As disaster looms in the November mid-term elections, the Trump regime is riven with internal dissent and ugly scandal. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller are taking leading roles.
Bessent at War With Iran, Own Staff and Leaks
The current round of leaks and intrigue kicked into high gear with an October 6th Wall Street Journal piece titled “Inside Bessent’s Treasury: Tension, Turnover And Unmet Economic Goals.”
Some highlights, with a focus on the key staffers and advisers Bessent is reliant upon:
He has become increasingly emboldened, making unilateral decisions that have confounded even some of his longtime allies and friends.
And his temper has flared. He has shouted at staff for not moving fast enough to implement his ideas and for failing to combat unfavorable media coverage, some of the officials said. Last year, Bessent got so angry about the way his daily briefing book was organized that he picked up the binder full of papers and threw it at a wall, people familiar with the matter said.
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At the end of August, Bessent stepped onto a stage at Treasury to unveil his economic plan to end the war in Iran, tethering his political future to a conflict that has stymied the president and his senior advisers for months. Keenly aware that Trump was looking for a way out of the military conflict, Bessent privately convinced the president it was time to trade in bombs for economic warfare, according to people close to the administration.Bessent and a small group of close advisers put together the plan, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Treasury secretary leaned on Gene Lange—a trusted ally who used to work for him at his investment firm, Key Square Capital Management.
Shortly after Hurley left his role, Bessent gave Lange his duties—though not the Senate-confirmed job—giving him control over the department’s powerful Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, which oversees everything from money laundering to sanctions.
The economic campaign has been dismissed by some foreign policy experts and economists as inadequate to batter Tehran into submission and for not directly targeting the government of China, its key trading partner.
The episode is emblematic of how Bessent runs the department, according to people familiar with his methods. Bessent has consolidated power in his massive agency, often relying on a handful of advisers to carry out the president’s agenda.
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Last week, Treasury announced David Zervos, a longtime Wall Street market strategist and a top executive at Jefferies, would become a senior adviser to Bessent.Outside advisers include economist and television personality Larry Kudlow; Lawrence Lindsey, the former head of the White House’s National Economic Council; and Alec Ellison, an investment banker in New York and a fellow native of South Carolina, according to people close to Bessent.
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The Treasury secretary cycled through three people filling the role of chief of staff before settling on Kate Tyrrell in June. Dan Katz, Bessent’s first chief of staff, was among the officials who clashed with Bessent, according to people familiar with the matter. He left the agency in fall 2025 to be a senior official at the International Monetary Fund.
There’s a whole lot more in the piece, especially stuff about Bessent losing his temper and acting out and his feuds with FHFA Director Bill Pulte, Elon Musk, former Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John Hurley, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik.
I’ve covered the Bessent/Pulte feud before. The Lutnik spat was reported in Maggie Haberman/Johnathan Swan book “Regime Change” which claimed Bessent called Lutnik “an idiot” to his face over a Ukraine minerals deal, leading Trump to join in and mock Lutnik, per The Hill.
Bessent fired back on October 7 on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” saying Fox was a “a shadow of its former self” and said it was a disgrace to compare it to TMZ.
But as Semafor reported in September, Bessent’s issues are not solely with the WSJ. He stopped appearing on Bloomberg TV. Bloomberg, WSJ and some NYT reporters were denied credentials for the August G20 meeting in Asheville. He’s down to Fox, Steve Bannon, and Right Side Broadcasting.
Bessent is also bullying Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh with a Treasury bond buyback policy that pressures the “independent” Fed.
Let’s move on to another intra-regime battle.
Even Marco Rubio Has Been “Subsumed” By Stephen Miller
Last week the centrist Substack Zeteo, had a piece charmingly titled “‘Secretary of Cuck’: How Marco Rubio Learned to Love Waging Trump’s War on the World.”
Zeteo takes the consensus DC insider position that Rubio was some paragon of decency and norms before being corrupted by his involvement with the wicked Trump regime, so keep that in mind as we read some highlights of the piece:
Rubio has led a swarming assault on free speech, overseen the destruction of U.S. foreign aid, and helped power Trump’s mass-deportation machine, disregarding human rights and basic decency in the process.
With Trump naming Rubio his acting National Security Adviser, a role made permanent last month, sources say Rubio has spent a great deal of his time at the White House, ensconced away from the State Department rank-and-file as he works alongside Trump’s inner circle.
As with the rest of Trump’s top cabinet officials, Rubio has been entirely subsumed by Stephen Miller, Trump’s nativist deputy chief of staff and top policy official, sources say.
Miller and Rubio have an amiable working relationship – in fact, relations between the former intra-GOP enemies are so chummy, and the duo are in such lockstep nowadays, that other Trump advisers tell Zeteo that they wonder how much of it is real and how much fake, put on for a “marriage of political convenience, more than anything else,” a former senior Trump administration official says. But, this ex-official adds, “those sorts of marriages sometimes work.” Largely, two sources familiar with the matter tell Zeteo, the “marriage” involves Rubio doing precisely what Miller tells him to do. Miller and Rubio talk frequently, their connection so tight it eclipses Miller’s relationships with nearly every other senior official.
The irony of this is not lost on senior staffers, least of all Miller, who has joked to confidants about how much he has subjugated a former nemesis, the two sources say.
“Stephen does find it amusing that Marco now sees things the way Stephen does…”
The piece then goes on to detail how in 2016, Miller, then a staffer for Alabama Senator (and future US Attorney General) Jeff Sessions, set out to “destroy” Rubio over the Gang of Eight bill and in the 2016 primary planted Breitbart stories casting Rubio as someone who “legalized alien sex offenders.”
But now Rubio is fully on side:
Rubio is officially overseeing or complicit in some of Trump’s most egregious and consequential acts: the gutting of U.S. foreign and humanitarian aid; the kidnapping and attempted deportation of college students, often for speech related to Israel; the shipping of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, CECOT, without due process; the deputization of department security agents to assist ICE with its shadowy detention campaign; the expansion of third-party deportations, immigrants renditioned to dangerous countries to which they have no ties; the near-total shutdown of refugee admissions, other than for white South Africans; a visa ban targeting 75 countries; crippling sanctions against Cuba; the defense of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and maintenance of support for Israel as it continues its genocide in Gaza, its strafing of Lebanon, and its unrelenting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank; the Pentagon-led murder of sailors in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific under the flag of stopping drug trafficking – all while he helps prop up Latin American leaders linked to drug trafficking.
A separate Zeteo piece on Miller says:
This is the creep dubbed (rightly so) America’s “prime minister,” by fellow Trumpland denizens. Other people might have higher-ranking titles, but there is no traditional secretary of defense (or, “secretary of war,” as this administration likes to call it) in Trump’s second administration. There’s no independent Justice Department or U.S. attorney general. There is no secretary of state, and there certainly isn’t a Homeland Security secretary, as we’ve previously known it to be. There is just one gleefully authoritarian West Wing of the White House, which uses its cabinet members and agency chiefs as mere cutouts for Trump’s political whims and wants. But the man barking those marching orders – to Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, and Markwayne Mullin – is usually Miller. So vast is his reach that Trump administration officials call the 41-year-old aide America’s “shadow president,” among other nicknames.
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Another former first-term colleague, Sarah Matthews, who served as a Trump White House spokesperson before falling out with the party, says: “I definitely thought to myself when I was working there: ‘This guy is fucking nuts and not the best surrogate that you’d want out on TV representing the administration.’ I always found him to be largely unhelpful to the cause, whether that was him putting himself on TV or the speeches he’d write for Trump.”“And look at him now,” she continues. “His policies are what’s crashing Trump’s popularity – and I’ve still seen him on TV a lot lately.”
So why does Team Trump keep putting this man on TV, even though many of them know what a bad idea that is?
“If you try to keep him off TV, he just books himself. That is what he usually does anyway,” another former senior Trump administration official says. “If you get in his way, he’d scream at you. And if that didn’t work, he’d complain to the president, who would then yell at you.”
Other former and current Trump advisers corroborate this, adding that starting in the first term, Miller was allowed to keep going on TV at the sickening rate he did because he operated under the full protection of the only person who mattered in their world: the sitting president of the United States, who advisers add loves the bile Miller has to spew on cable news and loves how he sticks it to the on-air hosts.
Trump’s blanket protection of Miller extends well beyond the Sunday show circuit: Over the first two years of the Trump-Vance administration, Miller has established himself firmly as the world’s most influential unelected bureaucrat. Despite his title, deputy chief of staff, Miller’s portfolio includes de facto management of various agencies and departments. Those who knew him and worked with him in his younger days can’t believe it. His supporters are euphoric about it. And his enemies – and his victims – say they’ve never seen anything like it.
Miller may be safe, no matter how much his policy ideas have hurt Trump’s polling numbers, but another power player is much less secure.
Sharks Circling Susie Wiles
Although nominally Miller’s boss, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has been under increasing pressure as the midterms loom.
According to an October 15th Politico piece, Trump has been calling allies asking who should replace her:
At moments of frustration and adversity, President Donald Trump has long made a habit of calling up friends to ask what they think of his advisers — and whether he should consider making changes.
These days, he’s asking about Susie Wiles, the once-unassailable White House chief of staff.
Trump has been soliciting allies’ views of Wiles and musing about replacements for his top aide, according to four people with direct knowledge of the conversations.
We’re told Trump is getting plenty of encouragement from rivals to Wiles and people who’ve felt “burned” by his loyal enforcer. Some have been sharing unfavorable coverage of Wiles and her family (more on that below) with the president.
“She’s burned a lot of people,” a Republican operative close to the White House said.
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Trump has floated several people who could replace Wiles as chief of staff: The senior elected Republican official said the president had mentioned Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, and Randy Levine, the president of the New York Yankees, as an outside-the-building option.Trump is also considering Steve Witkoff, Bill Pulte and Kevin McCarthy, people close to the president told us. Allies of McCarthy, the former House speaker, have been arguing that he could help Trump handle a hostile Democratic Congress.
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Trump has bristled at recent reports showing several longtime advisers are profiting from foreign consulting business, including top Wiles allies James Blair and Chris LaCivita (see the NYT). Katie Wiles, the chief of staff’s daughter, was reported (see the FT) to be working for a firm representing Republika Srpska, the pro-Russian, semi-autonomous Bosnian Serb territory for which Blair and LaCivita also did work. Trump was not previously aware of Katie Wiles’ work, which took her to Republika Srpska for a different contract, and rivals of Susie Wiles have made sure the headlines surrounding her daughter reached the president, one person close to the president said.“Susie has this whole cadre of people that have been found to have been monetizing his ecosystem pretty dramatically,” a senior outside adviser told Playbook.
There’s been so much scandal from Trump land I’m going to have to run through a few others with quick and dirty bullet points and links.
The Man Who Won Trump Michigan vs. His Favorite Attorney
Ric Grenell, whose role in organizing Muslim UFC fighters to campaign in the most heavily Islamic regions of Michigan has been credited by some with securing the state for Trump in the 2024 election, has gotten cross-wise with Trump Attorney Alina Habba:
She’s Gavin Newsom’s Ex, Donald Jr.’s Ex, and Now She’s the Ex-Ambassador to Greece
Crypto Been Berry Berry Good to Bo Hines
The Shortest-Tenured White House Press Secretary in History
The Man Behind the Blonde Women
That’s all for today.
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