Trump stands by Waltz as the president and his allies deploy a familiar playbook

Washington (CNN) — President Donald Trump not only stood by his embattled national security adviser on Tuesday, amid fever-pitch conversations about Mike Waltz’s fate in the wake of an extraordinary security breach; he invited him for a seat at the table in the Cabinet Room to send an undeniable message of support.

“No, I don’t think he should apologize,” Trump said, after branding it “the only glitch” of his new administration. “I think he’s doing his best.”

The president insisted classified information had not been shared in a group chat with his national security team about military strikes in Yemen. He declined to answer how he reached that conclusion, but the fact that he addressed the matter and took repeated questions underscored how his advisers said they believed that only he could defuse the crisis.

After watching an explosive Senate hearing in the morning, the White House sought to contain the fallout by using the president’s bully pulpit to try and change the subject. Trump appeared on camera, surrounded by his ambassador picks, for a previously unscheduled meeting where he also signed executive actions on conservative pet issues like requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration and declassifying the FBI’s Russia probe documents.

His afternoon remarks served a dual purpose of sending a message to allies on Capitol Hill and beyond in hopes of quelling a deepening controversy over how it came to be that war planning was debated and discussed in a group chat on Signal. The president’s loyalists employed a familiar page from the Trumpian playbook of attacking the messenger – the media – as they dealt with one of the biggest challenges of the young presidency.

As top White House officials began to carry out that strategy, people close to Trump – some of whom had been wary of Waltz’s survival rate on Monday after it first emerged he had added an Atlantic editor to the chat – argued that if the national security adviser could stay above the fray for another day or so the story would die down and he would remain.

“I take full responsibility,” Waltz told Fox in an interview that aired later Tuesday night. “I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated,” he added, while disparaging The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and not explaining how his number was in his phone.

After initial frustration, Trump suggests he’s ready to move on

A day earlier, it was Waltz who was one of the first people to discuss the story with the president, two sources familiar with the talks told CNN.

During their conversation, Waltz told the president that he had never met or spoken with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, against whom the president has long held a deep, personal grudge, according to one of the sources.

By the time Trump was fully briefed on the matter from Waltz and others Monday – a task one person familiar with the matter described as unpleasant – he’d already been questioned by reporters in the Roosevelt Room about the embarrassing episode. He claimed ignorance.

But the first hints of what was to come had started that morning when top officials had begun receiving word from the White House shortly after 9 a.m. that the encrypted chat where they’d been freely discussing plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen had inadvertently included an editor from The Atlantic, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in the air, having departed for a trip to Asia, only hours before the story emerged. By the time he stepped off his airplane in Hawaii, he was visibly irate, denying an allegation he dropped detailed war plans into the chat.

In Washington, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were forced to adjust in real-time their preparations for a high-profile congressional hearing on worldwide threats a day later, anticipating tough new lines of questioning on the administration’s handling of classified information.

And inside the White House, the top aides who had been included in the group text were left to piece together exactly what had happened – and how to tell Trump, who had never before heard of the Signal app his aides were using to discuss his military plans.

The president expressed some frustration with the story and its fallout behind closed doors, sources said, but by Tuesday morning, Trump downplayed the episode as “the only glitch” of his administration so far, both diminishing the severity of what happened while also tacitly acknowledging he viewed the matter as an unforced error.

It was also evident he was ready to move on, shrugging off the incident as a commonplace technical snafu rather than a serious breach of the government’s most closely held secrets.

“Sometimes people are hooked in, and you don’t know they’re hooked in,” he said later Tuesday in the Cabinet Room.

For a president long intent on rooting out leakers in his midst – and whose own handling of classified documents resulted in a criminal investigation – the Signal chat episode amounted to a major test of his new administration.

Internal administration dynamics were laid bare in the chats, including differences of opinion between some members of the national security team and Vice President JD Vance, who suggested in one message Trump may not be “aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” according to The Atlantic.

And questions of competence swirled in Washington around some of Trump’s unorthodox selections for top national security positions, including Hegseth and Gabbard, who were left to defend themselves after many of Trump’s rivals had already called into question their fitness for their roles.

“You have to learn from every experience,” Trump said Tuesday, suggesting the entire incident was just another day at the office.

But even as the president and his advisers worked feverishly to downplay the entire matter and diminish the specific war planning details that were shared on the Signal messaging app, top Democrats in Congress were calling for the resignations of Waltz and Hegseth.

Some Republicans also voiced their frustration.

“This has got to be the last time something this big and dumb happens,” Sen. Kevin Cramer said, adding someone needed to “apologize and say it’ll never happen again.”

“It’s such a major first strike, in my mind. I don’t know how many strikes you get. This one’s a really big first one. Maybe it’s worth two,” the North Dakota Republican said.

Indeed, whether there would be any consequences for the officials involved in the chat was a matter of intense speculation among aides, some of whom still vividly remember the tumultuous string of firings from Trump’s first time in office.

Multiple Trump administration officials told CNN on Monday they were shocked by the matter, with at least two speculating that this could result in the dismissal of one of their colleagues.

By Monday afternoon, however, the White House press secretary put out word that Trump retained confidence in Waltz.

And when the president brought together his ambassador nominees Tuesday afternoon, he gave a full-throated defense of his national security adviser.

“I think it was very unfair the way they attacked Michael,” Trump said.

Trump personally likes Waltz and has been pleased with the job he’s done so far, officials said, which is part of why he quickly chose to stand by him despite the embarrassing story, people familiar with the strategy told CNN.

But another leading reason, those people said, is that admitting wrongdoing, or going so far as to fire Waltz over the digression, would feed into the criticism of his administration.

Instead, Trump’s team, in part fueled by the president himself, adopted the well-worn playbook of downplaying the seriousness of the situation, denying the most egregious parts of the story and disparaging the journalist behind it.

Still, even many Trump allies acknowledged privately that the incident reflected poorly on the administration’s general competence. As soon as the story published, it was blasted out in multiple text threads throughout the administration, with officials reacting with disbelief, according to those who spoke to CNN privately.

Trump lashes out at Goldberg, while officials review Signal usage

When officials first briefed Trump on the matter on Monday, he expressed his disdain for Goldberg, sources said.

The president has long disliked the longtime Washington reporter, dating back to his 2020 story in which Goldberg reported that Trump described Americans who died in war as “losers” and “suckers.”

“You couldn’t have picked a worse person than Goldberg to add to the chat,” one person close to Trump said.

But as the White House scrambled to contain fallout from the incident, senior administration officials were also reviewing the use of Signal amid concerns there is an overreliance on the encrypted app.

Signal was widely used during the first Trump administration, multiple former administration officials told CNN, including at times to plan and coordinate sensitive meetings. Trump officials, both during the president’s first term and his current term – as well as the transition period in between the election and January 2025 – have also used signal to communicate with reporters.

“Everyone is on Signal, all day and night,” one official told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations in the West Wing. “That may well change.”

However, none of the officials said they could ever recall an instance where classified information relating to a military attack was ever discussed in such a manner, though some suggested officials may have used Signal to leak classified information to reporters.

“We all used signal to communicate at a staff level,” one of the former administration officials, who worked for a Cabinet-level official, said. “But the planning and execution of sensitive operations would have been ran by the President/NSC members from the Situation Room, regardless of whether it took place during ‘normal’ working hours. That would include the decision making and information sharing process leading up to the operation, in the form of a meeting or secure VTC,” this person said, referring to video conferencing.

A sense of concern was palpable inside the West Wing and across key agencies as questions emerged over whether new guidance or rules should be put in place for internal communications.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who was on the group chat reported by the Atlantic, was among the senior officials who apparently did not raise questions or concerns that a highly sensitive conversation was taking place on the commercial messaging app. Officials declined to answer questions about whether the text chat violated legal procedures for the handling of such information.

Trump, speaking Tuesday, suggested use of the app may be a thing of the past, at least for his top officials.

“I don’t think it’s something we’re looking forward to using again,” he said.

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