President Trump announced Friday he would make Stephen Miller, the powerful domestic policy adviser who has helped drive the administration’s immigration crackdown, his new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles following sweeping Republican losses in the midterm elections.
Ms. Wiles is moving to the president’s political operation, Mr. Trump said. But her departure and the ascent of Mr. Miller will fundamentally shift the circle of advisers around Mr. Trump as the White House absorbs the shock of the midterm elections.
It also signals an aggressive doubling-down by the president, after losses of Republican majorities in the House and Senate that served as a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s handling of issues ranging from the economy to the war with Iran to tariffs to his push for a mid-decade redistricting effort.
“I wanted to make a change,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a trip to Florida. She had done a “great job,” he said. “Sometimes in life you have to make moves,” he added.
Asked what he wanted Mr. Miller to do differently than Ms. Wiles, who he had previously claimed wasn’t going anywhere, the president said, “Just run things well.”
The Republican wipeout had further inflamed tensions within the administration, with officials bracing for a slew of congressional investigations by Democrats and turnover in the West Wing and the cabinet.
Mr. Trump’s decision elevates one of the most deeply ideological members of the White House, someone known for flexing his power, to a prime role. Mr. Miller is one of the few people in the current West Wing who spent years preparing for a second Trump term from the standpoint of executive power, and who knows how the levers of government function. He is also one of two top West Wing staff members to have been part of the first administration when the House majority flipped in 2018, prompting a blitz of subpoenas from Congress.
People familiar with his views say he is likely to steer the president away from his early instinct after Tuesday’s losses to seek deals with Democrats. That could involve leaning even more into culture war issues, such as hard-line immigration enforcement and efforts to target diversity initiatives.
“Stephen is and always has been the eternal flame of the MAGA movement — putting the president’s words and policy into action,” Hunter Morgen, who worked as a deputy to Mr. Miller during the president’s first term and is now a lobbyist at Ballard Partners, wrote in a text message. “Since the earliest days of the 2016 campaign, he has been a steadfast torchbearer of the president’s agenda.”
In the short term, Mr. Miller’s focus is said to be the Iran war, which has been viewed by the president’s base as a betrayal of the president’s campaign promises.
Mr. Miller has relationships with some of the key cabinet officials involved in Mr. Trump’s top priorities, such as Attorney General Todd Blanche, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His arrival may help Mr. Hegseth, at least in the short term, as the president has heard myriad complaints about him from Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Hegseth celebrated Mr. Miller’s promotion with several posts on social media. “Huge CONGRATS,” he wrote, calling Mr. Miller “a true patriot and America First fighter.” He followed that up with a post that said, “Patriots in control,” and a subsequent one that included a picture of himself and Mr. Miller.
Mr. Trump, in his private conversations as well as his public remarks, has not accepted blame for the election results.
Instead, he repeatedly blasted Ms. Wiles and his other political advisers, insisting he was poorly served in the lead-up to the midterms. He criticized Ms. Wiles in front of several people at an East Room election watch party this week, according to people with knowledge of the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
Mr. Trump has also been privately critical of James Blair, Ms. Wiles’s ally, who ran the president’s outside political operation, people with knowledge of the comments said. And for the last several months, Mr. Trump has berated Ms. Wiles in front of other staff members about his frustrations that his administration has not moved faster to find people he brands as “leakers,” as well as the stalled prosecutions of his perceived political enemies, they said. In front of several advisers, he would accuse her of being among the leakers.
Allies of Ms. Wiles described her as prepared to leave her role. Her supporters saw the criticism of her as an effort to assign blame for a political strategy largely driven by Mr. Trump himself. And they faulted her detractors inside and outside the administration for spreading information meant to undercut her with Mr. Trump, including stories about her daughter’s lobbying work.
In her own statement posted on social media, Ms. Wiles described working for Mr. Trump in the White House as the “honor of a lifetime.”
“While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will,” she added.
Ms. Wiles, the first woman to hold the top staff job in the West Wing, helped steer Mr. Trump to his election victory in 2024, playing a central role in his return to power four years after his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2026. Ms. Wiles stayed in her role as she started treatment and recently announced that she was cancer free.
Ms. Wiles came into the job having established a rapport with Mr. Trump and a level of trust that none of his four first-term chiefs of staff had enjoyed.
Unlike some of Mr. Trump’s previous chiefs of staff, Ms. Wiles made clear she did not consider her job as trying to fundamentally change the president. But she tried to influence his decisions on core issues including his immigration crackdown, even if only on the margins, according to people with knowledge of her role. She pushed for the appointments of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and both have been seen by many outside the government as stabilizing figures.
But Mr. Trump has relied primarily on his own instincts this term, and few advisers have engaged him in the kind of direct confrontations over policy that characterized his first administration.
Mr. Trump has publicly expressed his confidence in Ms. Wiles in recent months. But behind the scenes, there were signs that her standing with the president was shaky, according to officials with knowledge of the dynamics.
Mr. Trump began cutting Ms. Wiles out of hiring decisions, including when he chose an inexperienced television pundit to replace the departing press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.
And Mr. Trump started to criticize his chief of staff in front of other staff members, including over decisions he had approved, according to people familiar with his remarks.
After the elections, Mr. Trump made it clear to some advisers that he was unhappy with Ms. Wiles and his political team, who persuaded him to sign off on his super PAC’s spending $400 million to help Republicans in the midterms. The president had been reluctant to approve the spending and agreed to it only in September.
