White House aides, who have kept clashes muted during President Donald Trump’s second term, have begun jostling more openly for power as they brace for widespread midterm election losses and internal upheaval, according to interviews with 20 staffers, advisers and people close to the president.
The interviews, most of which were conducted on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel machinations, paint a picture of infighting that has started to resemble the pitched battles of Trump’s first term.
Believing that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles might step down after the election, a handful of Trump aides, including Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, top housing official Bill Pulte and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, have begun angling for the position should it become available.
Wiles has given no indication to aides or allies that she plans to leave. Still, high-level White House staffers frequently cycle out of their stressful jobs after 18 months to two years, and Trump had four chiefs of staff, including an acting one, during his first term.
The past week in the White House has been “the new Wild Wild West,” one Trump ally said.
The jockeying started in earnest last week after Trump first reached out to Katie Zacharia about joining the administration as the new White House press secretary, a move he made without consulting Wiles, according to four people familiar with the decision. The unilateral action by the president was viewed internally as undermining Wiles, creating the impression of a less-disciplined operation and an unsettled center of power inside the West Wing.
For longtime observers of Trump’s inner circle, the friction this week harks back to his first term, when shifting factions of aides and family members vied for power and undermined one another in the process — a pattern this White House has mostly avoided, until now.
Compounding the uncertainty is the president, who has told allies he feels frustrated that no one is publicly defending him as vociferously as he would like 18 days before the midterm elections. Trump has embarked on a frenzied schedule of campaign rallies in the final stretch to juice enthusiasm among the Republican faithful, but with a historically low approval rating and growing voter frustration about high prices, he and the Republican Party face major political headwinds.
The president has been calling friends, White House aides and outside advisers because he appears worried that information is not reaching him, according to an adviser who received one of the calls. In these conversations, he has also vented about the midterms and the two outside advisers quarterbacking his political strategy, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are close allies of Wiles.
Among those who have been in contact with Trump is former aide Corey Lewandowski, a fierce rival of Wiles’s, who is supportive of Pulte, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.
Reached for comment, Lewandowski said: “I have never spoken with the president about Bill Pulte being the chief of staff.”
“These anonymous sources know nothing. It’s the same selfish, opportunistic behavior from people more focused on themselves than on President Trump, whose priority is delivering for the American people and winning the midterms,” Danielle Alvarez, a White House spokesperson, said in response to a request for comment. “President Trump has assembled a strong, talented and united team focused on his America First agenda — not the egos and political games of anonymous outsiders.”
Internal GOP polling shows that support for Republican candidates cratered after the party’s midterm convention in Dallas, with voters saying the party was not attuned to their economic concerns, according to a Republican strategist briefed on the numbers. Rather than campaigning extensively in September, Trump spent much of the month hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House and working on his construction projects, including a new White House helipad and his proposed ballroom.
Although the White House continues to express confidence in public, many Trump aides and allies believe they will lose control of the House of Representatives, although by how large a margin remains unclear. Trump advisers and Republican strategists say the fate of the Senate is a 50-50 proposition, despite a deluge of spending in recent weeks by the president’s main super PAC, MAGA Inc., and the Senate Leadership Fund. They acknowledge that typically red states, including Kansas and Texas, are in play.
Whether Wiles will opt to stay in her position if the midterms yield major GOP losses has emerged as a dominant topic in Trumpworld.
A Republican “blowout next month, very likely, will be a wedge that the ambitious use” to slide into the chief of staff’s office, one Wiles ally said.
The jockeying to become the next chief of staff has taken various forms. Pulte frequently lugs poster boards onto the golf course, Marine One or Air Force One to try to nudge Trump to sign on to his ideas.
Typically, the poster boards contain Pulte’s proposals to handle whatever issue is irking the president that day — be it the renovations to the Kennedy Center or the Federal Reserve’s failure to lower interest rates. Sometimes the posters include artwork of the president, or images of his rallies, according to one person who has viewed the posters. Trump’s love of visual aids has its limits; he has told advisers that Pulte has brought him so many poster boards that they are cluttering up the White House residence, said two White House officials and a third person close to the White House.
Wiles ran Trump’s highly disciplined 2024 presidential campaign and paved the way for him and his team to take swift action through more than 100 executive orders during his first 100 days in office. While she does not consider herself a policy expert, she has inserted herself into the center of the administration’s debates on global tariffs and potential guardrails for artificial intelligence, as both became political liabilities for the president.
But Wiles and her inner circle were put on the defensive recently after Blair and LaCivita traveled to Republika Srpska — the Serbian-dominated portion of Bosnia — to do political consulting work for the pro-Russian government.
That created problems for Wiles, who had brought both men into Trump’s 2024 campaign. The president has always bristled when current or former aides profit off their connections to him.
Trump responded by posting a pointed message on Truth Social distancing himself from Blair and LaCivita and promising to fire them if their consulting work posed a conflict of interest.
The story got worse for the chief of staff when a photo surfaced of her daughter, Katie Wiles, on a visit to Republika Srpska. The younger Wiles is a partner at the lobbying firm Continental Strategy, which represents the territory’s government (though she is not individually named on the firm’s lobbying disclosure forms). Detractors of Wiles, LaCivita and Blair have been fueling the tensions and stoking Trump’s suspicions by showing him critical articles about the foreign consulting, three outside advisers said.
Blair and LaCivita are still leading Trump’s midterm strategy, and the president still talks to Blair frequently, but his initial unhappiness with their trip may have weakened the duo’s ability to offer guidance and issue directives to various campaigns, one Republican strategist said.
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