White House Power Struggle: Trump Weighs Wiles’ Future
A White House power struggle has burst into the open with less than three weeks to go before the midterm elections, after Politico Playbook reported Thursday that President Donald Trump has been quietly calling friends and allies to ask whether he should remove his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
Four White House insiders told Playbook that Trump has been soliciting views on Wiles’s standing. One senior elected Republican official who received a call said the president had raised “the first honest questions about Susie,” signaling that her long hold on the most powerful staff job in the building is under open debate.
Trump swiftly denied the report, calling it “TOTAL FAKE NEWS” and telling Politico that Wiles has his “COMPLETE confidence.” But the denial followed a flurry of reporting about names he has floated as possible successors, including Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, New York Yankees president Randy Levine, longtime envoy Steve Witkoff, federal housing finance chief Bill Pulte, and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The Names Being Floated
The roster of potential replacements described by Playbook’s sources mixes loyalists and outsiders. Miller, who serves as deputy chief of staff, would represent continuity with the administration’s hard-line wing, while Levine would be a striking outside-the-building pick from the sports world. Allies of McCarthy have argued the former speaker could help Trump manage a potentially hostile Democratic Congress, pointing to his past working relationship with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The chatter arrives amid broader signs of internal tension. Commentators tracking the White House described “incredible levels of internal chaos” as the story spread, and critics seized on the timing — a public staff fight days before early November voting.
The Serbia Consulting Fallout
Much of the pressure on Wiles traces back to a foreign consulting controversy. Reports revealed that longtime Trump advisers James Blair and Chris LaCivita took paid work advising Republika Srpska, the pro-Russian, semi-autonomous Bosnian Serb territory — and that a firm linked to Wiles’s daughter, Katie Wiles, registered to represent the same entity.
One person close to the president told Playbook that Trump had not previously known about Katie Wiles’s foreign work and that rivals of the chief of staff made sure the headlines reached him. A senior outside adviser said Wiles had “this whole cadre” of allies found to be “monetizing his ecosystem pretty dramatically,” while one GOP operative said she had “burned a lot of people” inside the administration.
A Staff Fight Weeks From Election Day
The November 3 midterms are now less than three weeks away, and Republicans are bracing for possible heavy losses, with forecasts pointing to a difficult fight to keep the House and Senate. Removing Wiles at this stage, insiders warned, could deepen the internal disorder rather than settle it.
Wiles is Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff and the first woman to hold the post, having helped orchestrate his 2024 election victory. She disclosed a cancer diagnosis earlier this year and announced in September that she was cancer-free after six months of treatment — making the ouster talk an especially sharp turn for a figure once seen as unmovable.
Source: Politico Playbook