If one journalist knows President Donald Trump’s thinking at any given moment, it’s likely The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman — and taking a closer look at his Susie Wiles ouster and Stephen Miller promotion to chief of staff, she thinks he’s suffering a case of election denial.
Sitting with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” Friday night, Haberman expressed that despite Tuesday’s mandate from voters that the same old Trumpian politics oppose what they want for the country, Miller’s promotion proves that Trump took the wrong lessons from his midterms blowout.
“What it tells me is that President Trump has one move, and it is always: ‘more MAGA’ or ‘more Trump,’” Haberman maligned.
Collins said that the choice of Miller, considered his storied and sordid history in the Trump administration, caught Washington insiders by surprise that Trump “actually pulled the trigger.”
“Obviously he’s very loyal to the president. But what do we think two years of Stephen Miller as the chief of staff look like, potentially?” Collins asked her guest.
Haberman drew a line to previous times that Trump “has faced some kind of a loss or some kind of an embarrassment” as he did coming out of Tuesday’s midterms and the so-called “Blue Tsunami” that handed the Democrats power in the House and Senate by a historic margin.
“From the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, right, where his response was to bring Bill Clinton’s accusers to the debate in St. Louis in the 2016 campaign; to after he lost the November 2020 election to maintain that actually he had won it and do everything that he could,” Haberman said comparatively. “Instead of seeing what voters said as a rebuke of this president and his administration, which it absolutely is — and the Iran War is obviously front and center in a lot of it, but certainly not all of it, it is a number of events, one of which is the immigration crackdowns. And so what it tells me is that President Trump has one move, and it is always: ‘More MAGA’ or ‘more Trump.’ And this is what you’re seeing.”
To Haberman’s point, Miller has been the chief architect of Trump’s immigration crackdowns, shaping his second administration’s mass deportation agenda, pressing for expanded ICE arrests and advocating restrictions on asylum, birthright citizenship and legal immigration. It’s a subject that has been decried far and wide and from her perspective contributed to Republican losses on Tuesday.
The president named Miller his new chief of staff in a Truth Social post on Friday, in which he also shared the news of Wiles’ resignation.
“I am pleased to announce that Mr. Stephen Miller, the current Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trump Administration, and one of my most trusted advisors, will become the Chief of Staff starting Monday, November 9, 2026,” Trump wrote. “Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation. I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff — She has done a great job!”
