Why Susie Wiles Is Still Standing as Trump’s White House Careens Toward the 2026 Midterm Elections

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.’”

Yet not one of Trump’s first-term chiefs was up to the challenge. Shortly after Meadows became his fourth chief, Trump is said to have declared that Meadows would be “my James Baker.” I was baffled. The sycophantic Meadows was no one’s idea of Ronald Reagan’s chief James A. Baker III, who was known for standing up to the president when necessary. Then it suddenly dawned on me: Trump must have meant that Meadows—imposing, amenable, and handsome—looked like Baker.

Unlike her predecessors, Wiles has an almost magical bond with Trump; she’s the exception to his occasional predilection for cutting ties with women who go off script. The reasons are multifold. First, she slogged through the trenches with him in three grueling presidential campaigns in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Trump knows she has his back. Second, they have a unique personal chemistry; during their first encounter at Trump Tower in 2015, Trump was thrilled to be in the presence of the daughter of Pat Summerall (the sports broadcasting legend whose alcoholism helped prepare Wiles for dealing with Trump’s whims, bullying, mood swings, and so much more). Trump has no fixed convictions, yet he believes in two things: good genes and winning. (He will be forever grateful to Wiles for helping him carry Florida against the odds in the 2016 presidential election.) Third, Trump connected with her over their shared nostalgia for the Copacabana era of 1970s Manhattan. Wiles told me: “So when he talks about Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, I know that name.”

Which is not to say that Trump is thrilled with his chief of staff. He appears to be angry about his terrible poll numbers, about outgoing Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle’s alleged shakedowns, about Pete Hegseth’s (now canceled) plan to livestream the Fort Hood killer’s execution. Sources told Politico that Trump has called friends to ask if Wiles should stay or go. If true, he would have known that these conversations would get back to her. (Trump himself called the assertion “TOTAL FAKE NEWS” in a statement to Politico, insisting that Wiles “has my COMPLETE confidence.”)

Wiles, like the Terminator T-800, just keeps going. Despite her recent bout with breast cancer (thankfully, in remission), she wants to finish Trump’s term. In fact, the same week in which Politico suggested Wiles might be sent packing, she reportedly reasserted her authority: Katie Zacharia’s grilling by Fox News’s Sean Hannity—and her subsequent firing, insiders say—had Wiles’s fingerprints all over it. (White House communications director Steven Cheung called reports on Wiles’s involvement “a fiction.”)

There’s another reason why Wiles is staying: She’s virtually irreplaceable. Does anyone believe that a new chief of staff, with an untested relationship with Trump, would survive any longer than an Apprentice contestant?