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Trump names Stephen Miller as new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles after midterm defeat
Move announced in social media post brings immigration hardliner into top White House role
Just days after the Republican Party's resounding defeat in the midterm elections, U.S. President Donald Trump is replacing his top political adviser, chief of staff Susie Wiles, with immigration hardliner Stephen Miller.
Trump announced Wiles's departure from the White House in a post on Truth Social.
He called Miller one of his "most trusted" advisers and said Miller — the deputy chief of staff and architect of the administration's mass deportation push — would take over the top job on Monday.
"I wanted to make a change," Trump told reporters outside the White House on Friday afternoon.
"Sometimes in life you have to make moves," he said. "Stephen's been with me from the beginning and he gets it."
Political observers say Miller's elevation signals Trump has no intention of backing away from the key policies that have defined his second term, despite the midterms drubbing.
That includes the mass deportation campaign that has gone far beyond its promised target of the worst criminals.
Backlash against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions of undocumented immigrants who've lived upstanding lives in the U.S. for years was one of the factors that swung many Hispanic voters against the Republicans in the midterms, helping to deliver a Senate seat for Texas to Democrat James Talarico.
Seen as a Trump loyalist
Marc Short, who served as White House director of legislative affairs in Trump's first term, says he expects Miller to bring a combative approach to the new political balance of power in Washington which sees Democrats in control of Congress.
"It's hard for the president to find somebody more loyal to him than Stephen has been," Short told CNN on Friday.
"You're going to have an executive branch versus a legislative flight that's coming, and I think that the White House wants that fight."
Democrats are reacting to Miller's appointment as a sign that Trump has no plans to moderate his agenda.
"Donald Trump learned nothing from his historic defeat," the Democrat leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, said in a statement.
"Stephen Miller is the architect of the most barbaric, inhumane policies of this administration. Trump couldn't have made a worse choice," Schumer said.
'Tripling down on MAGA insanity'
Tommy Vietor, a former Obama administration spokesperson, described Trump's move as "tripling down on MAGA insanity."
"Great way to signal that you learned zero lessons from the midterm debacle," Vietor said in a post on X.
The American Immigration Council, a Washington, D.C., non-profit that advocates for immigrant rights, called Miller the architect of Trump's "most harmful" immigration policies.
"It’s clear that Trump, despite receiving a decisive rebuke of his policies on Election Day, plans to double down on the extreme immigration agenda we’ve seen these last two years," the group's executive director Jeremy Robbins said in a statement Friday.
"Stephen Miller is behind the worst of the worst: the Muslim Ban. Family Separation. Masked ICE agents killing people in the streets," Robbins said.
Miller's appointment so soon after the election is being seen as part of Trump's search for scapegoats for the scale of the midterm defeat.
The Democrats won the popular vote for House seats by 13 percentage points, the widest margin for any party since 1976.
Wiles is one of the people Trump is blaming, CNN reported Friday, citing unnamed sources in the administration.
For much of the past year, Wiles had signalled that Trump would campaign for the midterms with a focus on affordability.
However the president instead sent voters an inconsistent message — often dismissing concerns about the cost of living while spending significant time in his rally speeches talking about his construction projects in Washington, D.C.
In his social media post, Trump said Wiles had done an outstanding job and will be "moving over to the Trump Political Operation."
It was not immediately clear what Trump means by his "political operation." It could be his MAGA Inc. political action committee, a fundraising organization that had hundreds of millions of dollars at its disposal to back Republican candidates in the midterms and could prove influential in the 2028 presidential campaign.
In her own post on X, Wiles did not specify what her new job would be.
"While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will," she wrote.
Her departure is the latest in a series of high-profile women exiting the Trump administration.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labour Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard either resigned or were ousted earlier this year.
Karoline Leavitt stepped down as White House press secretary in August.
Leavitt called Miller the perfect choice for chief of staff. "No one is more loyal, more hardworking, or more in touch with the America First movement than Stephen," she said Friday afternoon in a post on X.
"Now is the time to fix what's not working and double down on all of the victories we've already achieved," Leavitt wrote.
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