For weeks, Washington has been waiting to see how long national security adviser Michael Waltz can hold on. The answer we know now is 101 days.

Several media reported this morning that Waltz and his agent Alex Wong were leaving the Trump administration. His shooting lasted about seven weeks this Atlantic' Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg conducted a signal chat in which senior government officials striked Yemen before and after the incident. In legal and security terms, the deadly sin conducts formal business on an unsecured and unreserved forum; from a political standpoint, it includes Goldberg. Trump admitted in an interview with Goldberg last week that my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer were “a very big story” that his administration learned “maybe not using signals, okay?” Trump reportedly hesitated to fire Waltz because he didn’t want to give the media a “scalp” or admit that he cared about, but his determination clearly weakened.

Any other national security adviser should be fired after the leak, but it is hard to imagine that Waltz will survive for a long time even without a signal gate. (At least, he did surpass Michael Flynn, the first national security adviser in Trump’s first term, who didn’t reach a month’s mark.) Waltz is one of the most respected and professionals on Trump’s team, and sooner or later it will doom him.

Waltz's demise was prophesied shortly after the Signal Gate, when 9/11 fraud theorist Laura Loomer had no government role, convinced Trump to fire several NSC employees she thought were not enough to be loyal. Implified in her criticism and Trump’s default, believing that Waltz is not the real team either. Waltz is the right wing, converting it to Trumpism, but he is not a blind loyalist. He won four Bronze stars while serving in the U.S. Special Forces. He worked in the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration and served four terms in Congress. As a national security adviser, he tried to bring his expertise to the presidential service.

The problem is that Waltz is trying to serve the two masters. As I wrote in January, Trump doesn’t care about national security. He is not against it, nor against it, nor against destroying it. He just wasn't interested. As the National Security Council did, he was not interested in hearing reasonable suggestions developed through careful processes, especially if this suggestion contradicts his impulsiveness or ideology. On issues like the strike of Houthis in Yemen, Trump has fewer balanced interests and problems won't often arise. But, regarding the door issues that Trump cannot ignore, in difficult trade-offs and complex strategies, like Ukraine or China, some people must start giving him news that he doesn't like.

Trump doesn't want expertise. He has eliminated the presidency of dozens of professional officials who his team sees as Democrats in disguise or institutions. The ground has been shifting since then. My colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker recently reported that with Waltz’s control over the NSC, the real power of the council is longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff. These two models represent very different models: ideology and old friends. Stanley-Becker wrote that Miller sees the NSC as “not a forum to weigh policy choices” but as a platform to advance his own hardline immigration agenda. "The convenience of ideology is that it eliminates all the difficult choices required for a pragmatic approach to the world. Meanwhile, Vikov seems neither ideology nor any expertise that could interfere with his loyalty to Trump. Despite his lack of diplomatic experience, he has been friends with Trump for years and the president has sent him to send him around the world - so far, there is little to show.

Trump’s allergies to expertise also help explain why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be more solid than Waltz’s scandal: He’s also involved in signal gates. Although Heggs wasn't the one who added Goldberg to the chat, Heggs did share a detailed attack plan in it. He also shared sensitive information with his wife and others who didn’t need it, installing an unsafe line in the Pentagon that could not stop his staff from exchanging. (“I think he’ll put them together,” Trump told my colleagues in an interview last week. “I talked to him, a positive speech, but I talked to him.”) Walz’s removal may be an ominous sign, but for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the traditional Republican and Trump critics criticized another picky foreigner who had another delicate diplomatic job.

Now, Waltz joins Flynn, McMaster and John Bolton on the list of abandoned Trump’s national security advisers. That unhappy fraternity can only grow. Every government official serves in the president’s honor, and nothing is more dissatisfied than trying to make him care about national security.