Donald Trump relished delivering two devastating words — “You’re fired” — in his role on the reality show “The Apprentice,” and years later, he repeated them incessantly on the campaign trail, much to the delight of his audiences. But the president has a dirty little secret: He does not like confrontation. In real life, he prefers to delegate the unpleasant task to an underling. 

This emerged as a pattern during his first term, when personnel churn was a constant. Trump often had his chiefs of staff — there were several — deliver the bad news, and sometimes he would even fire people on social media rather than confront in person. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, famously learned of his dismissal from his staff via a printed tweet after returning from a diplomatic trip to Africa. FBI Director James Comey saw the news of his firing on TV news reports. Once the person was gone, Trump often publicly insulted them, portraying them as “lowlifes,” “nutjobs” and worse, never seeming to realize the glaring contradiction — that a man with his alleged business savvy should have had better judgment than to hire such people in the first place. According to a Brookings analysis, the president had a 92% turnover rate among his “A team” during his first administration, the highest of any president in history.

Trump’s second term has been much more stable. Where before Trump had hired qualified people — aside from his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner — recommended by experienced Washington hands, this time around he has surrounded himself with nothing but the most loyal sycophants. As a result, there has been much less personnel drama. Still, there have been a few notable departures. 

The first was the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. After a bromance budded between the billionaire and Trump during the transition period, when Musk essentially moved into Mar-a-Lago, the president appointed him to head the Department of Government Efficiency and take a chainsaw to the federal government. Then there was a rupture in the relationship and Musk departed, although they seem to have mended fences. Since then, Trump has only fired a few people: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. (The latter three “resigned” under duress.) On Friday afternoon, after only a few days on the job and widespread criticism of her tenure, Trump dismissed White House press secretary Katie Zacharia.

The White House has insisted it’s entirely coincidental that all the firings have been women. But as the New York Times reported on Wednesday, “In many instances, the female officials who departed appeared to have failed some kind of loyalty test to Mr. Trump.” (You know how women are.) The departures of these women isn’t because none of the administration’s men have been implicated in misconduct or corrupt dealings. To the contrary: Some of Trump’s male officials and staffers are stunningly incompetent and dishonest, but their behavior has either been overlooked or rewarded with promotions and transfers. 

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So when reports surfaced that another high-profile female staffer may be on the chopping block, it would have come as no surprise — if it weren’t for the fact that the woman in question is the single most powerful female in the administration. 

Susie Wiles has earned the distinction of being Trump’s longest tenured chief of staff, and with good reason: She has managed to stay on the president’s good side by enabling him and never telling him what he doesn’t want to hear. She has admitted that herself, saying, “These seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.” 

One would certainly think that would guarantee her job security. But ahead of the monumental loss Republicans are expected to endure during the upcoming midterm elections, Trump is reportedly raging — and looking for a scapegoat. Apparently, it’s going to be Wiles. According to recent reports, the president has been calling around to friends to see what they think of his chief of staff — a common precursor to a Trump firing. According to POLITICO, plenty of people have their knives out for Wiles, with one person close to the White House saying, “She’s burned a lot of people.” 

This, though, is an occupational hazard for any Trump chief of staff. It’s also not unusual for turnover following a midterm election. But the GOP is facing what looks to be a massive loss, attributed to the president’s historically low approval ratings among the American people. Since Wiles, who guided Trump to his historic 2024 comeback, has also been tasked with doing the same in 2026 — along with her partners James Blair and Chris LaCivita — she is in the presidential crosshairs, even though there is little room to address Trump’s overwhelming unpopularity because he won’t listen to anyone. 

The big question now centers on Wiles’ replacement. POLITICO reported there are three likely candidates. One is Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a fierce Trump loyalist known most recently for spending as much time as possible with the president, feeding him memes and ideas on big white poster boards. Another is Kevin McCarthy, the former House Speaker who once told an aide to fill a jar with only the red Starburst candies for him to give to the president because he had noticed that Trump preferred them, earning him the presidential sobriquet “My Kevin.” Then there is Stephen Miller, the notorious senior adviser of everything.

The choice of Pulte or McCarthy would signal a continuation of current practices, albeit with less discipline and adult behavior in the White House, which may be inevitable no matter who wins the job. Pulte is dramatically unqualified, but since Trump once made him acting director of national intelligence, that distinction is obviously not an impediment.

McCarthy is one of the most incompetent and ignorant leaders in GOP history, but this is likely a plus, since Trump likes people who are just like him. If anyone expects that the president is looking for someone who is stronger than Wiles, the fact that McCarthy is being considered should lay those thoughts to rest.

The most frightening prospect is, of course, Miller, who is already serving as the shadow president and would, as chief of staff, essentially have the full power of the presidency at his fingertips. Trump is obsessed with his legacy projects and making as much money as possible, and the only other thing he cares about is vengeance on his enemies, a desire he shares in equal fervor with Miller. If Miller has the full power of chief of staff, we can assume that he will be ordering and approving the most authoritarian policies the United States has ever seen, and Trump may not even know it’s been done. That is clearly Miller’s mission, and given the power to enact such policies, he will not hesitate. 

Being far more ruthless and determined, Miller would no doubt run a tighter ship than Pulte or McCarthy. Trump, though, will still be in charge, and it’s easy to imagine that Miller’s actions would make him even more unpopular than he is now. That could make the legacy-concerned president uncomfortable as he confronts the possibility that he will leave office with a personal reputation far worse than Richard Nixon’s and a record of failure lower than Jimmy Carter’s.

It’s not too early to start blaming Miller for Trump’s unpopularity, and Democrats would be wise to start doing that publicly as soon as possible. If he becomes the chief of staff wielding power with fascist fervor, it may just be too late.

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There are always power centers in any White House. Certain people have their own little fiefdoms or specific knowledge of how government bureaucracy works, which gives them a leg up in internecine battles. Some offices or Cabinet posts are just imbued with more power than others. The Treasury secretary, for example, is always going to have more juice than the secretary of agriculture, just by virtue of their respective portfolios. But there is no job that has traditionally been more powerful than White House chief of staff.

The role of the position is multi-faceted, managing the flow of information to the Oval Office and keeping them from becoming distracted by people pushing their own agendas and distorting the president’s understanding of the facts. The chief of staff has hiring and firing power over the West Wing, basically running the day-to-day operation of the presidency. Mediating disputes among the executive branch’s advisers and officials before they reach the president is also an important part of the job. But most importantly, the chief of staff should be the president’s most trusted adviser, willing to provide an honest assessment and opinion on all the important issues that reach the Resolute Desk. 

No president has a more checkered past with chiefs of staff than Donald Trump. In 2017, as a complete political novice, he brought in a GOP party hack, Reince Priebus, who quickly proved himself to be completely unprepared to deal with an egomaniac like Trump. Priebus was fairly swiftly given the heave-ho in favor of retired Gen. John Kelly, who was serving as secretary of homeland security. He was expected to whip the White House and the chaotic president into shape. While Kelly tried his best, he proved to be no match for the force that was Javanka — Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter — and others who had forged a personal relationship with Trump and wielded influence, no matter how hard Kelly tried to discipline the operation. After the four-star general couldn’t tame the Trump White House, they ended up with a bucket of lukewarm chamomile tea by the name of Mark Meadows, who is probably best remembered as the man who sat on his couch scrolling through his phone while insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, simply saying the president wanted to be alone. 

“It used to be a fairly stiff competition for the worst chief of staff in history,” according to Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” the definitive book on the subject, “but Meadows absolutely owns it.” Still, there were others. Until Meadows, most people would have considered H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s very loyal chief of staff, to be the lowest rating. After all, Haldeman actually did time for his crimes in service of Nixon’s infamous abuses of power. George H.W. Bush’s right-hand man, John Sununu, was known to be a terrible manager and a terrible boss, while Don Regan, who served in the Reagan administration, handled the disastrous Iran-Contra scandal badly and alienated the very powerful Nancy Reagan, which in the end proved to be fatal to his employment in the West Wing. 

According to Whipple, the consensus is that Howard Baker, Reagan’s final chief of staff, and Dick Cheney, who served Gerald Ford, were considered competent, but the “gold standard” is James Baker, Reagan’s first chief, and Leon Panetta, who brought much-needed organization and discipline to the chaotic early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. 

Susie Wiles, Trump’s current chief of staff, won’t be included in that pantheon, even though the president’s second term is a very different operation than the first. Following his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump and his inner circle spent their four years in the wilderness figuring out what they wanted to do if they got back into power and devised a strategy to get it done. According to New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of the book “Regime Change,” the massive leaks that characterized the first term have given way to a tightly controlled administration run by a group of devoted loyalists. Their fealty appears to be voluntary, and Wiles will no doubt be credited with maintaining discipline among the staff far better than those who served in the first Trump White House. But the job is about more than discipline, and on that scale, Wiles is little better than Meadows. 

As the first female chief of staff in history, she does deserve credit for running, along with Chris LaCivita, Trump’s successful 2024 campaign, an operation that, at least for him, was relatively professional and buttoned up. After his win against Vice President Kamala Harris, Wiles was the logical choice to follow him into the White House. She seems to have found the key to managing Trump, which is to not manage him at all. (One imagines his mother reached the same conclusion around the time he reportedly gave his second-grade music teacher a black eye because “he didn’t know anything about music.”) 

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Whipple interviewed Wiles eleven times for a major feature in Vanity Fair, and she was incredibly frank, letting it be known that she didn’t think much of Vice President JD Vance, characterizing him as an opportunist and a “conspiracy theorist.” She also called Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget — and the author of much of Project 2025 — a “right-wing absolute zealot.” But Wiles also revealed that she doesn’t see her job as one in which she tries to help the president sort through all the options and do the hard job of offering her unvarnished advice, even when it’s something Trump doesn’t want to hear.

Wiles denies that she is an enabler, but it’s clear that Vance was right when he told Whipple that she sees her job as a “facilitator,” which simply means that she makes sure the president’s disordered trains of thought run on time. She even more or less admitted it herself when she said that she only has difficult conversations with the boss over “little things.” Wiles revealed that she doesn’t have “these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.” 

That pretty much says it all. And one has to question whether Wiles challenges him on the little things either. After all, in addition to a list of cronies and sycophants, Trump appointed her to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. If she had any clout, you would think she could have talked him out of his petty obsession of adding his name to a living memorial to a revered, slain president — a disgusting act of desecration. But with Trump, there’s nothing too small on which to fixate and, in any case, this crusade to remake Washington, D.C., in his own image overwhelms all other concerns, including economic crises and war. 

In other words, Susie Wiles has no influence over Trump at all. Just like Mark Meadows, she’s essentially sitting on a couch and scrolling on her phone while the world burns.

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