1. Michael George Glen Waltz was born on January 31,1974 and is an American politician, businessman, author, and former Army Special Forces officer who served as the national security advisor to President Donald Trump from January to May 2025.
47 Facts About Mike Waltz
1. 2.
Mike Waltz was the first Army Special Forces soldier to be elected to Congress.
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Mike Waltz received four Bronze Stars while serving in the Special Forces during multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa.
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In 2018, Mike Waltz was elected to the House of Representatives, defeating former ambassador Nancy Soderberg and succeeding Ron DeSantis, who was elected governor of Florida that same year.
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Mike Waltz was chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness for the 118th United States Congress.
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Mike Waltz was considered one of Congress's most hawkish members with regard to China, believing the Chinese Communist Party is in a cold war with the US.
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In 2021, Mike Waltz was the first member of Congress to call for a full US boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over what he described as the CCP's genocide and internment of Chinese Uyghur populations and the enslavement, forced labor, and internment camps of ethnic minorities in China.
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On November 12,2024, President-elect Trump announced he would appoint Mike Waltz to serve as national security advisor in his second administration.
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Mike Waltz resigned his House seat prior to taking office on January 20,2025.
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Mike Waltz was born on January 31,1974 to a single mother in Boynton Beach, Florida, and grew up in Jacksonville, where he graduated from Stanton College Preparatory School.
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Mike Waltz earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in international studies from the Virginia Military Institute in 1996, graduating with honors as a Distinguished Military Graduate.
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Mike Waltz was commissioned as an armor officer in the US Army in 1996.
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Mike Waltz later graduated from Ranger School and graduated the Special Forces Qualification Course in 2000, then serving two years as an active duty Special Forces officer with multiple tours in the Middle East and Africa.
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From 2002 to 2011 and 2016 to 2025, Mike Waltz served in Company B, 2nd Battalion, 20th Special Forces, MD-ARNG.
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Mike Waltz worked in the Pentagon as a defense policy director for secretaries of defense Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.
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Mike Waltz went on to serve in the White House as the vice president's counterterrorism advisor.
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Mike Waltz wrote Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan.
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In 2010, Mike Waltz helped found the analytics and training company Metis Solutions.
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Mike Waltz ran for Florida's 6th congressional district in 2018 to succeed incumbent Republican Ron DeSantis, who retired before being elected governor of Florida.
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Mike Waltz defeated John Ward and Fred Costello in the Republican primary before facing Democratic nominee Nancy Soderberg, a former representative at the United Nations and the former deputy national security advisor, in the general election.
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Mike Waltz received 265,393 votes to Curtis's 172,305.
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Mike Waltz was sworn in to the 116th United States Congress on January 3,2019.
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In December 2020, Waltz was one of 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump.
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On May 19,2021, Mike Waltz voted against legislation to establish the formation of a January 6 commission meant to investigate the storming of the US Capitol.
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On July 29,2024, Mike Waltz was announced as one of seven Republican members of a bipartisan task force investigating the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
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Mike Waltz served on the House China Task Force with 15 Republican lawmakers representing 14 committees of jurisdiction to coordinate policy on China.
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Mike Waltz has pioneered legislation to secure American universities and academies from Chinese espionage, saying that although not all Chinese students in the United States are "spies or bad people", they "have no choice but to provide the Chinese government with whatever information that government demands".
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Further, Mike Waltz directed the Department of Defense to track foreign talent recruitment programs that pose a threat to the United States, particularly as a response to Chinese Communist Party efforts to infiltrate American universities.
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Mike Waltz sponsored legislation to ensure the federal Thrift Savings Plan does not invest in Chinese or Russian markets.
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In 2020, Mike Waltz voted for the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, which would prevent the president from withdrawing soldiers from Afghanistan without congressional approval.
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Shortly after Mike Waltz's 2021 op-ed, The Intercept reported on his role in founding and managing a defense contracting company called Metis Solutions, which had landed contracts worth an accumulated $930 million in Afghanistan from the US government, largely in the area of training Afghan security forces.
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Mike Waltz voted to include provisions for drafting women in the NDAA of 2022.
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Mike Waltz endorsed Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries.
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Mike Waltz was among the 71 Republicans who voted against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 in the House.
35.
On November 12,2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would appoint Mike Waltz to serve as his national security advisor.
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On January 20,2025, Mike Waltz tendered his resignation from the US House of Representatives in order to take up his appointment with the Trump administration.
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In March 2025, Mike Waltz confirmed on CNN's State of the Union that the United States would continue offensive cyber operations against Russia.
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In March 2025, Mike Waltz announced a visit to Greenland, which was criticized by Greenlandic leaders as an aggressive move amid ongoing tensions over US interests in the territory.
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In March 2025, Mike Waltz inadvertently added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat discussing the upcoming US strikes in Yemen targeting Houthi militia before they were publicly known.
40.
In late March 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that according to American officials, Mike Waltz had started and hosted multiple other Signal group chats containing Cabinet members to discuss sensitive issues related to national security, including on military operations and on ceasing hostilities between Ukraine and Russia.
41.
Politico wrote that its sources were four people who had been added to such Signal chats, one of whom said: "Mike Waltz built the entire NSC communications process on Signal", while another said that Mike Waltz and his national security team had continued to use Signal ever since the transition period before Trump's second presidency began.
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Mike Waltz was announced as the nominee for United States Ambassador to the United Nations on the same day.
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Mike Waltz assessed that Afghanistan could be won through slow cultural conversion by unconventional forces, described as "multiple generations of winning hearts and minds", and anticipated 100 years before such objectives could be achieved, saying:.
44.
In 2024, Mike Waltz published a video on X expressing support for Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, who he said was going to send Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau "packing in 2025 and start digging Canada out of the progressive mess it's in".
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Mike Waltz has frequently criticized Trudeau for not being sufficiently tough on China, criticizing Trudeau for abstaining on a Parliament vote on declaring the persecution of Uyghurs in China as a genocide, allowing the sale of a lithium mine to a Chinese-state owned entity and the pledging of Chinese donors to donate $1 million to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and warned about Chinese government interference in Canadian elections.
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Mike Waltz repeatedly criticized the Biden administration's strategy in Ukraine as unclear and confusing, and expressed support for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.
47.
Mike Waltz is married to Julia Nesheiwat, an Army veteran who served in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, most recently as Trump's homeland security advisor.