Trump Adviser Behind Train-Wreck Signalgate Chat Is on His Way Out

Multiple Trumpworld officials involved in the Defense Department’s Signalgate scandal are leaving their posts.

National security adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, are exiting the administration, CBS News’s Jennifer Jacobs reported Thursday. The pair are expected to leave by the end of the day.

But the roles aren’t likely to stay open for long. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is reportedly in talks to replace Waltz, according to Politico. Witkoff has been busy the last several months attempting to work out a peace deal with Hamas in Gaza and end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Other contenders include White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, National Security Council Senior Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka, and the special envoy for special missions Richard Grenell. The last of those options served for a handful of months as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence during his first term, and was in talks for other top intelligence positions in December as Trump drew up his Cabinet.

Waltz has been the epicenter of several embarrassing episodes for the Trump administration in the last couple of months. In March, Waltz committed an egregious national security flub by accidentally inviting a journalist from The Atlantic to a Cabinet group chat on Signal that discussed sensitive, real-time war details about bombing Yemen.

That news brought the supposed chief intelligence expert’s myriad other misgivings to light. In the wake of the Signal scandal, an account sharing Waltz’s name had seemingly left his Venmo profile public. In doing so, the intelligence official disclosed the names of hundreds of his personal and professional associates, including government officials and lobbyists.

The list also included several major media personalities, such as Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, Brianna Keilar and Kristen Holmes of CNN, a cable news producer, local news journalists, a national security reporter, documentarians, and “noted conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin,” reported Wired.

Waltz was also one of several top Trump administration officials caught with their personal data—such as account passwords, cell phone numbers, and email addresses—listed online, reported the German newspaper Der Spiegel.

And, as it turns out, Waltz “regularly” used Signal to discuss work, according to Politico. He reportedly had at least 20 group chats to discuss issues in Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

Behind closed doors, Donald Trump was reportedly furious with Waltz’s pattern of errors and was “suspicious” that Waltz’s contact list apparently included journalists critical of the administration.

“The president was pissed that Waltz could be so stupid,” one anonymous source familiar with the situation told Politico, in the aftermath of the Signal scandal.

Still, the Trump administration publicly reiterated its confidence in its intelligence pick, describing Waltz as a “good man” who had learned his lesson.

Trump has reportedly been sensitive to the idea of ousting Waltz, believing that doing so could be interpreted as a bend to public pressure. One source familiar with the situation at the National Security Council told CBS News that the president believes enough time has passed that the administration can reasonably reframe Waltz’s and Wong’s departures as part of a “reorganization.”

Waltz’s removal also marks another embarrassing loss for Republicans, who traded the former Florida representative to the executive branch at a cost to their slim majority in the House.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong in his second term as president.

On a NewsNation town hall with Chris Cuomo, Stephen A. Smith, and Bill O’Reilly, Trump, who phoned in to the event, was asked by an audience member, Lee Shapiro, what he thought his biggest mistake was in the first 100 days of his new term.

“I’ll tell you, that’s the toughest question I can have because I don’t really believe I’ve made any mistakes,” Trump said to laughter from the audience, which was divided between Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

“I think Lee is reassured,” joked O’Reilly, a former Fox News host.

Trump appears to be in deep denial. His administration is facing more than 200 lawsuits over his immigration policies, his ill-advised tariffs, his revenge against law firms, his attempts to shut down government agencies, and many more actions. On top of that, his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has been embroiled in scandals over leaks and discussing battle plans in private group chats.

The president has shown signs of cognitive decline over the past year. If Trump was unwilling to hear criticism before, now he’s unable to acknowledge the consequences of his own actions. With Congress and much of the Supreme Court failing to hold him accountable, it appears that Americans are stuck with a president who causes problems for the country and doesn’t take responsibility.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is doubling down on Donald Trump’s ridiculous way of dismissing the rising prices of consumer goods.

During a White House press briefing Thursday morning, Miller attempted to defend the president’s strange remark from the day before that parents might have to buy fewer toys for their kids while his destructive tariffs on China take effect.

“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday.

Miller tried to make sense of the comment in his typical antagonistic fashion.

“He was making the point that I think almost every American consumer agrees with,” Miller said.

“If you had a choice between a doll from China, that might have, say, lead paint in it that is not as well constructed, as a doll made in America that has a higher environmental and regulatory standard and that is made to a higher degree of quality, and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you probably would be willing to pay more for a better-made American product,” he continued.

“But here’s the key point: With the tax cuts, the regulation cuts, the energy price decrease, and everything else that President Trump is doing to unleash this era of American prosperity and prevent the road we were on, to get off that road of financial ruin and doom, means that it will be cheaper than ever to manufacture in America,” he added.

It’s worth noting that, in the same breath, Miller touted a supposed higher degree of quality for American-made goods while also promising that Trump would strip the very regulations that ensure that quality in an effort to make production less expensive.

As the Trump administration has begun to reckon with just how destructive Trump’s sweeping tariffs will be for the domestic and global economies, they have made a sharp pivot to convince Americans that desire is in fact the root of all suffering. In March, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” In fact, being able to afford to live is a huge part of the American dream, and abundant consumer conveniences have become baked into our national identity.

The administration’s weird warnings that Americans will have to hunker down with the toys they’ve already got flies in the face of Trump’s grandstanding about prosperity.

Meanwhile, toy companies are reporting that Christmas may be in jeopardy. Greg Ahearn, chief executive of the Toy Association, a U.S. industry group representing 850 toy manufacturers, warned of “a frozen supply chain that is putting Christmas at risk.”

“If we don’t start production soon, there’s a high probability of a toy shortage this holiday season,” Ahern said.

House Republicans on Wednesday killed a measure that would have stopped ICE from being able to deport or detain U.S. citizens. The measure was originally an amendment introduced by Representative Pamila Jayapal to President Trump’s massive budget bill.

“My amendment is simple, and I hope that it has bipartisan support. It simply states that none of the funds in this bill may be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain or deport U.S. citizens,” Jayapal said. “Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, I hope we can all agree that U.S. citizens should never be detained by ICE or any agency conducting civil immigration enforcement. They certainly should not be deported.”

The Republican Party does not agree with that. The Trump administration has already deported multiple U.S.-citizens, including a four-year old with cancer. The issue came up at the very same hearing where Republicans decided to allow ICE to deport more U.S. citizens.

“Your bill will deport more kids who are American citizens with cancer,” Representative Eric Swallwell asked. His statement was met with complete silence.

“The fact that Democrats and my colleague Representative Pramila Jayapal feel the need to even introduce an amendment that says ICE cannot deport U.S. citizens is bats*t crazy,” Representative Ted Lieu said on the House floor.

“How about this,” Representative Daniel Goldman raised. “Raise your hand if you do not think children with cancer who are American citizens should be deported.”

Half of the hands in the room were raised.

“Looks like it’s all the Democrats and none of the Republicans.”

Elon Musk isn’t happy about a report that his own company is looking to replace him.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Tesla’s board of directors had begun the process of finding a new CEO to replace the billionaire bureaucrat who was galavanting around Washington with a chain saw, people familiar with the discussions told the paper. The board reached out to several executive search firms, and was ultimately able to narrow its efforts to one major firm, the outlet reported.

Following an initial spike after Musk had effectively bought Donald Trump the White House, the electric vehicle-maker spent the first three months of the year watching its value deflate and its brand curdle as its CEO spent more time cozying up to the increasingly unpopular president.

It’s unclear whether Musk, who stepped down as the chairman of the board of directors in 2018, was aware that the company was beginning to look for new leadership. As the board of directors first embarked on their search about a month ago, they warned the CEO that he needed to spend more time at the company, and Musk didn’t argue.

In a furious post on X Thursday, Musk claimed that the report was a complete fiction.

“It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!” he wrote.

Robyn Denholm, the chairman of Tesla’s board of directors, flat-out denied the reporting.

“Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company. This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published),” Denholm said in a statement Thursday. “The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”

Last week, in a humiliating first-quarter earnings report, Tesla said that profits had crashed by a whopping 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year. The drop was a direct result of Musk’s entanglement with Trump’s administration.

Tesla has become a symbol of the Department of Government Efficiency’s likely unconstitutional government overhaul and extreme cost-cutting measures that have led to sweeping layoffs and essential services being gutted. Teslas have quickly become the target of widespread protests against the administration.

Trump’s embrace of a sweeping “reciprocal tariff” policy, and steep tariffs on imported cars and auto parts, also rocked the industry, hurting Musk’s value personally. In Trump’s first 100 days in office, Musk lost a whopping 25 percent of his total personal wealth.

Following the earnings report last week, Musk told investors that he planned to cut down his time in Washington to two days a week, but said that he would likely continue working with the Trump administration until the end of the president’s term.

Musk insisted that he would continue to advocate for lower tariffs but said that the decision was “entirely up to the president of the United States.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have described the current measles outbreak in Texas as the worst uptick the agency has seen in measles cases in the last 25 years. But on Wednesday, the man responsible for running the nation’s public health response continued to lie about the vaccine that, at one point, practically eradicated the childhood disease.

Speaking with NewsNation, virulent vaccine conspiracist and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. justified a religious Texas community’s decision not to receive the vaccine by claiming that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles.”

“There are populations in our country, like the Mennonites in Texas, who are most afflicted,” Kennedy said. “And they have religious objections to the vaccination.”

“The MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris and DNA particles, so they don’t want to take it,” Kennedy continued. “So we ought to be able to take care of those populations when they get sick.”

It should go without saying, but the MMR vaccine does not contain pieces of aborted fetuses. The vaccine contains live or weakened measles, mumps, and rubella viruses and ingredients to stabilize the solution.

Data published Tuesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services indicated that 663 cases of measles have been confirmed in the state since late January. There have been 396 cases in Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak. So far, 87 people have been hospitalized since cases began popping up in the Lone Star State and at least two children have died, officials confirmed. Both children were not vaccinated.

Measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, thanks to the vaccine. But researchers have warned that the country is now at a tipping point and could see the return of endemic measles, according to The Guardian.

That’s due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear due to thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories, which, at one point, linked autism to the jab. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

In December, Donald Trump still announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching the conspiracy tying vaccine usage to autism rates.

This wouldn’t be the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled. Under his stewardship, the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the organization spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles, as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

President Trump’s all-hands Cabinet meeting Wednesday to mark his 100 days in office was such a shameless display of fealty that even commentators on the far right felt compelled to criticize it.

Trump hosted a two-hour-long televised meeting starring each of his Cabinet appointees. They all took turns going around the table talking about how awesome and wondrous Trump is, and how honored they were to even be in his presence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke of a “recruiting renaissance” and said that Trump “ripped wokeness out of the military.” National security adviser Mike Waltz said the world was “far better, far safer” because of Trump. And perhaps most notably, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Trump has somehow saved 258 million Americans from overdosing on fentanyl in just 100 days.

“Since you have been in office President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 3,400 kilos of fentanyl … which saved—are you ready for this, media?—258 million lives,” Bondi claimed, turning directly to the camera when she said “media.” “Kids are dying every day because they’re taking this junk laced with something else. They don’t know what they’re taking. They think they’re buying a Tylenol, or an Adderall, and a Xanax. And it’s laced with fentanyl and they’re dropping dead. And no longer, because of you.”

This elicited an eye roll from even Richard Hanania, a right-wing commentator whose history of white supremacist writings directly influenced Project 2025.

“Yesterday, Pam Bondi claimed Trump saved 119 million lives. Today she has upped it to 258 million as she yells at the press for not wanting to accept it,” he wrote on X. “Seriously, we are in deep trouble. You really can’t be on the fence anymore about what we’re seeing.”

Infamous bigot Ann Coulter also chimed in.

“Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il-style tributes?” she wrote.

The Vermont judge who on Wednesday ordered the release of a Columbia University student arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave a grave warning about the Trump administration’s McCarthyist crackdown on free speech.

In his sharply worded 29-page decision ordering Mohsen Mahdawi’s release, Judge Geoffrey Crawford wrote that in addition to the fact that the graduate student was not a flight risk and presented no danger to his community, the judge had also considered the “extraordinary setting” in which his arrest was made in the ruling.

Legal residents—not charged with crimes or misconduct—are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day,” Crawford wrote. “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 that led to the deportation of hundreds of people suspected of anarchist or communist views.”

He referred to judicial decisions that had helped bring “an end to the moral panic that gripped the nation and its officials.”

“Similar themes were sounded during the McCarthy period in the 1950s when thousands of non-citizens were targeted for deportation due to their political views,” he said, referring to a 1950 Supreme Court dissent that condemned the “menace to free institutions” presented by such cases.

“The wheel of history has come around again, but as before these times of excess will pass. In the meantime, this case … is extraordinary in the sense that it calls upon the ancient remedy of habeas to address a persistent modern wrong.”

Crawford presented a strong defense for Mahdawi’s speech, writing that “even if he were a firebrand, his conduct is protected by the First Amendment.

“The court is aware that he has offended his political opponents and apparently given rise to concerns at the State Department that he is an obstacle to American foreign policy. Such conduct is insufficient to support a finding that he is in any way a danger as we use that term in the context of detention and release,” Crawford added.

Mahdawi, who had committed the heinous crime of activism and founded Columbia University’s Palestinian Student Union, offered a sharp condemnation of the very kind of antisemitism of which he stood accused, during an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in December 2023. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly invoked vague “antisemitic activities” as justification for the arrests of several students who have committed no crimes and whom the government hopes to deport.

Green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who missed the birth of his child while being detained in Louisiana; Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was detained over an op-ed, even though the State Department determined that the Trump administration had no evidence linking her to antisemitic activity; and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri, who is now held in a Texas detention center, all remain in custody.

Just one day after his commerce secretary claimed that the American dream is a return to multigenerational factory serfdom, President Trump stated that parents might have to buy fewer toys for their kids while his destructive tariffs on China take effect.

“[China] made a trillion dollars with Biden, a trillion dollars, even a trillion and one with Biden, selling us stuff,” Trump said, referring to the gargantuan Chinese import market in the United States. “Much of it we don’t need. Ya’ know, somebody said, ‘Oh the shelves are gonna be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”

The Trump administration has been trying for weeks now to gaslight Americans into thinking these tariffs will only be a temporary rough spot, that each country we’ve levied them on will fold, and that the man who penned The Art of the Deal will work his magic once again.

The reality of the situation is bleaker than they can imagine. The country’s gross domestic product fell by 0.3 percent in the first three months of the year, the first time in years that the economy has shrunk, while Trump blamed it entirely on former President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, the whole world is bracing for impact, Americans who were already struggling are feeling deeply anxious, and Trump—whose very name is associated with opulence—has the nerve to tell the populace to buy fewer toys for their kids. Who is buying 30 toys at once?

The U.S. Postal Service is now helping the Trump administration with its mass deportation efforts.  

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement division of the postal agency, is cooperating with immigration agencies to help locate people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally by investigating data from mail and packages. The USPS officers have joined a Department of Homeland Security task force that focuses on finding, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants.

Thanks to the USPS’s cooperation, immigration officials now have access to photographs of the outside of envelopes and packages, as well as the postal service’s surveillance systems, including mail tracking, IP addresses, online account information, credit card data, and other financial information. 

While DHS has partnered with other agencies in areas such as taxes, housing, and public health, enlisting the USPS means that mail delivery is now part of immigration enforcement. The postal service has 1,700 law enforcement officers, whose main tasks in the past were to keep the mail system safe, investigate threats and attacks on postal facilities and workers, and keep illegal items out of the mail. 

The Postal Inspection Service’s leaders signed on to immigration efforts in part because of fears that the White House could tighten its control of the postal service. President Trump issued an executive order that includes all federal law enforcement agencies in the administration’s deportation efforts. 

“We want to play well in the sandbox” is how an Inspection Service email described a recent meeting with immigration officers, according to the Post. The service is now even participating in immigration raids and arrests. 

Aside from focusing more and more of the federal government on deportations, the move is another way that the White House is turning government services necessary to daily life into a trap. Immigrants have to use the mail and pay taxes like anyone else living in America, and now that could get them deported. 

“The Inspection Service is very, very nervous about this,” an unnamed source told the Post. “They seem to be trying to placate Trump by getting involved with things they think he’d like. But it’s complete overreach. This is the Postal Service. Why are they involved in deporting people?”