The national security adviser, already embattled, is taking the brunt of the criticism.
Despite President Trump’s insistence on Tuesday morning that his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, “has learned a lesson” after inadvertently including the editor of The Atlantic in a cabinet-level chat session on Signal, speculation continues to build about Mr. Waltz’s job security.
Mr. Trump vigorously defended Mr. Waltz in front of television cameras during an event a few hours later, saying he should not have to apologize for the breach.
“That man is a very good man, right there, that you criticized,” Mr. Trump said, pointing to Mr. Waltz after a reporter asked if the president would order practices to be changed. “So he’s a very good man, and he will continue to do a good job. In addition to him, we had very good people in that meeting, and those people have done a very, very effective job.”
Most of the Republican Party leaped to Mr. Waltz’s defense, seeking to blame the news media for the uproar.
But in interviews, several close allies of the president characterized the national security adviser’s standing as precarious, more so than it already was when The New York Times reported on his uneasy status over a week ago. Those who discussed Trump administration views on Mr. Waltz did so on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. His fate, they say, rests on Mr. Trump’s caprices, with several competing factors coming into play.
On the one hand, it is Mr. Trump’s nature to defy a media firestorm rather than try to quell it by offering up a sacrificial lamb. He parted from this tendency at the beginning of his first administration when he fired his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for not divulging his encounters with Russian officials to the F.B.I. According to one adviser from that era, Mr. Trump soon regretted that act of acquiescence.