Ax Falls on Trump Chief of Staff After Midterm Plan Lost Seven Senate Seats

Last December, Susie Wiles sat down for a podcast interview and laid out her plan for the 2026 midterms.

Republicans would keep the House, keep the Senate, and maybe even add seats.

On Tuesday her plan and the White House agenda met the voters, and a former Trump aide went on Jesse Watters to say exactly who should pay.

The Plan Wiles Bragged About in December

"I haven't quite broken it to him yet, but he's going to campaign like it's 2024 again," Wiles told The Mom View.

"We're actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot."

She was the chief of staff, and the political shop answered to her.

What Tuesday Actually Delivered

Republicans lost the House.

They lost at least seven Senate seats, including Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, and Kansas.

She lost Texas to James Talarico after Wiles and the RINO establishment starved Ken Paxton of cash .

Kansas sent a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1932.

Chuck Schumer gets the majority in January, and Democrats take the gavels in the House.

A Former Trump Aide Called It 100 Percent Preventable

Former Trump staffer Caroline Sunshine did not wait for the dust to settle.

"Susie Wiles needs to resign," she said on Jesse Watters' show.

She called the losses "a hundred percent preventable."

"A lot of this was staff failure," Sunshine said, adding that it was also a "strategy and messaging failure."

In her telling, the White House never pushed the president's message hard enough on TV or on podcasts – and young men, she noted, "swung 32 points."

Then she went after James Blair, the Wiles deputy who ran the White House political shop.

Blair "should not have been over in a pro Russian state a month before a wipeout election," Sunshine said. "He should have been in Michigan."

Think about that.

Wiles promised to put Trump on the ballot, and her own operation could not even get him on the shows where voters were listening.

Sunshine gave Wiles credit for 2024, then said "now she's behind the historic loss."

"Her campaign skills have not translated into governing," she said.

The Vanity Fair Interviews Were the First Warning

The same month Wiles was predicting midterm gains, she gave a series of interviews to Vanity Fair.

Wiles said Vice President JD Vance has "been a conspiracy theorist for a decade."

She said Attorney General Pam Bondi "completely whiffed" on the Epstein files – which is true but Wiles almost certainly meant on the execution – that is to say Bondi was unsuccessful at brushing the files under the rug.

She told the magazine Trump has "an alcoholic's personality."

She even knocked Elon Musk's dismantling of USAID, saying it was "not the way I would do it."

Wiles later called the piece "a disingenuously framed hit piece," and Trump stood by her.

But the job of a chief of staff is to protect the president and the administration.

It was certainly not Wiles’ job to scapegoat everyone else in the pages of a liberal magazine when it was her job to protect the whole team from making unforced errors, including the President.

The Hawks Saw This Coming

For months, the actual conservative and MAGA loyalists in Trump's orbit grumbled that Wiles kept pulling him back from his most aggressive instincts, according to Just the News.

Sunshine said Republicans "lost on every single issue except immigration."

Immigration is the one fight where Trump never backed down an inch.

The issue where the White House went hardest is the issue voters still trusted Republicans on.

Everywhere the staff tried to sand the edges off, the party got crushed.

She Told Everyone She Was Not Going Anywhere

Back in June, when a report said she would leave after the midterms, Wiles called it "Friday fiction."

"To be crystal clear, I am not going anywhere," she wrote.

Even Mick Mulvaney, who held the job in Trump's first term, predicted on NewsNation that she would be gone after the midterms.

Five months and two lost chambers later, she turned in her resignation Thursday night, a U.S. official told CBS News.

Her goodbye post on X called the job "the honor of a lifetime" and pointed to border security and tax cuts.

Trump thanked her, said she "has done an outstanding job," and moved her out of the West Wing.

She is headed to the Trump Political Operation.

That should worry every Republican who watched that political machine come up empty on Tuesday.

The president was gracious on Friday.

Voters were not on Tuesday, and the woman who drew up the plan is still on the team.

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Sources:

• Tyler Stone, "Caroline Sunshine: Susie Wiles Needs To Resign, Her Campaign Skills Have Not Translated Into Government," RealClearPolitics, November 5, 2026.
• Matt Margolis, "BREAKING: Susie Wiles Out as Chief of Staff, Trump Names Replacement," PJ Media, November 6, 2026.
• "Susie Wiles confirms departure in farewell post," Just the News, November 6, 2026.
• Ariana Baio, "Susie Wiles reveals Trump will make himself the focus of the midterm elections," The Independent, December 9, 2025.
• Associated Press, "In Vanity Fair interview, top Trump aide Wiles reveals White House tensions, points to missteps," December 16, 2025.
• Chris Irvine, "See you Monday: Susie Wiles dismisses Friday fiction she is eyeing White House exit," Washington Examiner, June 5, 2026.
• "Trump installs Stephen Miller as White House chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles," CBS News, November 6, 2026.