Leaving top Trump administration post? President may have ambassadorship for you
National security adviser Mike Waltz was nominated as United Nations ambassador after he mistakenly added a journalist to a Signal chat discussing military plans.
Trump tapped IRS Commissioner Billy Long to be his ambassador to Iceland after Long contradicted the administration's messaging in his less than two months in the job.
And Trump last weekend named State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce as deputy representative to the UN after she struggled to gel with Secretary of State Marco Rubio's close-knit team.
The new appointments can be viewed as consolation prizes for leaving a high-profile post in the Trump administration following rocky tenures. But they also reflect the degree to which Trump is trying to keep his loyalists close, even if their earlier placements in the administration were ill-fitting.
Breaking with the reality TV show that helped make Trump a household name, the president is not telling his top appointees 'You're fired!" but instead offering them another way to stay in his administration.
'It's not like 'The Apprentice,'" said John Bolton, another former Trump national security adviser, who has since become a Trump critic.
Trump's first term featured more firings During his first White House tenure, Trump was new to politics, made many staffing picks based on others' recommendations and saw heavy staff turnover. Trump has stocked his second administration with proven boosters, which has meant fewer high-profile departures.
Still, those leaving often are the subject of effusive praise and kept in Trump's political orbit, potentially preventing them from becoming critics who can criticise him on TV — something that didn't happen to a long list of former first-term officials.
Ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president, and Trump can nominate anyone he likes, though many ultimately require Senate confirmation. Typically, top ambassadorships are rewards for large donors.
'It is a tremendous honour to represent the United States as an ambassador — which is why these positions are highly coveted and reserved for the president's most loyal supporters," said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. 'Mike Waltz, Billy Long and Tammy Bruce are great patriots who believe strongly in the America First agenda, and the President trusts them fully to advance his foreign policy goals." From 'glitch' to a new job Waltz's days appeared numbered after The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed in March that Waltz had added him to a private text chain on an encrypted messaging app that was used to discuss planning for a military operation against Houthi militants in Yemen.
Trump initially expressed support for Waltz, downplaying the incident as 'a glitch." Roughly five weeks later, the president announced Waltz would be leaving — but not for good. He portrayed the job change as a cause for celebration.
'From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation's Interests first," Trump posted in announcing Waltz's move on May 1. 'I know he will do the same in his new role." Vice President JD Vance also pushed back on insinuations that Waltz had been ousted.
'The media wants to frame this as a firing. Donald Trump has fired a lot of people," Vance said in an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News Channel. 'He doesn't give them Senate-confirmed appointments afterwards." Bolton, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush before becoming Trump's national security adviser in 2018, called it 'a promotion to go in the other direction" — but not the way Waltz went.
'The lesson is, sometimes you do more good for yourself looking nice," Bolton said of Trump's reassignments.
Bruce also picked for a UN post Ironically, Bruce learned of Waltz's ouster from a reporter's question while she was conducting a press briefing.
A former Fox News Channel contributor, Bruce is friendly with Trump and was a forceful advocate for his foreign policy. Over the course of her roughly six months as spokesperson, she reduced the frequency of State Department briefings with reporters from four or five days a week to two.
But Bruce had also begun to frequently decline to respond to queries on the effectiveness, substantiveness or consistency of the administration's approaches to the Middle East, Russia's war in Ukraine and other global hotspots.
At one point, she told reporters that Witkoff 'is heading to the region now — to the Gaza area" but then had to concede that she'd not been told exactly where in the Middle East he was going.
Trump nonetheless posted Saturday that Bruce did a 'fantastic job" at the State Department and would 'represent our Country brilliantly at the United Nations." During her final State Department briefing on Tuesday, Bruce said Trump's announcing that he wanted her in a new role 'was a surprise," but called the decision 'especially moving as it allows me to continue serving the State Department, to which I'm now quite attached." 'Exciting times ahead!' Then there's Long, a former Republican Missouri congressman, who was the shortest-tenured IRS commissioner confirmed by the Senate since the position was created in 1862. He contradicted administration messaging on several occasions.
Long said last month that the IRS' Direct File programme would be eliminated.
An IRS spokesperson later indicated that it wouldn't be, noting requirements in the tax and spending law Trump has championed. The Washington Post also reported that Long's IRS disagreed with the White House about sharing taxpayer data with immigration officials to help locate people in the US illegally.
After learning that Trump wanted him in Reykjavik, Long posted, 'Exciting times ahead!" White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to say Tuesday why Long was removed as IRS chief and being deployed to Iceland. 'The president loves Billy Long and he thinks he can serve the administration well in this position," she said. (AP) GRS GRS
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed - PTI) view comments
First Published:
August 13, 2025, 13:45 IST
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Some are outraged Alaska would host Putin after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Others hope this marks a step toward peace. But most everyone agrees on one point. This summit—with the deadly war at stake—is perhaps the most notable event to happen in Alaska in modern memory. 'All eyes are on Anchorage,' declared a headline in the Anchorage Daily News, while Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy told a local news station that the event 'puts Alaska on the world map—where we should be.' 'This trip is very big,' said Mike Porcaro, a radio talk show host who said calls about the event flooded his conservative program. 'There have been other high-level meetings, but not of this magnitude.' 'Bucket list' On Friday morning, onlookers gathered on a pier, beneath the flight path to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, to see the plane carrying Putin, and Air Force One, land there. A website for the base, in the wooded outskirts, recommends that new arrivals enjoy a 'bucket list' of experiences including the Moose Run Golf Course and beluga whale watching. But the chance to see the rare joint landings of two world leaders topped that. 'Putin's jet!' local resident Cheryl Shroyer, 73, shouted from an overlook as a large plane believed to be carrying the Russian leader appeared first as a black dot against the snow-capped Alaska Range. The big jet grew larger, gliding over the Cook Inlet before disappearing as trees blocked the view of the base's airfield. At 10:17 a.m. local time, Shroyer shouted again: 'There it is, Air Force One!' as Trump's plane emerged from the clouds. (As it turned out, Putin's plane was another one, which came in after Trump.) Though Anchorage has nearly 300,000 people, it feels like a small town. Many locals drive pickup trucks, and the airport greets visitors with taxidermied grizzly, Kodiak and polar bears. 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ANCHORAGE, Alaska—President Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin ended their highly anticipated meeting here without announcing a breakthrough, leaving the path toward ending the war in Ukraine unclear. At the end of the over three-hour meeting, the two men offered few details about their talks. 'There's no deal until there is a deal,' Trump told reporters at a news conference following the close of the summit. The typically talkative U.S. president took no questions from the dozens of reporters assembled before him. The president said the delegations made progress on key issues, but added, 'We haven't quite got there.' Trump said he would call members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 'We will probably see you again very soon,' Trump told Putin. The Russian president interjected and offered that their next meeting could take place in Moscow. Trump responded, 'I can see it possibly happening.' Trump had come into the summit seeking Putin's agreement on a cease-fire in Ukraine. But Putin in his remarks gave no indication he was prepared to agree to that demand, repeating that Moscow wanted the root causes of the 3½ year conflict addressed—a term that refers to Moscow's demands for demilitarizing Kyiv and blocking its hopes for membership in NATO. In contrast to the handshakes and smiles that characterized the start of their meeting on the tarmac on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Putin and Trump looked stone-faced during much of the news conference. Putin spoke for roughly eight minutes. Trump then spoke for three minutes, before leaving the room. Even before the meeting officially began, Putin, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. and largely snubbed on the world stage, racked up a series of symbolic wins. Trump waited onboard Air Force One for 30 minutes before the Russian president's plane touched down. The U.S. president greeted his Russian counterpart warmly, applauding as he walked down a red carpet and shook his hand. After posing for photos, both men got into the U.S. president's armored limousine, known as the Beast, giving Putin the one-on-one time with Trump that some of the American president's advisers sought to avoid. Photographers caught the Russian leader smiling as he sat next to Trump in the limo. While it isn't unusual for an American president to invite a foreign leader for an intimate ride in the president's motorcade, the privilege comes after Putin has repeatedly thumbed his nose at Trump's repeated calls to stop the violence in Ukraine. Trump's earlier reception of Putin was markedly different from the way the U.S. president treated Zelensky during a February visit to the Oval Office. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated the Ukrainian president for not, in their view, showing sufficient gratitude for U.S. support in the war with Russia. Relations between Trump and Zelensky have subsequently improved. But Trump, a former reality-television star who focuses intently on stage-managing his public events, also sent a message to Putin about America's military might. Trump and Putin walked down a red carpet flanked on either side by F-22 stealth fighters and, as the two leaders stepped onto a riser with the words 'ALASKA 2025,' a nuclear-capable B-2 bomber and four F-35 jet fighters roared overhead. As the meeting was in progress, Russian military forces launched new attacks targeting Ukraine's eastern regions, according to the Ukrainian air force. Securing a face-to-face meeting with Trump is a win for Putin, analysts said. The fact that the meeting took place in Alaska, which Russia sold to the U.S. in 1867, is an bonus for the Russian leader. It's 'a Russian revisionist dream come true,' said Celeste Wallander, a senior Pentagon official in the Biden administration. The Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram that the meeting signaled to the media a shift in relations between Moscow and Washington. 'For three years, they have been reporting that Russia is in isolation, and today they saw the red carpet, laid to greet the Russian president in the United States,' she wrote. Trump has expressed frustration with Putin in recent months after once claiming his strong relationship with the Russian president could lead to a resolution of the war in just a day. In the days leading up to the summit, Trump played down the prospects for a breakthrough, calling his first face-to-face meeting with Putin in six years a 'feel-out meeting.' He didn't rule out the possibility the talks could fail and he said he was prepared to walk away entirely if Putin refused to work toward peace. Trump said he hoped Friday's meeting would lay the groundwork for a second meeting in the near future in which Putin would negotiate directly with Zelensky toward a cease-fire. But in the hours before the summit, Trump upped the stakes, telling Fox News that he wouldn't be happy if Putin didn't agree to a cease-fire at the meeting. The summit was initially set to begin with a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin, but it was expanded to include top advisers from each delegation at the U.S. president's request. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff represented the American delegation, while Putin was joined by Yuri Ushakov, his longtime foreign-policy adviser, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. While Trump and Putin have spoken several times in the last six months, the meeting in Anchorage was the first time they met in person since the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019. Russian officials indicated that Putin wanted to push a spectrum of bilateral issues onto the negotiating table, likely in an attempt to water down talks about Ukraine, decouple the conflict from U.S.-Russia ties and avoid the threat of sanctions from the Trump White House. The absence of any binding steps for the Russian side to follow out of the meeting could give Putin a chance to continue prosecuting his war in Ukraine, where Russian troops are gaining crucial footholds in eastern Ukraine, while avoiding any new sanctions on Russian oil. Putin's broader goal of trying to put Russia on an equal footing with the U.S., however, was already achieved just by clinching the meeting, particularly on U.S. territory. 'This meeting elevates Russia in some ways to an equal status to the United States, which is what he has craved,' said Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former top State Department official on European affairs. Kremlin loyal media had suggested the meeting would carry echoes of the 1945 Yalta Conference in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union managed to carve up Europe into spheres of influence, a scenario Putin would be eager to repeat with Trump. Putin is unlikely to be deterred from his ultimate goal of conquering Ukraine militarily or politically to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in Europe which Moscow lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. 'Putin is primarily carrying out this war to end the post Cold War order, that is to return Russia to its place as a great power in the classic sense, with its sphere of influence and the right to establish its own conditions there,' said Ruslan Pukhov, founder of Moscow-based defense think tank Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. Conflict negotiation is usually a drawn-out process that involves detailed timetables, confidence-building measures and verification over months and years. But little of that is expected to be hammered out in a matter of several hours, leaving the rapid cease-fire agreement that Trump wants an open question. 'The big question is whether any of this is enough for Trump,' said Samuel Charap, a veteran Russia watcher and senior political scientist at Rand Corporation. 'He wants an immediate cease-fire, and that's highly unlikely.' Write to Lara Seligman at Meridith McGraw at and Thomas Grove at
