LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: President Trump ousts his national Security adviser making Mike Waltz the first casualty of the Signal gate fiasco.

Meanwhile, federal judges across the country called the biggest parts of Trump's deportation agenda unlawful.

Tonight, Trump's motivation for the White House shakeup and what's ahead on his collision course with the courts, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I'm Laura Barron-Lopez.

Jeffrey Goldberg is away.

President Trump is looking for a new national security adviser tonight after pushing out Mike Waltz.

It's the first ax to fall after the moderator of this show reported he was mistakenly added by Waltz to a signal chat about military attack plans.

Trump is now nominating Waltz to be the next United Nations ambassador.

And for now, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio will take Waltz's place.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and much more are Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck, Michael Scherer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, Ali Vitali is the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC, and Alexander Ward is a national security reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you all for being here tonight.

We have a lot to get through.

And we have some news tonight from President Trump's interview with Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.

She asked him if he was okay with some -- a short-term recession to achieve his long-term goals, and here's what he said.

KRISTIN WELKER, Host, NBC News: Is it okay in the short-term to have a recession?

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: Remember this, look yes, everything's okay.

What we are -- I said, this is a transition period.

I think we're going to do fantastically.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Michael, you interviewed the president just last week.

Is there any amount of financial chaos that would convince him to reverse course?

MICHAEL SCHERER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Well, I think that's an open question.

I think that answer though is consistent with what he told us last week.

Because we asked him a similar question, could the markets move you to pull back further from your tariff policy if they crashed or if there was a real signal in the bond markets that people were moving away from the dollar?

And he said, then no, that's not going to be a factor.

I mean, you pay attention to the markets, but that's not a factor.

Now, that's what he says.

If you go back a few weeks, he introduced this very dramatic tariff policy.

The bond market started to go a little haywire and the stock market collapsed about 20 percent, and he did pull back.

So, I think that he's in the middle of a negotiating process right now with the world, and I think he's trying to project a very strong negotiating position.

But whether he would withstand that and whether his party could withstand it with the midterms just a couple years away is a different question.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.

And earlier this week, he got a lot of questions about the effects of his tariff policies and people were looking to see if he would provide some reassurance to Americans, and this is what he said.

DONALD TRUMP: Well, maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?

And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: There appears to be little effort, despite the fact -- to reassure Americans, despite the fact that his polling numbers are taking a bit of a hit, especially on the economy.

I mean, Ali, why not provide some reassurance?

ALI VITALI, Host, MSNBC's Way Too Early: Tough year for Barbie, but we'll move forward.

I think, look, this is an administration that above all does not want to look weak.

They do not want to look like external factors impact them.

That's sort of fundamentally Trump, right, for as long as all of us have been covering him since 2015.

And so it makes sense that they are not trying to be moved by the markets or by others in the party.

And I think that it's actually fascinating to see the way that the Hill has gone along with him on almost everything, pardoning everyone involved with January 6th, all of the actions that he's taken both in legal institutions, educational institutions, but on tariffs, that's where they start to draw the line.

And it tells the larger story that this is the thing that they cannot defend to their voters in the midterms, even if it's just a year-and-a-half away, because pocketbook issues were the thing that Trump really ran and won on, and they haven't seen the kind of price decreases that the president, frankly, promised and hasn't yet delivered on.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: But, Leigh Ann, just this week, they tried to have a vote on keeping the president in check on tariffs, and that vote didn't succeed.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL, Chief Washington Correspondent, Puck: Yes.

There's just a few of them who are willing to speak up about this.

For the most part, they are all in lockstep.

You know, I was talking to a lot of members on the Hill, a lot of Republican operatives who work, whose full-time job is to elect Republicans to Congress.

And one of them told me that they're not going to break with the president.

They are -- the president -- part of the president's party, they're relying on him to -- they're the reason -- he's the reason they are elected.

And if you break with them, what does it do?

It angers the base.

And so if the ship sinks, they're all going to sink together.

We might see little pockets here and there of Republicans who know their districts being able to speak out, but, electorally and politically, it doesn't look like, for the most part, Republicans are going to go in a different direction.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.

It's only a little pockets of Republicans that are speaking out.

And in one area, I want to move on to the Mike Waltz Signal gate.

Some Republicans after the initial Signal gate scandal broke called for Mike Waltz and others to resign.

Alex, take us inside this decision.

I mean, how did the president get to this?

It was a month -- little more than a month after Signal gate.

And why -- so why now?

ALEXANDER WARD, National Security Reporter, The Wall Street Journal: Where to begin?

All right, so let's start with at Signal Gate.

Trump was really mad with Mike Waltz at that moment, but he didn't want us succumb to the media pressure.

And so he waited and waited and waited until a moment where he could claim some sort of strength, some sort of change, and it comes notably shortly after the 100 days.

But that's not all.

We also know that Mike Waltz was really grading on Trump and a lot of people within the White House.

Part of it was Waltz was really feeling himself as the national security adviser at getting a little too big for his britches, fighting with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and others, bringing on war staff than he probably should have on Air Force One, making a big case for himself, and, importantly, for Trump, not doing as well on T.V.

as he was expected to do.

That was actually considered a strength of his during the campaign that he could sell the president's agenda.

But when he got on T.V., he made some pretty glaring mistakes about Iran policy, Ukraine policy, or didn't fully give the strength and the oomph that Trump likes to see.

And so we get to this point, and so sort of tied into other things, we get to a moment where Trump's kind of also feeling himself.

It's after 100 days, he feels like he's doing well and he feels good enough to remove a national security adviser that a lot of Republicans on the Hill really like, that actually a lot of Republicans feel was helping Trump in his national security decision-making and on all these issues, whether it was Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, et cetera.

So, it's this moment of weakness for Waltz and a moment of strength for Trump, as I think he would see it.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It's interesting that you mentioned that Mike Waltz wasn't doing so well in his media appearances.

Trump likes it when people do well in media appearances.

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, was way more defiant, I think, than Waltz was immediately after.

But let's get into who could potentially replace Mike Waltz.

Obviously, Marco Rubio is the interim right now, could very well stay on, but there are a number of other names that have come up.

That's Michael Anton, State Department official, Richard Grenell, envoy for special missions, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, and Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy.

Michael, what are you hearing about all of these replacements?

MICHAEL SCHERER: Well, I think it's still too early to know.

I think names are being floated.

We've heard that Witkoff is not interested in the job, that he likes the role he has now as sort of emissary to the world and personal consultant to the president.

You know, this job in the first term was one of two jobs in the White House that no one could really hold, and Trump has -- until Susie Wildes became chief of staff, that was the other job.

He was never happy with his chief of staff.

He was never happy with his national security adviser, and he would kind of roll through them one after another.

I think there is a possibility that for the short-term, he's perfectly happy to keep Marco Rubio in that place and that they're going to have to bring in a deputy to actually run the operations of it.

But the challenge that presents is that the national security adviser, by design, is an honest broker who's meant to run a process that brings input from all parts of the government, the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the State Department, other places.

If the head of the State Department is running that process, you could have a breakdown in the process.

People won't feel like he's being an honest broker, that one person is too close.

The counterpoint to that is there's only really one person that matters in that process when Donald Trump's president and that's the president himself.

ALI VITALI: Can I just add?

The thing that I think if you're looking for patterns, both from the first administration, but then also from what we're seeing now, that role of national security adviser is probably likely to be the one that has the most revolving door fashion to it, notwithstanding how long Rubio actually ends up holding this role, and that's because you don't have to be Senate-confirmed for it.

And so now Michael Waltz has the next phase of perhaps punishment of having to actually go before the Senate and testify under oath about, imagine they're going to have some questions about Signal gate, imagine they're going to have some questions about the way that classified information is used and talked about in this administration.

How does this White House run?

It's a real opportunity for Democrats to get a key member of the administration before them and ask them questions.

And that's why I think there is more reluctance when it comes to the political pressure of pushing out someone like a Hegseth or another Senate-confirmed position because there's just more action and political capital being spent on the Hill to do that.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: After the news broke of Waltz's ouster and move over to United Nations ambassador, there was a photo that everyone seized on from when Waltz was in the cabinet meeting this week, Reuters snapped this photo that shows him using Signal.

Let's zoom in on it.

There's, I think when you zoom in, you can see J.D.

Vance, Marco Rubio.

There's no Jeffrey Goldberg in there.

But, Leigh Ann, it wasn't just Signal gate, which Alex alluded to, that caused this shakeup.

There were key foreign policy differences when it came to Mike Waltz and Donald Trump and other parts of the administration.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And that's why some Republicans on the Hill liked Mike Waltz, because they thought that he represented a more mainstream Republican view of foreign policy, of national security, and that did not mesh well apparently with the Trump administration.

And so that is what's causing some of these Republicans a little bit of heartburn about who the replacement is going to be.

You know, they still mostly like Marco Rubio, even though some are frustrated with some of the positions that he has taken under a Trump White House.

But that's -- when I talk to these Republicans about potential replacements for some of these cabinet positions, not just Mike Waltz, but should Pete Hegseth eventually be removed as well, that fear of who is going to replace them is very real on Capitol Hill, especially from the more like neo-conservative Republicans there that the confirmation process might be more difficult.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Go ahead.

ALEXANDER WARD: Just the marriage of convenience was always doomed, right?

Waltz was Trump's fifth national security adviser.

The first, Mike Flynn, and the fourth, Robert O'Brien, were sort of more amenable to Trump, and he likes them, although O'Brien was not allowed back into this administration.

The second and third, H.R.

McMaster and John Bolton, were the ones who pushed their agendas, pushed their more hawkish, traditional foreign policy views, and Trump has now excommunicated them, including even the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

So, the fact that Mike Waltz, despite all the nice things he said on the campaign trail and all the defense of Trump he did on T.V., et cetera, the fact that Waltz and Trump had diametrically opposed foreign policies, one of restraint in Trump and one of hawkishness in Waltz, this was always going to end badly.

And it's kind of a shock to the system to believe that Waltz thought it would end any other way.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Can I just go back to that photo of Mike Waltz's phone?

When we were in the Oval Office last week, we asked, and Jeffrey was the one who actually asked the president, so what is the lesson of Signal gate like?

What did we learn?

And his answer was, well, maybe don't use Signal.

And it's sort of funny that it still is.

It's an approved device.

It's approved for use in the White House.

I'm not sure the president knows that, or, you know, is aware that this is being used.

It's not okay to include journalists when you don't want to, or to share was obviously classified information.

But I do think it's a little window into the disconnect between a White House that is sort of built around pleasing and facilitating the president's presidency, but then has a separate operation amongst itself, the president's just not really aware of.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.

I mean, Alex you were getting at the fact that Mike Waltz -- maybe it was never going to work and maybe it was remarkable that it lasted as long as it did.

Is it going to work with Marco Rubio even in the interim?

Is Marco Rubio a very different -- I mean, he's changed a lot of his foreign policy stances since he entered the administration.

ALEXANDER WARD: Well, this is the thing, is that, you know, where does, what does Rub want to do with this opportunity, right?

There's a lot been said that he's got the same position of being Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, very different situations, of course.

But, you know, does Ruby decide to use this moment and sort of take the reins of the foreign policy establishment and sort of try to direct it to his will and therefore provide Trump with options instead of just dictating, you know, taking Trump's dick tots, or is he just going to go, you know, President Trump, what do you want, and then direct the foreign policy apparatus to do what it needs to do.

This is actually a kind of a big moment for Rubio.

Obviously path, one of him trying to guide foreign policy is going to put, probably put him in the same Bolton and McMaster in Waltz camp and just going with what Trump wants will probably help him in Trump's good graces.

One quick thing that Waltz chat, he could make - - at least make the case that he wasn't using Signal, because it's an Israeli app.

It's this weird workaround that's less secure, but it at least allows for the text to be kept and records kept.

So, if you're Waltz, you're going, I wasn't using Signal, I was using a dupe.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Signal-ish?

ALEXANDER WARD: Single-ish, yes.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: I was just going to say the interesting thing about Rubio is that people speculated when he entered the administration that he was not going to make it very long just because of how different philosophically and ideologically he is from the administration.

But he is actually a lesson in how he has navigated the administration and morphed into this new being.

And now he has four, maybe eventually nine roles in the administration.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And so he's navigated this in a way that has benefited him, for sure.

MICHAEL SCHERER: The one thing Rubio has that Waltz didn't have is he went through the vice presidential vetting process.

And during that process, he became very close with Susie Wiles, who was running the process.

And Waltz, as you mentioned earlier, didn't have that relationship with Susie.

In fact, they were clashing.

So, I think that has a lot to do with it too.

Susie has enormous power overseeing that whole operation in there and being able to work well with her is sort of a crucial part of the job.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I want to ask very quickly, Michael, you know, Laura Loomer, the far right activist, has been taking a lot of credit for this.

She's been taking credit for the ouster of Mike Waltz, for the ouster of his deputy within the National Security Council.

Just a month ago, she took credit for ousting the director of the National Security Agency, a general.

I mean, does she have this direct line of influence to the president?

MICHAEL SCHERER: She has some influence.

I think she is part of a sort of exoskeleton around the White House of MAGA ideologues.

I mean, Tucker Carlson's also been saying negative things about Mike Waltz.

There are a number of others.

There's sort of an ongoing Twitter conversation -- we don't call it Twitter anymore -- X conversation among these groups in which Loomer and others are trying to dig down into the personnel records and the histories of some of these people to find people to pull out.

Now, it is true that after the Signal thing happened, Loomer was in the Oval Office and she did have a role in getting a bunch of Waltz's deputy underlings dismissed over his objections.

He kind of lost control of personnel at that point.

I've heard that she has been asked by the president to keep looking at other agencies.

So, I think she's going to keep coming back, but it's not her alone.

It's like this broader movement.

And Trump likes it.

Trump wants people to keep an eye out for him, and he's very suspicious of the people he works for after the first term.

ALI VITALI: Yes.

I mean, this was always the case in the first term as well, right?

You had the people who were officially in, and then you had the people who were unofficially in, because they were always on the phone with the president, or they were down at Mar-a-Lago with him.

So, you've always got these various spheres of influence around Trump.

And, again, he likes it that way, but he also likes for people to be able to make their cases, sort of duke it out behind the scenes or potentially on television, and then see the policy of the day win out.

It kind of reminds me of when Musk and Peter Navarro were going at it over tariffs very publicly.

The White House was asked about this and they were like, well, we're a transparent administration and, what was it, boys will be boys.

There was something to that effect in the explanation.

They're not shying away from the fact that the conflict behind the scenes that spills into the public is kind of by design.

It gives that reality show feel that we know Trump is a fan of, but then also the idea, and I come back to how we started the show of strength is the thing that wins the day.

No one ever wants to appear weak in that orbit.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.

And I just want to add a bit of context on Laura Loomer.

She is -- the reason we call her a far right activist is because she has said things like 9/11 is an inside job.

But I also want to get to the other big story this week, which is the judiciary pushback against the president's agenda.

And so up first, a Trump appointed federal judge in Texas I want to run through some of what they said in their ruling, said that Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act exceeds the scope of the statute and is unlawful.

And when ordering the release of a green card holder, Mohsen Mahdawi, another federal judge said legal residents are being arrested and threatened for their political views.

Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the red scare.

Lastly, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, administration -- said this, administration threats and harassments are attacks on our democracy that are undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.

Ali, what's the significance of this pushback from judges?

ALI VITALI: I mean, first of all, it shouldn't matter who appointed the judge.

You're a judge and the courts exist as a check on the executive and other branches in this country for a reason.

It is as the founders designed it.

All of the members, Republican and Democrat, who walked around with the Constitution in their pocket know that very well.

And yet it brings us to this point with the administration why people are toying with the idea of, is this country in a constitutional crisis or not?

Because what happens when the courts issue orders, and, yes, the appeals court process exists for a reason.

That is how the administration is working through it.

But at the same time, they are sort of openly flaunting and toying with the idea that they don't have to listen to the judiciary.

I thought it was so telling when the president this week in an interview with ABC talked about, well, I could get Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, and yet he didn't, despite the fact that the court said he had to facilitate, or his administration did, the return of this person so that they could just go through due process.

And I think that's the thing that Americans who are watching have to remember, that is what you're afforded in this country, whether you're a citizen of it or not, the due process.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: On that note of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, despite judges repeatedly warning the White House, saying, it seems like you're defying our orders, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had this to say when he was asked about Garcia.

REPORTER: Have you been in touch with El Salvador about returning Abrego Garcia?

Has a formal request from this administration been made?

MARCO RUBIO, Secretary of State: Well, I would never tell you that.

And you know who else I'll never tell?

A judge.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Michael, why is the administration doing this?

Why taunt the judges like that?

MICHAEL SCHERER: Look, the defining fact of the first three months of this second term of Trump is that so many of the institutions that so successfully opposed him in the first term have been absent or in retreat.

And the one exception to that is the legal process, and that's because there've been so many lawsuits filed against what DOGE has been doing, against some of the budget stuff they've been doing, against the immigration actions, birthrights issue.

You can go on and on.

And judges operate at a different tempo than politicians or executive orders, and so we're a little bit delayed.

But you have seen in the last few weeks a really dramatic move by the judiciary to step in and say, you can't be doing this to these law firms.

We're going to find out soon what they can do to Harvard University, and really upsetting the whole o overview of their immigration, deportation strategy here on a number of fronts, and there's real frustration.

I mean, if you listen to what the administration says every day, they come out and they're angry that this is the place where they're meeting resistance and they haven't yet been able to overcome it.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Leigh Ann, you said that some Republicans are getting heartburn over tariffs, but are they getting heartburn over the near daily rulings from the judiciary, saying things like the president's actions are unlawful or they're on the pathway to lawlessness?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Not really.

No.

So, the way Congress works is they can think of about one thing at a time, and they are busy with their own legislation of trying to extend Trump's tax cuts.

But there has also been legislation and some that has -- one that has passed in the House, which was an attempt to actually punish the judiciary for some of these decisions, including the -- you know, trying to take away national injunctions so that they're much more narrow in scope of what judges can do.

And so there is an effort among Republicans on the Hill to defend the administration and the president on this.

They think that this is a very easy place to do so.

And it kind of -- they don't have any direct confrontation with it, but it's an easy way to stand with the president.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It's striking, even though polling recently showed that on the question of due process, it seems like Americans are not on the administration's side.

But, Alex, Rubio has become -- the secretary of state has become the face of many of these aggressive immigration actions.

I mean, talk about how he's taken that on.

ALEXANDER WARD: I mean, well, first shout out to Congress.

I too can only think about one thing at one time, but I've been thinking a lot about Rubio lately.

And it's amazing, you know, he gets unanimously approved into this job, in part when you had lawmakers basically saying they thought, look, you'd have to play the Trump game, he'd have to say what he had to say, but he would mostly try to keep this administration in a somewhat within the bounds.

That just hasn't happened.

He stood by as USAID was decimated, despite its codification in federal statute.

He has pulled the visas of, you know, visa holders over op-eds that they've written.

He has defied courts and openly mocked justices.

And in foreign policy, he has, you know, stood by as well, or not done much when the president has been making deals or pushing diplomacy forward that could help, let's say, Russia over Ukraine.

So, yes, Rubio's just not been who people thought he would be.

And -- LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: -- A former gang of eight member.

ALEXANDER WARD: On immigration in particular, right?

So, he's just a different person, or at least he's playing this role in a different way.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.

And he's appearing to be much more loyal to Trump than someone like Mike Waltz.

So, that might be the lesson for Mike Waltz here.

Unfortunately, we have to leave it there.

I know there's a lot more to talk about.

But thank you to all of our guests for joining me and thank you at home for watching us.

For more on Mike Waltz's White House exit, visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Laura Barron-Lopez.

Goodnight from Washington.

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