Friday evenings are the moments when Washington journalists tremble. Just as they are about to leave their offices for the weekend, veterans know the favoured hour is dawning for presidents to release unwelcome news.
And so it was on Friday. As the sun moved over the yardarm, reports started dribbling out of the White House indicating that a massacre was taking place within Donald Trump’s National Security Council. About half of the NSC’s 350 staff was shown the door.
The firings were described as “abrupt”, with no notice provided to the scores of seasoned foreign policy and defence experts caught up in the President’s maw. An email landed in their inboxes at 4.30pm announcing that their service was no longer required by the White House. For the moment at least, they are being transferred to other branches of Trump’s far-flung government.
From the President, the message was clear as a bell. “We’re gutting the deep state,” one White House insider told the website Axios, describing the NSC as “ultimate deep state”. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put things more subtly, issuing a statement that announced “the right-sizing” of the NSC, and arguing its total overhaul was designed as a course-correction so that it might serve “its original purpose and the President’s vision”.
Since 1947, the NSC has served as the gold standard within the US government, analysing world affairs and producing policy options to deal with them. Established by president Harry Truman, the NSC was designed to be chaired personally by the president, with his secretaries of state and defence as its key members. All three would be served by the nation’s most experienced foreign policy practitioners and analysts.
For the past 78 years, the NSC provided 14 separate presidents with the information they need to make carefully-calibrated decisions.
In 1950, the NSC delivered Truman the blueprint for America’s approach to the Cold War, including the massive military build-up, the creation of a nuclear arms programme, and forging alliances with other nations to confront the Soviet Union.
In October 1962, the NSC played a critical role assisting president John F Kennedy to defuse the Cuban missile crisis. The official White House history of that crisis credits national security adviser George Bundy with “being scrupulously fair” in presenting opinions of the NSC to the president. “Even when they conflicted with his own…Bundy’s influence was oblique rather than direct,” it notes.
The National Security Council served 14 presidents including John F Kennedy during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis (Photo: Corbis/Getty)But Trump is indicating that his “vision” requires neither oblique nor direct advice. He has spent the last three months gradually reducing the council’s role, and last month purged six of its top staffers after far-right influencer Laura Loomer presented him with undisclosed evidence of their alleged “disloyalty”.
Three weeks later, the President’s hand-picked national security adviser Mike Waltz walked the plank. His ouster followed the revelation that along with other top officials, he had engaged in a group chat on the messaging app Signal to discuss highly secret plans to attack Houthi positions in Yemen. The discussions were observed by Washington journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently invited to join the chat and secured a worldwide scoop as a result.
Now, with the NSC almost entirely hollowed-out, Trump is sending the rest of the world a message. He and Rubio (now also serving as interim National Security Adviser) will make all the key decisions, and no longer require the kind of in-depth information previous presidents have relied upon. “He wanted to do this in the first term,” one former NSC official told The i Paper, “but was talked out of it by [former vice president Mike] Pence. But he has always wanted to do this, because he doesn’t value the expertise the NSC delivers”.
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The effects are expected to be immediate. Peace in Ukraine will be hard to deliver, in a world in which Trump has demonstrated little personal attention to detail, and the NSC no longer provides an academic counterpoint to his pro-Putin sympathies.
Negotiations with Iran have traditionally involved a vast array of NSC officials to war-game strategies to combat Tehran’s nuclear aspirations. Now, Trump is relying solely on his special envoy (and fellow real estate magnate) Steve Witkoff.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with no previous experience crafting policy, will also now operate without access to significant NSC advice.
For Keir Starmer and his fellow European leaders, the NSC firings should ring alarm bells. Diplomats have traditionally worked overtime to secure relationships with NSC officials, in a bid to understand US government thinking. Today, even remaining NSC staffers are as much on the outs as the diplomats seeking to engage with them.
Like so much else in 2025, American foreign policy is now becoming a one-man show.
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