What did Donald Trump do today?

He fired the National Security Advisor who accidentally leaked war plans to a reporter… sort of.

In March, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg broke the story of how Trump's National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, had accidentally added him to a group chat on the app Signal in which he and other Trump officials were discussing a plan to attack Houthi forces in Yemen.

This was shocking to American military and national security experts for several reasons. First, it is a serious breach of basic operational security to use a private chat app on private phones—the sort of thing that a serving member of the military would get court-martialed for. But tellingly, there were no military personnel in the discussion. The closest thing to a serving military officer was ex-reservist and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was later revealed to have still more Signal chats going on his insecure personal phone, which included family members as participants. Hegseth was also found to have installed a totally insecure "dirty" hardline in his Pentagon office, for reasons he has not explained.

Trump at first pleaded ignorance of the whole affair, then tried to suggest that the 59-year-old journalist Goldberg had somehow hacked into the chat, then insisted that it didn't bother him, and finally simply stopped answering questions about it. But today, he fired Waltz—and then immediately tapped him as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, in an apparent effort to downplay the seriousness of Waltz's mistake.

Waltz's replacement will be Marco Rubio, whose list of simultaneous appointments now includes Secretary of State, Archivist of the United States, USAID Administrator and National Security Advisor. Rubio has no national security experience, but neither did Waltz. 

Rubio's multiple appointments suggest that a problem from Trump's first term—finding people willing to work for his administration—is recurring. This would be exacerbated by the renewed emphasis on absolute personal loyalty to Trump above everything else that has defined his second term.

Trump, who took obvious pleasure in getting the nickname "Little Marco" to stick to Rubio during the 2016 campaign, has also characterized his new National Security Advisor as a "lightweight" and a "disgrace" who is "all talk and no action" and who "couldn't be elected dogcatcher." Trump has also described Rubio as a "frightened little puppy" and a "choker" who "gave amnesty to criminal aliens guilty of 'sex offenses.'" 

Rubio, for his part, said that Trump wet his pants at a debate.

Why does this matter?

• No matter how gently anyone tries to sweep it under a rug, being that careless with classified information about the deployment of American forces during a battle is a big deal.
  

• National security advisor, Secretary of Defense, and many other positions in the executive branch require people who know the first thing about their jobs.
  

• The problem with wanting scared underlings who serve you rather than the nation is that that's what you get.