The wheels are coming off the Trump White House bus. The president’s approval rating is dismal, the Iran war has fanned inflation at home and instability abroad, helter-skelter tariffs have angered US farmers, a craven deal with Vladimir Putin over diesel fuel has threatened Ukraine’s survival, and this month’s botched rollout of an inept new press secretary descended into farce.
The GOP boat, meanwhile, is drifting toward the waterfall of the 2026 midterm elections—and the party’s pending wreckage on the rocks below. If history is any judge, most White House chiefs of staff facing such turmoil would be eyeing the exit before the boss shoved them out. But in all likelihood, Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief, isn’t going anywhere.
She’s come through trials before. In 10 interviews with me for Vanity Fair in 2025, Wiles described her brand of management-by-serenity-prayer: Trump, she said, has an alcoholic’s personality (even though he’s a teetotaler); his White House was populated by a microdoser and ketamine user (Elon Musk), a decade-long conspiracy theorist (JD Vance), and a right-wing absolute zealot (Russell Vought). These were her words, not mine. Many around Washington thought that after baring her soul, on the record and on tape, Wiles would be toast. And yet her job was never in jeopardy; indeed, her standing in the West Wing was only strengthened after she gave away the store. Trump immediately embraced her description of him, as Vance did his. The vice president only believed in conspiracies that are true, he insisted. Trump’s inner circle rallied around Wiles.
Now, once again, Trump and his team are standing by his chief amid recent press reports that she might be on the outs. That’s because, despite his travails, Trump needs Wiles and almost everyone around him knows it.
The president trusts her in a way that he trusted none of her predecessors. In his first term, serving as his chief was practically Mission Impossible: Reince Priebus, General John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, and Mark Meadows didn’t click with Trump, for a variety of reasons, but none, in the end, seemed willing to go the distance and do anything he ordered. Trump just didn’t understand—and didn’t care—that any chief’s most important duty is to tell the president hard truths. As Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford’s first-rate chief, put it: “The White House chief of staff is the one person besides his wife…who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road.’”
