United States President Donald Trump has announced he plans to reassign Mike Waltz, removing him from his current role as his national security adviser and nominating him instead to be ambassador to the United Nations, Al Jazeera reported.
The revelation on Thursday comes after a morning of intense speculation that Waltz and his second-in-command, Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong, had been pushed out of their roles.
“I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first. I know he will do the same in his new role.”
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Trump said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would instead step into the role of national security adviser, while continuing in his role as the country’s top diplomat.
“Together, we will continue to fight tirelessly to Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN,” Trump said.
The president’s message seemed to confirm the first major staffing shake-up of his second term. Earlier in the day, anonymous sources had told major US news outlets that Waltz had been forced out, after his relationship with Trump cooled, Al Jazeera added.
Waltz’s reputation has suffered from an incident in which he appears to have added a journalist to a private chat on the app Signal where details of US military attacks were shared.
But Trump has publicly stood by Waltz and refused to mete out punishment for the Signal scandal, according to Al Jazeera.
