How do you get fired from the Trump administration?

Lateral moves instead of scalps in Trump 2.0

“You’re fired” is the phrase that catapulted Donald Trump into the public imagination two decades ago – but it’s something that he seems reticent to tell the people who work in his administration.

Trump briefly set the world on fire (again!) after everyone learned that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was… leaving. One Trumpworld veteran told Cockburn that Waltz’s departure was a “disaster.”

While the specifics remain murky, Trump gave Waltz what one administration insider called a “golden parachute” by announcing that Waltz is shipping up to Turtle Bay as America’s next ambassador to the United Nations, nomination pending.

The writing was on the wall for Waltz as soon as the Signalgate scandal blew up. A number of reports yesterday morning suggested that Waltz was set for the chopping block, and the decision to make him UN Ambassador is curious. Remember: Trump wanted another one of his top congressional allies, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, to take the UN job before the realities of a fragile GOP majority were brought to bear on the President. But Trump presumably didn’t want to give the Atlantic a scalp by firing Waltz. CBS reports that Waltz was given a series of other roles to pick from, including Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Waltz plumped for UN.

Waltz’s friends in Congress told Cockburn immediately after the initial news broke that the sky is the limit for the former Green Beret. “Next stop for Waltz: less work, more money and a certain return to the scene,” one longtime House Republican said.

That prediction came to pass within hours. It strikes Cockburn that a pattern is starting to emerge. Vivek Ramaswamy was set to serve as the DoGE co-head alongside Elon Musk, but he had to withdraw from contention after a brawl with MAGA over immigration and H-1B visas. Now, he appears to be on a glide path to become Ohio’s next governor. It’s another cushy landing. Under Trump’s administration, everyone seems to win a prize.

So who could be the next to leave the administration for greener pastures? Cockburn hears rumblings that it could be Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who reportedly has an eye on another Senate run in Minnesota…

On our radar

IL MANNERED Representative Ilhan Omar swore repeatedly at a Daily Caller News Foundation reporter who asked her whether more Democrats should be visiting El Salvador.

RTR? During a commencement address at the University of Alabama, President Trump said, “The next chapter of the American story will not be written by the Harvard Crimson. It will be written by you, the Crimson Tide.”

BRAIN DRAIN A bruising New York magazine piece about Senator John Fetterman raises a number of – belated – questions regarding his mental state.

Why didn’t Trump put Dr. Gorka in charge of NPR?

Journalism is favored. At +350 in tomorrow’s Kentucky Derby, that is: certainly not in the White House. President Trump signed an executive order last night withdrawing government funding from PBS and NPR. “Neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” the order reads.

The move ends a longstanding debate over why, exactly, the US government was pumping money into outlets that so regularly and vociferously espoused very progressive viewpoints. A fact sheet circulated by the White House highlighted some of the most egregious examples: a PBS station in New York that produced a kids’ program about drag queens, including one called “Lil’ Miss Hot Mess”; a PBS segment on “wokeness” and “white privilege,” and an NPR interview about why genderqueer and trans people love dinosaurs that name-checks the “trans-ceraptops.” How educational!

Spectator contributing editor Stephen L. Miller has been banging the drum for the defunding of NPR for years. “The world will be a great place when our schools have all the funding they need and NPR and PBS need to hold a bake sale,” he told Cockburn this morning.

Cockburn understands the lamentations about how the executive order is another “attack on the press” – but it could have been worse for them. Imagine if Trump had treated the outlets like the Kennedy Center and installed a top loyalist at the top? Would it have been less of an affront to norms to have a Kari Lake-led PBS or a Sebastian Gorka-run NPR? (Gorka may find himself otherwise occupied, if speculation that he’s under consideration to be the next national security advisor prove true.)

Compounding the media’s woes is the fact that the White House is getting into the content aggregation game. This week, while much of the media struggles for traffic and audience capture, White House Wire was launched, as a more MAGA alternative to the Drudge Report. “I’m considering a $1 trillion lawsuit!” Matt Drudge told Axios.

Cockburn wondered what the other big aggregators made of the move. “RealClear is all about viewpoint diversity: the pairing of rivals between parties and within parties. The press corps is too much of one mind,” said RealClear publisher David DesRosiers. “I hope the press will with engage it: the American people have shown a taste for it.”

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