Do you hear calliope music? That’s the sound of the Trump staffing carousel steaming up to speed. Mike Waltz was kicked upstairs last Thursday to the UN ambassadorship from his perch atop the National Security Council, following a thoroughgoing purge of his underlings. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will fill the position of national security advisor ad hoc, but this is doubtless temporary, as it will cut into his time perusing foreign students’ social media for deportable speech offenses. (This is, in some way, a shame; the NSC is a perverse workaround for the fact that State and CIA don’t actually do their jobs, and its permanent incorporation into the normal structures of the executive branch would be a welcome development, all told.)
Who will it be? The names we’ve heard are Michael Anton, Seb Gorka, Ric Grenell. (Grenell will probably denounce this assessment on Twitter as part of his inexplicable but apparently implacable social-media enmity with our executive director.) Time will tell. Our own preferences are obvious.
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More interesting is the abattoir of the Pentagon. When, in the wake of Signalgate, we gently suggested that Waltz ought to get the sack, our main point was nonideological: This fellow shouldn’t be allowed within sniffing distance of secrets of state. At that time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was looking pretty good by comparison, not having just added the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic to “bomb yemen chat (secret).” It has been a rough month. Two of Hegseth’s advisors—that is to say, the guys he brought in, not disgruntled career bureaucrats groaning under the yoke of the Trumpian occupation—were perp-marched out of the Pentagon on ill-defined leaking accusations, of which the department’s inspector general cleared them not soon after. Hegseth went on the tube to trash his guys in an appearance so weird that even Brian Kilmeade’s simian brow furrowed in puzzlement. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Hegseth’s chief of staff, who had emerged from the fog of war as the prime mover behind the purge, was shuffled off the scene shortly after, but definitely not for allegedly being a drug-addled maniac—do not put in the paper that he is allegedly a drug-addled maniac. Stories about the secretary himself playing fast and loose with department information have continued at a steady drip.
Hegseth has, if not quite yet the goodbye look, at least an expiration date. And, unlike the NSC, DoD is too big to host another Rubio residency. So the natural question is who’s on next. Arkansas’s Sen. Tom Cotton is in the mix; while Cotton seems competent and has a good grasp on the military–industrial base challenges facing the armed forces, his appointment would be a pivot toward a much more hawkish department, which wouldn’t clearly fit with the White House’s priorities. (DoD’s persistent refusal to cooperate with Trump’s more irenic approach to the Middle East in particular was a thorn in the side of the first administration.) Elbridge Colby, currently the undersecretary of defense for policy, is a more attractive option on this axis; his 2018 national defense strategy was the canonical blueprint for Trump’s defense policy, and he is already hard at work on the 2025 update. And, even as Hegseth’s staff has been enveloped in chaos, Colby’s office has been quiet, without a whisper of organizational zaniness making its way into the press. (And, not insignificantly for the most media-savvy president of the modern era, Colby looks good on the TV.) The combination of competence, continuity, and ideological alignment will be hard to reject.
The second Trump term started with a promise of machine-like efficiency and precision. Despite the industrial pace of executive actions, this promise has lost a bit of its luster on the personnel side—although one must not lose sight of how much better it has been than during Trump I. Balancing ideological alignment and operational competence is the whole trick of statesmanship, and it’s not easy, as the first term illustrated in spades. Waltz struck out on both at the NSC; Hegseth seems well on his way to flaming out on the latter without ideology entering into it much at all. The White House still has good options on the bench; if it’s careful, there are still the means and time to pull the brake lever on the carousel. If it’s not, expect to be hearing “Camptown Races” and “My Darling Clementine” tooting over the carnival for a while.
