May 1: Waltz Out, Witkoff In?
A message to IRAN; "I like to kill Jews"; U.S. and Ukraine sign minerals deal
The Big Story
On the Thursday morning edition of his show, The Morning Meeting, Mark Halperin reported that the White House had decided to fire National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong, as well as much of the current NSC staff. A few hours later, Trump confirmed on social media that Waltz would indeed be assuming the role of ambassador to the United Nations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been named interim NSA, but the leading candidate to replace Waltz, according to Halperin, is the man currently leading the negotiations for said Iran deal: billionaire real estate developer and Donald Trump golf buddy Steve Witkoff.
Internal administration panic about a potential Witkoff NSA appointment, according to Halperin, was the proximate cause of a Wednesday article from the New York Post’s Washington, D.C., correspondent Caitlin Doornbos. The article quoted several Israelis, experts from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and first-term Trump figures—including former National Security Adviser John Bolton—who savaged Witkoff’s competence and attacked his approach to negotiations with Iran, Russia, and Hamas. The bill of particulars includes charges that Witkoff is naive about his interlocutors’ motivations, ignorant about history and technical details, and that he has operated without the support of U.S. diplomatic staff, at times having to rely on Kremlin translators. But the general idea was summed up by an unnamed member of Trump’s first administration, who said Witkoff was a “nice guy, but a bumbling fucking idiot” who “should not be doing this alone.”
The White House, and several influencers close to it, however, blasted the two stories as the work of “neocons” and “warmongers” attempting to undermine Trump’s foreign policy. A White House deputy press secretary told the New York Post that it was a “badge of honor to be the target of a John Bolton tantrum” and that Bolton and his “fellow warmongers … thrive off forever war—lining their pockets while young people die.” On X, Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. weighed in with similar insults to the intelligence of their followers:
Which is, of course, absurd:
Wall Street Journal reporter Laurence Norman observed in a perceptive post that “A decade ago, Dems were attacking FDD. Now it’s conservatives/Trump supporters.” We’d add that they’re attacking it using the same language, and straw-man arguments, pushed by the Obama echo chamber to sell the 2015 Iran deal—i.e., that we face a choice between a deal and “forever war,” pushed by the “deep state” and sinister foreign political interests.
So why are MAGA influencers, including the president’s son, aligning behind Witkoff to sell a new Iran deal? We can’t peer into anyone’s heart, but our guess is that it’s a family affair. Here at The Scroll, we’ve been skeptical of Witkoff since January, when he reportedly strong-armed Israel into accepting the Biden administration’s cease-fire plan for Gaza. We’ve noted at various points that Witkoff (a) was one of the “Trump influencers” that the Qataris approached in 2018 to lobby Trump on their behalf; (b) sold a hotel to the Qatari sovereign wealth fund for more than $600 million in 2023; and (c) effusively praised the Qataris as “peacemakers” in a March interview with Tucker Carlson, which came two weeks after Carlson interviewed the emir of Qatar. Witkoff’s son Zach is in the crypto business with Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., whose family business, the Trump Organization, just inked a major real estate development deal in Qatar.
But wait, there’s more! Don Jr., a major ally and protector of Carlson within Trump’s inner circle, is in turn business partners with Omeed Malik (via 1789 Capital), one of Carlson’s major financial backers. Don Jr., Malik, Zach Witkoff, and Steve’s other son, Alex, are also partners in Executive Branch, a recently launched “MAGA moguls” club in Washington, D.C., with a $500,000 membership fee, which effectively allows one to buy access to administration insiders. Here’s the guest list from Executive Branch’s launch party, from Politico:
That highlighted name is Garrett Ventry—a former top aide to Elise Stefanik typically identified as a Republican “operative” and “lobbyist.” As of 2023, however, Ventry was being quoted in press reports about Malik’s and Don Jr.’s business ventures as a “representative” of Malik, and last year, Malik and Ventry became business partners by investing together in a new conservative news outlet, The Washington Reporter (which appears to have been a flop).
In addition to Malik, Ventry has at least one other deep-pocketed partner: Qatar. Last September, Ventry registered as a foreign agent of the International Media Office of the State of Qatar, for which he would receive $960,000 for one year of PR work on behalf of the emirate, according to a November 2024 story in The Wrap. Ventry’s firm, GRV Strategies, advertises on its website that it can help clients “land persuasive pieces in the conservative and mainstream press that will influence policymakers and the public.”
—Park MacDougald
The Rest
→A positive sign?
At the very least, it’s probably good that Hegseth is literally typing like Trump while threatening Iran, which suggests he thinks that’s a good way to ingratiate himself with his boss.
→A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian Columbia graduate student targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, pending the resolution of his habeas corpus petition. After being freed on bail, Mahdawi held a defiant press conference outside the federal courthouse in Vermont, telling “President Trump and his cabinet” that “I am not afraid of you” and quoting Martin Luther King Jr. The government’s court filings in the case, however, included some fairly damning information about Mahdawi, highlighted by Marina Medvin on X. According to the government, a gun shop owner in Windsor, Vermont, warned police in 2015 that Mahdawi had expressed an interest in buying a “sniper rifle and automatic weapon” and told the owner he had “considerable firearm experience and used to build modified 9mm submachine guns to kill Jews while he was in Palestine.” The owner added that he’d spoken with a “gun enthusiast” who reported a similar conversation with Mahdawi, in which Mahdawi allegedly said “I like to kill Jews.”
→Washington and Kyiv have signed a minerals deal that will see the United States share in revenues from Ukraine’s natural resources via a jointly managed “reconstruction investment fund.” “The fund,” according to the Financial Times, “will invest in extraction of critical minerals, oil and gas, as well as in related infrastructure and processing, and projects will be jointly selected,” with “all profits generated by the fund … reinvested in Ukraine” for the first decade of the agreement. And while the deal does not include explicit U.S. security guarantees, Washington dropped its demand that Ukraine pay back more than $100 billion in military aid. William B. Taylor, who served as ambassador to Ukraine under George W. Bush and as chargé d'affaires in Ukraine in Trump’s first term, told The New York Times that the Ukrainians “got a much better minerals deal” than the one that was initially proposed, which was a “good sign for cease-fire negotiations.” On Tuesday, the White House notified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it was preparing to authorize the sale of upward of $50 million in “defense articles” to Ukraine.
→Chart of the Day:
That’s from a story in The Wall Street Journal on how Trump’s tariffs are damaging the Chinese economy. In yesterday’s edition, we noted that U.S. GDP contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter of 2024—reflecting a massive “pull-forward” of imports, even as underlying economic indicators remained strong. In China, on the other hand, rosy official numbers mask what appears to be a sick economy, dragged down by the dual threats of a trade war and real estate crisis. The “pain for China” in the trade war “is likely to go deeper” than in the United States, the Journal concludes, “because [China] has increased, rather than decreased, its focus on exports as a cornerstone of the economy.”
→Quote of the Day:
Land warfare has transitioned to drone warfare. If you can be seen, you can be killed.
That’s from Gen. (ret.) Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, quoted in a Wall Street Journal feature on the Army’s transition to drones in what the report calls its “largest overhaul since the end of the Cold War.” The Journal reports that the Army, in an attempt to adapt to the battlefield conditions it has observed during the Russia-Ukraine war, plans to eventually equip each of its combat divisions with 1,000 drones. It is also planning to spend $3 billion on antidrone technologies, such as battlefield lasers, and to develop its “electronic warfare capabilities” as part of its $36 billion effort to modernize its systems.
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Witkoff is utterly unqualified to run the NSC
Imagine Junior's laptop...