Stephen K. Bannon, one of President Trump’s top allies, threw a party in January at his Capitol Hill townhouse for the Washington bureau chief of Breitbart News, Matt Boyle. The usual guests from the right-wing media ecosystem were there in full force, but one attendee stood out: Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz.
Mr. Waltz, who posed for pictures with Mr. Bannon, Mr. Boyle and others, had been invited as part of an effort to rehabilitate him in an administration that was only eight days old. He was in a quandary faced by many Trump aides from the president’s previous administration. He had become too Trumpy to former Republican allies in the Washington political class, but not Trumpy enough to the president’s hard-core loyalists.
Even as Mr. Waltz has been in the middle of negotiations on a cease-fire between Ukraine and Russia, several people close to Mr. Trump now wonder if Mr. Waltz might be an early administration casualty. Others suggest that Mr. Waltz’s determination to align himself with Mr. Trump will save him from the fate that befell three of the four national security advisers in the president’s first term.
“Mike understands the chain of command, which gives him a leg up over H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, who were there to implement their own agendas,” said Ezra Cohen, who served on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon during the first Trump administration. “He knows his job is to execute the policies of the president.”
A case in point was Mr. Waltz’s response to Mr. Trump’s televised blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office last month.
Two days later on CNN, Mr. Waltz said Mr. Zelensky was “incredibly disrespectful” and questioned whether he was “ready to go to peace.” The day before on Breitbart Radio, Mr. Waltz compared Mr. Zelensky to an “ex-girlfriend that wants to argue everything that you said nine years ago, rather than moving the relationship forward.”
Among those dismayed by Mr. Waltz’s rhetoric was Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, who as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in 2022 had led a small congressional delegation to Ukraine. Mr. Waltz, then a House member from Florida, was the lone Republican on the trip.
“The Mike Waltz I got to know was a serious guy who aggressively supported Ukraine,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “The Mike Waltz we’re now seeing has done a bit of yoga to fit himself into the Trumpian view of things: ‘Oh, Zelensky was so rude.’ Past a certain point, it gets to be pathetic. And I know he knows better.”
But to close allies of Mr. Trump, the national security adviser’s harsh words about the Ukrainian president were too little, too late.
Mr. Waltz’s hawkish ideology and his previous support for Mr. Zelensky have made him a subject of deep suspicion in the administration, according to three people closely allied with the president. Mr. Waltz’s transgressions include championing the war in Ukraine, voicing antipathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and past support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He has also surrounded himself with staff members on the National Security Council who are aligned with his views, raising the ire of the president. The three people close to Mr. Trump said he had expressed displeasure with some of Mr. Waltz’s early personnel decisions, asking, “What the hell is up with Mike?”
Mr. Waltz, who declined to be interviewed for this article, returned this week from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he and other U.S. officials persuaded Mr. Zelensky to agree to a 30-day cease-fire. Russia has yet to sign onto the agreement.
The National Security Council’s spokesman, Brian Hughes, disputed the notion that Mr. Waltz was in hot water and dismissed the anonymous voices as the “griping of dark-water bottom dwellers.”
Mr. Hughes also provided glowing testimonials from Vice President JD Vance and senior White House officials about Mr. Waltz’s loyalty to Mr. Trump’s America First agenda. Notably, none of the statements directly addressed concerns about Mr. Waltz’s personnel choices or the views on America’s military posture that he embraced before joining the Trump administration.
Mr. Vance said Mr. Waltz was “totally committed to the president’s policy vision.” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said Mr. Waltz’s commitment to the agenda was “unquestioned.” Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy, said Mr. Waltz was “resolutely and uncompromisingly committed.”
Sebastian L. Gorka, the National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism, offered this: “Eight days into the Trump administration, when the president was briefed that ISIS built a massive terror compound in Somalia, it was Mike he turned to and said: ‘Kill them. Kill them all!’ And that is what Mike Waltz did.”
(Mr. Waltz, a 51-year-old former Green Beret, did not kill them himself. An airstrike by U.S. Africa Command did.)
Until now, Mr. Waltz’s life has been the stuff of a Hallmark movie. A telegenic, square-jawed veteran with an affable Florida drawl, he was raised by a single mother in Jacksonville who at one point worked three jobs to make ends meet. He joined the Army in 1996 and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was deployed to Afghanistan, where he earned four Bronze Stars, two for valor on the battlefield.
His trajectory afterward was a familiar one. During the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Waltz was a defense policy director at the Pentagon and a counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. That was followed by some profitable years making millions at a defense contracting firm. He then ran for Congress and served three terms. Mr. Waltz is married to Julia Nesheiwat, a former Army intelligence officer who was briefly the homeland security adviser to Mr. Trump in his first term.
Other details on his résumé made Mr. Waltz a hit with Mr. Trump.
He was a paid Fox News contributor before announcing on “Fox & Friends” in early 2018 that he would be running for the Florida congressional seat vacated when Ron DeSantis ran successfully for governor. In Congress, Mr. Waltz condemned the first impeachment of Mr. Trump as a “sham.”
Two months after the president left office in disgrace, Mr. Waltz visited Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago when few other elected Republicans would. He later endorsed Mr. Trump over Mr. DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary and spent much of that year campaigning for Mr. Trump, including on Fox News.
Yet Mr. Waltz was never part of the bomb-throwing wing of the Republican Party. During his time in the House, he largely preoccupied himself with military issues, including improving the dilapidated state of Army barracks and funding research into post-traumatic stress disorder among war veterans. Four Democrats who served with him on the Armed Services Committee said in interviews that he was collegial and focused on substance.
That began to change in 2023, three of them said, when Mr. Waltz became increasingly critical of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and what he called “wokeness” in the military. He held out hopes of becoming defense secretary, according to one Trump associate who was asked by Mr. Waltz to put in a good word on his behalf. But that job went to Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, who made an appeal to Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Mr. Trump picked Mr. Waltz for national security adviser only after his first choice, Richard Grenell, the sharp-elbowed former ambassador to Germany and the acting director of national intelligence in his first administration, turned down the post in hopes of running the State Department, according to a Trump associate whose opinion was solicited for that selection. The job ultimately went to former Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Mr. Grenell did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Waltz’s selection as national security adviser reassured colleagues on both sides of the aisle. “When you look at the other people who were being nominated for this administration,” said Elaine Luria, a former Democratic congresswoman from Virginia who served on the Armed Services Committee with Mr. Waltz, “seeing Mike’s name among them gave me a lot of comfort.”
But providing comfort to Beltway habitués was not exactly a priority for Mr. Trump. Several of the president’s allies wondered whether he had been fully apprised of Mr. Waltz’s past, which included his 2014 memoir, “Warrior Diplomat.” Mr. Waltz wrote that he “had no moral objections” to invading Iraq and only worried that going to war there would drain resources from the war in Afghanistan.
Mr. Trump has described the Iraq war as possibly “the worst decision anybody has made, any president has made in the history of this country.”
In 2015, Mr. Waltz denounced Mr. Trump’s caustic appraisal of Senator John McCain’s war heroism, declaring that Mr. Trump “hasn’t served this country for a day in his life” and chiding him for “cozying up to Putin.” After Mr. Waltz announced his House candidacy in 2018, a Republican primary opponent posted those and other comments on the website NeverTrumperMikeWaltz.com.
“I supported him in his race after I vetted him and made sure he was sufficiently hawkish and Trump-skeptical,” said Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman and fighter pilot who later voted to impeach Mr. Trump.
Mr. Waltz’s skepticism about Mr. Trump proved to be short-lived. “At the end of the day, Mike is a pragmatist who is very clear about his goals,” said Mary Beth Long, a former assistant secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration who supervised Mr. Waltz in the Pentagon and later signed a letter opposing Mr. Trump’s candidacy. “His entire life he’s adapted to get what he wants.”
By the end of his 2018 campaign, Mr. Waltz had procured Mr. Trump’s endorsement. Two years later, in December 2020, he joined 125 other House Republicans in filing an amicus brief supporting a federal lawsuit that sought to overturn the results of the presidential election.
And yet on Jan. 6, 2021, he reversed himself and voted to certify the election results, after what he described as “today’s despicable display of violence and intimidation.” Four months later, Mr. Waltz pledged that “those involved will be brought to justice.”
By 2024, Mr. Waltz’s attention had turned to a different legal matter. That May, he stood outside a New York courthouse with two House Republican firebrands, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, denouncing the hush-money trial against Mr. Trump as “election interference.”
Since his appointment as national security adviser, Mr. Waltz has had to execute other gymnastic feats worthy of Simone Biles. Mr. Waltz previously called for TikTok to be banned in the United States, but he recently acknowledged to a Fox interviewer that Mr. Trump “is a fan of TikTok” and went on to describe it as “a great product.”
At the same time he installed as his deputy Alex Wong, who was an aide to Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state who has fallen out of favor with Mr. Trump. He also sought out staff members from House Republicans who have been staunch supporters of lethal aid to Ukraine, as well as from the Hudson Institute, a think tank denigrated in Mr. Trump’s circles as a nest of neoconservatives.
It is too early to tell whether Mr. Waltz will find his footing in the new administration. If he does persevere, it will most likely lead to further disappointment from those who have already accused Mr. Waltz of undue fealty to Mr. Trump.
“The job of the national security adviser is to bring a variety of viewpoints and options to the president based on serious analysis of the challenges we face,” said Charles Kupperman, Mr. Bolton’s former deputy. “It is not to go out and cook the system and the interagency process to bring back to Trump the answer he’s already given them.”
