The Tiny White House Club Making Major National-Security Decisions

The Atlantic

a day ago

During Donald Trump's first term, his top advisers attempted to run a traditional process for shaping foreign policy, tapping experts from the White House's National Security Council, debating recommendations from across the government, and steering the president away from decisions that they feared would damage America's interests. But Trump was deeply mistrustful of the NSC, which he saw as too big, too cumbersome, and too attached to Republican orthodoxy.
Back in office, Trump has pushed away the help of career experts, and major decisions—the handling of the war in Gaza, for example, and negotiations over Ukraine —are now made by a tiny core group of loyal advisers, including Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chief of Staff Susie WiIes, and one or two others. The president 'is now fully the quarterback, and he doesn't want too many guys in the huddle,' a former official, who remains in close contact with the White House, told us. 'And those that are there need to run the play he calls, no questions asked.'
This time, Trump has a better understanding of the levers of power and greater trust in his own instincts—he doesn't want to be slowed down by contrary viewpoints, according to nearly a dozen current and former White House officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment of sensitive deliberations. Trump is more Trump in his global statecraft.
By shrinking the number of people involved in major decisions and making fealty the indispensable trait in selecting aides, Trump has pushed the system in a more personalized direction. The more centralized setup allows Trump's impulses—his disregard for historic alliances, his love of dealmaking, and his focus on perceived abuses of American largesse—to drive U.S. policy.
But by isolating his decision making, Trump has limited his ability to harness expertise, or to ensure that his decisions are executed by an often unwieldy bureaucracy. And by discarding a process designed to surface different views and analyze moves from all sides, he has increased the risk of unintended consequences.
From the June 2025 Issue: 'I run the country and the world'
'On the one hand, this arrangement is much more nimble. The president is the decision maker,' said Victoria Coates, who served as deputy national security adviser during Trump's first term and continues to support Trump's foreign-policy moves. 'But the downside is you don't have that NSC muscle to bludgeon the interagency into doing what you want.'
The risks of the new approach will be fully on display in Anchorage, Alaska, today, as Trump holds talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, giving an adversary a win without extracting much in return. Trump's first-term advisers would have counseled against the hastily arranged summit.
The consolidated setup has also led to policy whiplash—as was the case with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's on-again, off-again suspension of military aid to Ukraine in July, which confused officials at a moment when Trump was trying to dial up pressure on Moscow. It can also hamper problem-solving and policy innovation. Allied nations often struggle to navigate a system in which even high-ranking officials cannot provide clarity, because a wider array of decisions must be taken to the Oval Office, where Trump remains inscrutable and often erratic.
The White House defended the changes. Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement that the NSC was now 'more relevant and consequential than ever before, allowing the administration to execute the President's foreign policy agenda more effectively.' She cited the setbacks dealt to Iran's nuclear capability, the return of U.S. citizens detained overseas, and the peace deals that have included halts to India-Pakistan and Armenia-Azerbaijan hostilities.
Trump returned to the White House in January with a sense of vindication. He and his advisers also brought a scathing assessment of Joe Biden's foreign-policy record, blaming him for the humiliating end to the war in Afghanistan, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and other crises they vowed to put right. And they came armed with lessons about what had gone wrong the first time around, when Trump cycled through four national security advisers.
Trump remained regretful about the departure of the one he trusted most: Michael Flynn, who stepped down less than a month into Trump's first term over his undisclosed ties to Russia. In the years that followed, Trump felt stage-managed by H. R. McMaster and then John Bolton. (He was mostly fine with his final national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, who was more in sync with Trump's preference for a limited role for the NSC.)
From the July 2025 Issue: The talented Mr. Vance
McMaster and Bolton didn't love the experience either. McMaster grew exasperated with what he called the 'adhocracy' of disjointed deliberations that yielded rushed executive orders or other chaotic steps. Bolton later wrote that discussions of consequential trade issues, which occurred in weekly gab sessions rather than orderly meetings, 'more closely resembled college food fights than careful decision-making.' Throughout, both men enlisted senior administration figures like James Mattis, John Kelly, and Mike Pence to redirect Trump or talk him out of what they saw as particularly counterproductive moves, such as reneging on America's commitment to stand by NATO allies.
But the man Trump chose as national security adviser after his reelection, Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, was an awkward fit from the start. Some of Trump's long-serving aides viewed the former Green Beret, who once was an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, with suspicion, pegging him as a hard-liner on Russia and Iran and overly beholden to traditional foreign partners.
Waltz continued to adhere to a conventional process—in which NSC staff convene a series of high-level discussions with officials from across government agencies to tee up policy options for the president—but struggled to navigate the West Wing's deep mistrust of his staff. At certain points, turf wars flared with the West Wing over foreign-leader visits and who would control the president's schedule and time. By May, even senior subject-matter experts were sometimes left out of the loop on visits by senior officials from regions within their portfolios, one former official said.
This former official said that Waltz's subordinates had doubts from the beginning about the weight his determinations carried with the president. 'You'd coordinate the interagency; you'd come to a consensus; the national security adviser would make a decision,' he said. And then nothing further would be heard; NSC staff would have no idea if their policy advice was being adopted or even read in the West Wing. 'It needed to be tabled until you could get a decision or opinion from the president.'
In early April, the administration abruptly fired half a dozen NSC officials after Laura Loomer, the far-right activist, accused them of not being supportive enough of the president's agenda. Some of those dismissed included staffers close to Waltz, illustrating his inability to shield them.
Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, & Jonathan Lemire: Trump invites Putin to set foot in America
Waltz's departure may have been inevitable, but it was hastened when the national security adviser accidentally added The Atlantic 's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a text chat on Signal in which Waltz and other officials shared sensitive plans for bombing Yemen on March 15.
The security breach and Waltz's response—he claimed on Fox News that Goldberg's number had somehow been 'sucked' onto his phone—provided further ammunition for his West Wing rivals. By early May, Waltz was gone, nominated to represent the administration at the United Nations. (Waltz, who gave up his congressional seat to serve in the White House, has not yet been confirmed. He did not respond to a request for comment.)
Rubio, meanwhile, got an additional job. To the surprise of those who expected friction between Trump and his 2016 Republican-primary rival, whom the president once derided as 'Little Marco,' Rubio's style as interim national security adviser has gained purchase with the president and those around him.
White House officials defended using the secretary of state in this role, saying it made for quicker decisions and better operational security, pointing to Trump's strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June. One White House official told us that the dual position is Rubio's as long as he wants it. 'He knows his subject matter better than just about anybody in the government,' the official said.
Tommy Pigott, a spokesperson for the State Department, said that Rubio and the department back Trump's 'America First' agenda and are 'proud to support him as he leads our country in a golden era of American diplomacy.'
Rubio has likened the NSA role to the conductor of an orchestra of Cabinet members. 'The president picks the music; the instruments play off the same sheet; and it's the job of the conductor to make sure everyone's playing—that every instrument's playing correctly and playing together,' he said last week.
Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans
Rubio quickly restructured the NSC, which had grown to more than 300 people in recent years. By late May, 100 staffers had been dismissed and numerous NSC offices had been closed or consolidated. Vance's aide Andy Baker and Wiles's aide Robert Gabriel, both of whom were named deputy national security advisers in May, are now key figures in managing the smaller, more streamlined NSC.
In addition to the core decision team of Trump, Vance, Rubio, and Wiles, Stephen Miller plays a key role on issues related to homeland security. On decisions involving Russia and Israel, envoy Steve Witkoff is included. And on military matters, the president pulls in Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
One of the former officials said that Trump would have likely retained a more robust NSC and a less centralized setup if Waltz had survived. He said that Waltz's departure allowed for the sort of restructuring long sought by some of Trump's West Wing advisers, for whom the shadow of the 2019 impeachment and the potential for 'deep state' figures—like Alexander Vindman, the Ukraine expert and Army officer who testified against Trump—to constrain the president continued to loom large.
'It was an opportunity that they seized,' the former official said. ''Let's do it, and go after the ghost of Vindman.''
Trump's new setup is a stark contrast to Barack Obama's 'team of rivals,' which encouraged debate and sometimes sparring between different agencies as the chief executive sought to tease out the best approach. While that kind of debate could sometimes lead to never-ending interagency discussion, as many of his advisers later complained, it had the advantage of enabling a more exhaustive analysis of policy pros and cons. That sort of process might have helped Trump avoid some of the legal challenges his administration has faced to its rapid-fire executive orders and its rushed efforts to dismantle federal agencies, and helped minimize the commercial disruption that has resulted from his tariff pronouncements.
Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral and former NSC official now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told us the centralized setup discourages contrarian viewpoints. 'And you're not going to surface any problems until they really surface,' he said.
Nick Miroff and Jonathan Lemire: Stephen Miller has a plan
Another former official noted that as Trump sought to intensify competition with China during his first term, a more diffuse system and more empowered agencies allowed a host of military, commercial, and diplomatic initiatives to bubble up.
'None of that is happening' now, the former official said. 'This time, the principle is that the only things that are done are things specifically directed by the president.'
Some current and former officials fear the setup may also mean inadequate vetting of questionable ideas, such as Trump's announcement earlier this month that he had repositioned two nuclear submarines in response to bellicose remarks by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin ally. It caught many in the Pentagon by surprise; neither the White House nor the military typically publicly discusses submarine movements. Even after the fact, some Pentagon officials said they weren't sure whether the submarines had already been scheduled to move or not.
To achieve strategic deterrence, the Navy's ballistic-missile fleet relies on stealth. 'That's the whole fucking point of submarines. You don't know where they are,' one defense official explained.