Democrats just wiped out Republicans in the biggest midterm wave in a generation.
Trump watched the results come in from his private residence, barely speaking, with Susie Wiles at his side.
What happened in the Oval Office 48 hours later is why Stephen Miller runs the White House now.
Susie Wiles Resigned After Trump Discovered the Camp David Plot
Former White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles walked out of the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon while Trump was still yelling at her.
He had turned on his chief of staff in front of other aides – berating her over the midterm catastrophe that handed Democrats both chambers of Congress.
Democrats flipped the Senate 54-44 and seized the House 231-141, the largest popular vote margin for either party since 1976.
That night, Wiles went to Trump and resigned before he could fire her – and he refused to accept it on the spot.
She walked back into the Oval Office Friday morning and told him the decision was final.
The story she wanted told was that she was tired – but Wiles had already booked a private offsite at Camp David for Saturday, a day when Trump would be in Florida, stacked with White House officials loyal to her.
The agenda was keeping herself in the building – the trip is now canceled.
Her other project was scapegoating Pete Hegseth.
Wiles's allies spent the days after Tuesday's disaster trying to make the Defense Secretary the public face of the Republican collapse, blaming his role in the Iran war – a war that sent gas prices through the roof and cost the GOP millions of votes.
Trump himself admitted it: voters "weren't willing to deal with the short term consequence of paying more for gasoline."
Then Trump found out who was feeding those Hegseth stories to the press.
"I think eventually enough people talked to him that he got very upset," a source close to the president said.
"Susie Wiles is a leaker," one former Trump official told the Daily Mail.
She ran a political operation that burned through close to half a billion dollars while she had been telling people six weeks before Election Day that Republicans would win.
Stephen Miller Built Mass Deportations and Now He Runs the White House
Stephen Miller flew to Florida on Friday with Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump aide Natalie Harp.
Wiles was nowhere to be seen, and the reason Miller was grinning on the South Lawn goes straight to the fault line that ended her.
Wiles had been arguing behind closed doors for a narrower deportation policy – enforcement focused only on people with violent criminal records – and telling colleagues the mass deportation operation was bleeding the party at the polls.
Trump just handed her job to the man who built that operation.
"I don't know that there is anyone to the right of Stephen Miller on immigration," a State Department official told the Daily Mail.
Miller has been with Trump since the 2016 campaign – architecting the travel ban, the border crackdown, and the mass deportation operation that became the defining policy of Trump's second term.
Karoline Leavitt has said that in policy meetings, Trump repeatedly turns and asks "Where's Stephen?" – starting Monday, Miller won't need to be summoned.
Trump announced the change on Truth Social, calling Wiles's service "outstanding" – the presidential equivalent of a participation trophy after losing 78 House seats and the Senate.
Post-midterm staff shakeups are a Washington tradition – John Kelly told aides during Trump's first term that he planned to make it only through the 2018 midterms.
The standard move after a loss is to bring in someone safer, move toward the center, and give voters what they said they wanted.
Trump threw that playbook in the trash – replacing the chief of staff with the person she had been quietly fighting to contain.
Miller has never slowed a deportation because a poll made someone nervous, and he is not arriving with a list of people he owes.
Democrats now control both chambers and are already promising congressional investigations into Miller's decade-long role in the deportation campaign – and he is about to have more power than any of them.
One former Trump official celebrating the news spoke for the deportation wing of the administration: "The guys who deport people are going to be excited."
Sources:
- Phillip Nieto, Ross Ibbetson, Elina Shirazi, Jon Michael Raasch, "Trump screamed at Susie Wiles and banished her from the Oval Office," Daily Mail, November 6, 2026.
- Seung Min Kim, "Stephen Miller replaces Susie Wiles as Trump's White House chief of staff after GOP's midterm defeat," Associated Press, November 6, 2026.
- "Election 2026: Democrats capture both chambers of Congress," NBC News, November 4, 2026.