Perhaps it’s no surprise that Donald Trump—who has redone the Oval Office in neo-Versailles gold, claimed monarchical powers as his Presidential prerogative, and encouraged florid tributes from followers that would make a Bourbon blush—had quite the Marie Antoinette moment on Wednesday. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio, clad in the Trump-homage uniform of dark-blue suit and extra-long red tie, looked on worshipfully, the President dismissed concerns about spiking prices for consumer goods that economists expect as a result of his trade war with China. “You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open,’ ” Trump said, conjuring an image of empty stores and a gift-giving season without all the cheap toys from China that Americans have grown used to in the past few decades. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.” Putting aside the question of why Trump thinks anyone would give their kid thirty dolls, the point was clear enough: Who are the peasants to complain about the high cost of dolls, or cake for that matter, when the king has wisely decided to upend the global economy on their behalf?

The occasion was a Cabinet meeting, meant to celebrate the first hundred days of his second term in office, or, as Trump put it in his opening remarks, “the most successful first hundred days of any Administration in the history of our country.” His Attorney General, Pam Bondi, later suggested that Trump was actually being too modest. “Mr. President, your first hundred days has far exceeded that of any other Presidency in this country ever, ever,” she told him, before explaining that government agents on his watch had seized so much of the deadly drug fentanyl that they had already saved an incredible “two hundred fifty-eight million lives.” If that were true, it would be a hell of a feat in a country of only three hundred and fifty million people. None of his other advisers were quite so sweeping in their claims, but around the table they went, offering praise for his leadership, his support, his “profound positive impact.” “It’s an honor to serve you in this Administration,” Mike Waltz, his national-security adviser, said, “and I think the world is far better, far safer for it.”

Roughly twenty-four hours later, however, Waltz found out what so many of Trump’s courtiers over the years have learned before him: You may shamelessly suck up, sell out your principles, betray your values, and flip-flop on all that you hold dear in the name of Trump, but it still won’t stop him from dumping you in a maximally embarrassing way. The king is always right; his servants, not so much. By late morning on Thursday, news organizations reported that both Waltz and his deputy, a former State Department official named Alex Wong, were being ousted. Trump, cruelly, left Waltz hanging for hours before announcing, at 2:16 P.M., in a post on Truth Social, that Waltz would receive the consolation prize of becoming his Ambassador to the United Nations, while Rubio, “in the interim,” would serve as both Secretary of State and national-security adviser. Who says history doesn’t repeat itself? The first law of Trump, forgotten by those around him at their peril, is that few survive for long in his orbit. During Trump’s previous stint in the White House, the first senior appointee of his he fired was also his national-security adviser, Mike Flynn, who lasted a mere twenty-four days; three more national-security advisers would follow, adding up to the most turnover in that job for any President in a single term since the post was created.

Before Trump’s election last fall, Waltz was a generally well-regarded, generally hawkish, and generally little-known Republican congressman representing a safe Republican seat in Florida. Waltz, a former colonel and officer in the Army Special Forces, had just published “Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret.” It’s one of those leadership books that offer a long list of virtues the author has learned in the military which ought to apply to civilian challenges—traits such as restraint, discipline, and speaking truth to power. With Waltz’s fate in the Trump White House in doubt on Thursday morning, I went back and listened to one of his book-promotion events, at a Washington think tank, the Atlantic Council, in October. The tough lessons he had learned in Afghanistan and elsewhere, he said, had given him a “moral compass” and an “adaptive mind-set” that he had come to realize “apply to life, to business, and certainly to politics.”

A few weeks after that appearance, when Trump announced Waltz and Rubio as the first two national-security appointees of the new Administration, official Washington breathed a bit easier—both were known commodities, stolid Republican elected officials who seemed to mean it when they talked about “peace through strength” and the need for American leadership in a world on fire. They were both known for tough views on China and Iran, and both were early supporters of Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022—though, in 2024, they had both voted against providing additional military aid to Ukraine as the prospect of a victory by the Ukraine-skeptical Trump drew closer. The Associated Press called them “Trump’s mainstream picks,” and suggested their appointments could “reassure allies—and worry China.”

No wonder, then, that the whispers began almost immediately from the “America First” corners of the MAGA internet: Was Waltz a deep-state plant? A “neocon” enemy within? His late conversion on Ukraine was apparently never enough to satisfy Trump’s push to make a peace deal on Vladimir Putin’s terms. As recently as Monday, the publicly sycophantic Waltz, according to the Times, was privately pushing Trump and other advisers to impose tougher new sanctions on Russia if it did not go along with the terms that the Administration has proposed for a ceasefire.

The crushing embarrassment from which Waltz never recovered was the revelation, on March 24th, that he had created a group chat on the encrypted app Signal for senior officials to discuss plans for upcoming military strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels and inadvertently included in it a journalist, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. It was actually Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, who shared the most flagrantly secret information in the chat, describing details of planned strikes down to the timing and targets, which Goldberg subsequently published. But, despite that and a management meltdown among Hegseth’s top staff at the Pentagon, the flamboyantly pro-Trump Defense Secretary was thought to be in a much stronger position with the boss.

Waltz, meanwhile, soon became the subject of the sort of “Knives are out” stories that often spell the end of a White House career. In early April, after hosting the far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in the Oval Office, Trump ordered a purge of lower-level staffers at Waltz’s National Security Council, who Loomer claimed were insufficiently loyal to the President’s vision. When news of Waltz’s ouster circulated on Thursday, she texted Politico a one-word reaction: “Loomered.” Perhaps Waltz had an early premonition of his fate back in October, when he told his interviewer at the Atlantic Council that Washington was one of the hardest battlefields he had faced. “Sometimes, I think the tribes of the D.C. swamp are tougher than the tribes I faced overseas,” he said.

Poor Waltz. Will he soon recover his ability to speak truth to power? His vaunted moral compass? Will he become one of those former officials, like Trump’s third-ousted national-security adviser, John Bolton, who speaks out about Trump’s errors and excesses? Or will he be like Flynn, the first national-security adviser dumped by Trump, who has remained a steadfast Trumper to the end?

Perhaps the solace of a tour in New York at the United Nations will serve the intended purpose of keeping Waltz from ever openly breaking with the President. But the mere fact that there is a job opening in Turtle Bay speaks to how perilous it is to count on Trump’s loyalty. The post was supposed to go to Elise Stefanik, a New York congresswoman who gave up her position as a rising member of the House G.O.P. leadership, packed up her office, and started hunting for schools for her son in the city, only to have the appointment yanked back, ostensibly because of the narrow margin in the Republican-controlled House.

Waltz was not in the job long enough to have accomplished much, but thanks to Signalgate and his status as the first of what are sure to be many firings to come in a second Trump Administration, he will be remembered all the same. I would even venture to say it will be with a history-making first, the only national-security adviser to have a string of emojis forever associated with his tenure: 👊🇺🇸🔥 ♦