fair, part revival meeting — known as the ''Trump rally.''
What becomes evident from viewing these events on TV is that Trump loves the adoration of the crowd. But more than this, he loves the crowd itself, the proximity to ordinary people.
He may be the only American politician who currently displays, and knows how to convey, a visceral affection for voters. He's clearly energized in their presence, to the extent that he never wants the show to end. Just like some operatic arias offer an excuse for the diva to flaunt her vocal skills, the meanderings of the weave are Trump's pretext for keeping himself in front of his audience.
That's his moment of transcendence.
The style, with its comical insults, first-person informality, and wandering attention span, fits perfectly into the modalities of digital communication. This isn't by design. It's just the way he talks, the first of many coincidences favoring him with which we must come to terms. Trump is a boomer, who, online, sounds like a zoomer.
He's a face-to-face personality transmuted, almost physically, into the virtual realm. He was the Beethoven of Twitter during his first presidency, the loudest voice amid the uproar of what Jonathan Haidt has called the digital Tower of Babel.
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” From City Journal.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/02/2025 00:00 ||
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#1
And he shows his total and complete ignorance of what Trump is about and for. They can't accept the reality of what he is because that doesn't exist in their worldview.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
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Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
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[NYPOST] In retrospect, I can see that the sources of error lay within me. Trump is one of a kind and escaped my ready-made categories. He's also a mixture of popular culture and personal weirdness — the hair, the hand gestures, the dancing — which everything in my background told me was not to be taken seriously.
