Stephen Miller’s first job: End the White House blood feuds

Welcome to Tuesday’s Washington Secrets. Stephen Miller as a unifying force? No, nor me. But this is what we are hearing from people outside the White House. Read on for that and for the real reason Nikki Haley quit the first Trump administration and her secrets for managing the president …Trump confidante Laura Loomer goes to war with top Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz.MAHA campaigner Calley Means resigned from the administration and is intent on taking down the White House, accusing officials past and present of corruption. And Susie Wiles is out as chief of staff after being blamed by President Donald Trump for devastating midterm losses.Stephen Miller’s first job as new chief of staff will be to staunch the bleeding as different factions jockey for influence.“It’s just a blood feud across the board,” said one former senior administration official.The first year of Trump’s second administration was marked by relative calm. The team was built of allies forged in the fires of the president’s wilderness years. Wiles ruled with quiet authority.That is gone.In the weeks leading up to the midterm elections, Alina Habba, Trump’s former lawyer, accused Ric Grenell of pocketing a $6 million donation that her husband meant for the Kennedy Center, which he denies. Layer in a pay-for-access allegation and there is the making of a scandal.Meanwhile, Bruesewitz said Republicans lost the elections because they spent too much time obsessing over online feuds and taking messaging advice from “fringe right-wing influencers.” Fringe right-wing influencer Loomer took offense, whereupon Bruesewitz alleged that he had paid her thousands of dollars for online messaging. (There were signs that peace broke out Tuesday morning, when Bruesewitz posted that the two had had a “productive call.”)Keeping up?And then there is Means, who has kept up a busy round of interviews since quitting his job at the Department of Health and Human Services. His main allegation, as he told Joe Rogan, is that Wiles and a “close-knit crew” of former lobbyists such as James Blair (who left the White House this year to work on the midterm campaign) had stalled MAHA policies to protect donors.Add in the way Vice President JD Vance has criticized the war in Iran, and another possible fault line emerges with embattled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.Enter Miller.Coverage of his appointment so far has been straightforward: Trump is wounded after the midterm elections and has picked an enforcer to help him pursue an even more aggressive set of policies.But insiders canvassed by Secrets said it missed another point about Miller.“The Stephen Miller choice amidst all of this is actually kind of interesting because in some ways he straddles across the lines of new guard and old guard,” said a source close to the White House.He has been around since the start, when Steve Bannon was chief strategist, but adapted easily to Wiles’s White House and the people she brought in.“He’s also MAHA,” said the source, pointing out how his wife Katie’s podcast has focused on health and wellness issues, “and I don’t know exactly where he is on the war front, but Vance has called him one of his best friends.”Long seen as something of a lone wolf in the administration, Secrets understands that Miller is working fast to build his staff. He has been calling officials and former staffers for recommendations for new hires.He has already brought back ally May Mailman to be his right-hand woman, as first reported by Axios.And Secrets hears that competition is heating up again to fill the vacant post of press secretary.“Stephen Miller has extensive expertise in Republican politics and has been on the front lines of the MAGA movement since its inception,” said a source familiar with his plans. “There is no better person to bridge any divide in order to help the president implement his America First agenda.”So is Miller the man to calm everything down? Stranger things have happened.You are reading Washington Secrets, a guide to power and politics in D.C. and beyond. It is written by Rob Crilly. You can reach him at secrets@washingtonexaminer.com with your comments, story tips, and suggestions.How Nikki Haley kept Trump sweet If the MAGA brand is tarnished by the devastating midterm election results, does it open a lane for a more traditional small-government, low-tax, hawkish conservative to run in 2028?It won’t be Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, if it does.She ruled herself out of the next presidential cycle during an interview with entrepreneur and Shark Tank shark Daniel Lubetzky. The latest edition of his “Build or Break” show dropped this morning.In the episode, recorded before last Tuesday’s wipeout, she did not close the door on a possible 2032 run.“Never say never. I’m not going to do that,” she said. “I’m not going to pigeonhole myself that way.”She also shed light on the reason she suddenly resigned from her job during Trump 1.0 and laid out her technique for managing the president, a famously quixotic and demanding boss. In a nutshell: If you are going to disagree with him, make sure you have options ready to offer him a better way of doing things.“And I think that’s what you have to remember … know your role, know your place,” she said.“He was the president. He needed to make a decision. So instead of saying, ‘Oh, this decision’s bad or good,’ give options on what would make it better.”“But it’s your job to be a truth teller. Tell them everything good and bad,” Haley added. “And I think that he knew, one, I gave him good solutions. Two, I never embarrassed him. And I also made sure that, I think, he knew he could trust me because I wasn’t going to let him fall.”She was famously one of the few figures to leave that first administration on good terms, taking observers by surprise when she resigned in October 2018.“It actually wasn’t about Trump that I left,” she said. “It was more about John Bolton and seeing what was happening as national security adviser. He didn’t want to have meetings. He only wanted to handle things quietly.”At the time, some reports suggested that she had lost influence and power when Bolton moved into the White House.Her version is that he sidelined the usual National Security Council policy process, reducing the number of key meetings where cabinet agencies were represented.“I mean, these are things like getting out of the Iran deal,” she explained. “These are things like what’s happening with Ukraine at the time. These are massive issues that you don’t need to have sitting in the Oval with a notepad and having that one-on-one. You need to know how it’s going to affect commerce, how it’s going to affect agriculture.”The late-night viewer in chief Trump may have faced a huge setback last week with the midterm election results, but he has been having fun ever since. Particularly with his media strategy.There was the trolling of journalists by claiming he had offered the job of press secretary to Dana White, of Ultimate Fighting Championship fame. Then he had reporters scurrying to the briefing room yesterday, with a last-minute appearance.And then he called into C-SPAN’s new show late on Monday, clearly taking the hosts by surprise.There was giggling in the White House background (Secrets guesses it was Natalie Harp) as he wished Washington Journal Primetime host Mimi Geerges the best of luck.But of course it is no surprise that Trump would be checking out a new phone-in show on his favorite channel.“I like to watch the call-ins because it gives me a little of an indication of where we are,” he said.Lunchtime reading The Chinese woman at the center of a spy probe after an affair with Jensen Huang: “Megaspeed didn’t respond to a request for comment, and efforts to reach Alice Huang were unsuccessful.”Inside the Spirit’s mad dash to keep its playoff game at Audi Field: DC United, the men’s soccer team, is the women’s team’s landlord. And it booked the stadium for someone else on the date of the women’s semifinal. Oddly glossed over in this piece.