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Former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews served during President Donald Trump’s first term. It was, as she recalls, an administration of internecine battles, where independent enclaves would wage war on one another for Trump’s favor or some other advantage.

That internal combativeness appeared to be toned down somewhat under Trump 2.0, she said. But the departure of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday indicated to Matthews that the old internal battles and treachery was back on the table.

Trump announced on Truth Social that he would be replacing Wiles Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, starting Monday, November 9, 2026.

“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!" Trump wrote.

“I couldn't help but laugh to think that now this is playing out as if it's Trump 1.0 all over again, because when I was there, it was chaos,” Matthews told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins Friday night. “I mean, it felt like there were maybe a handful of people I could trust. And even then, you still didn't really trust anyone because you felt like at any given moment, someone would knife you to try to make themselves look better.”

There were always “competing factions happening within the White House," Matthews added, and “it felt like we were competing.”

“The press team: me and Kayleigh McEnany against [senior presidential advisor] Jared Kushner and Ivanka, who were also competing against [Former White House Chief of Staff] Mark Meadows, who were also competing against the vice president's team,” said Matthews. “So, it always felt like this chaotic nature because we're all supposed to be on the same team. But then people are looking out for their own self-interest. And in Trump 2.0, they've prided themselves on this idea that there's been no leaking and that they're all this one unified front. And now we're kind of seeing the wheels come off.”

White House Bloomberg Correspondent Jeff Mason said he was personally surprised that Trump demoted a dedicated organizer like Wiles and replaced her with a fire-starter like Miller, who only appeals to a small minority of extremists.

“I thought it was interesting that he said very plainly he was ready for a change, given that he had given that strong, strong defense of Susie Wiles only a few weeks ago. Also, the fact that Wiles … is largely responsible for the fact that this second term has not been as chaotic of a White House as it was during his first term,” said Mason, adding that Wiles is also “essentially the architect of his campaign for reelection,” and the reason Trump’s campaign had the discipline to reclaim “power at all.”

“So, it's a pretty big break to be jettisoning this particular chief of staff, and then to be replacing her … with someone who absolutely appeals to some instincts … that I think many Republicans would be happy for him not to emphasize in these next two years, as they are also keeping an eye on 2028,” Mason concluded.

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The fuse of far-right activist and Newsmax host Carl Higbie appears to have gotten shorter since the thumping voters gave the Republican Party on Tuesday. These days Higbie seems as quick to unleash his temper upon his own team as he is upon socialist Democrats.

Higbie spoke with guests Friday night about the threat of the new Democrat majority freezing out President Donald Trump’s judicial and administrative appointments when the new Congress takes hold on January 6. But before Higbie released his guests, he brought up another devastating “freeze” in the Senate — this one involving embattled Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell.

“Our correspondent, Kilmeny Dukhat was down on Capitol Hill, and pressed Mitch McConnell [for answers], and watch this,” Higbie demanded of panelists former asst. attorney general Theo Wold and former U.S. attorney Jay Town.

“Senator McConnell, can I get your quick reaction to the midterms, the GOP's midterm losses?” asked Dukhat, speaking with McConnell, who was seated in a wheelchair while the Newsmax Chyron “Mitch McConnell Freezes Again” flared beneath the video.

“What do you think is going to change?” Dukhat pressed, but she received only a vacant stare from the 84-year-old senator, who has suffered health issues even before his mysterious three-month absence from the Senate. He has since been accused of being led through Senate votes by GOP handlers.

“Do you think that Republicans will get anything done in the lame duck session?” Dukhat prodded. But again she received no answer, only an awkward pause as McConnell’s gaze appeared to melt into a disengaged rictus.

“That can't be legal! He's a vegetable,” wailed Higbie at the end of the video.

“Two things here, Carl,” said Wold. “No. 1: this isn't just an ideological conflict for the soul of the Republican Party now. It's a generational one. We're tired of the geriatric gerontocracy ruling, the conservative movement. No. 2: the idea that [Sen. Thom] Tillis and these folks now want to negotiate on things like amnesty with the Democrats. Look, you can't negotiate with a tiger when your face is inside of its mouth, okay? What we need now are fighters, fighters who are not wheelchair bound, but who can actually stand on their own two feet.”

“Yeah. Unbelievable. Well, we'll see what happens — or doesn't happen in the next two months and then the next two years,” grumbled Higbie.

“It looks like they're just going to wheel him out in emergency situations when they absolutely need his vote,” said longtime conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes in September. “The compassionate response to seeing Mitch McConnell is, ‘oh, no, let him retire. This is almost elder abuse.’

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NBC News reports that National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton is slandestinely maneuvering to hire back employees fired after drastic cuts in the department’s workforce were enacted under his fired predecessor Bill Pulte, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

“Clayton is asking some employees who had been let go to return to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, these people said. They said the effort is so far focused on employees who had been detailed to the ODNI but were sent back to one of the 18 spy agencies the office oversees as part of the staff cuts,” reports NBC.

Pulte had a reputation of “move fast and breaks things," as one CNN reporter said earlier this year. And he moved quick to clean house for President Donald Trump.

Trump told reporters in June that he believed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is “unnecessary and or too big.”

“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, about those who worked in the Joe Biden and Barack Obama administrations.

When the Wall Street Journal asked Trump whether he wanted Pulte to start firing people, and Trump said he wants him to “start the process.”

But the department appears to be more essential than Trump and Pulte initially treated it. The office of the DNI oversees 18 intelligence agencies from the CIA to the NSA and others. It was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the investigative commission found various intelligence departments weren't able to connect the dots between details each agency discovered.

The ODNI relies on a legion of employees who are detailed to the office from other intelligence agencies. But hundreds of employees were fired, offered early retirement or ordered to return to their home agencies as part of that major workforce downsizing by former directors Tulsi Gabbard and Pulte.

“The effort by Clayton to approach some former staff members about coming back suggests the new director is seeking to introduce a degree of stability to the ODNI after months of turmoil, including major personnel cutbacks, the firing of senior intelligence analysts and turf wars with the CIA and the FBI, according to current and former intelligence officials,” report NBC News. “During Gabbard’s tenure, the ODNI was often marginalized in administration discussions. She announced her resignation in May.”

NBC News added that the ODNI, which had a workforce of slightly more than 2,000 at the start of the Trump administration, “is now down to fewer than 1,000 employees, the people with knowledge of the matter. The sources did not know how many former employees have been approached by the ODNI to ask them to return to the agency.

It’s not enough that Americans are saying the economy is in the doldrums and their paychecks are not keeping up with inflation. It’s also that if the paycheck stops coming, there’s a diminished chance of finding a new one anytime soon.

“A disturbing employment trend is hiding beneath the latest strong job numbers,” reports CNBC. “Americans who lose their jobs these days are facing a harsh new problem: It’s getting harder to find another one quickly.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Friday jobs report, the average jobless worker’s bout of unemployment surpassed 27 weeks in October on a seasonally adjusted basis. That’s the same as a job search lasting nearly seven months. This is moving into the 12-month realm of a whole year, and CNBC says it’s “the longest outside of the pandemic period since 2016, when the U.S. labor market was finally getting back on track after the 2008 financial crisis.”

“About 2 million Americans have been without work for at least 27 weeks,” reports CNBC, citing the BLS report. “People in this category are referred to as the ‘long-term unemployed’ and accounted for 27.6 percent of all jobless workers in October, the highest share since late 2021.”

“…[T]here is no mistake in the trend,” said Cory Stahle, senior economist at hiring platform Indeed.

Workers stuck on the sidelines are a casualty of Trump’s ‘low-hire, low-fire’ job market, in which “companies are hesitant to lay workers off, but aren’t adding them either,” said CNBC. “Research shows that Americans who experience long-term unemployment face depleted savings, lower earnings potential over time and declining mental health.

Worse, former employees who are unemployed for extended periods risk falling into a “self-perpetuating cycle,” according to Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond researchers.

“Time spent unemployed may itself reduce the probability of finding a job, perhaps because skills depreciate, networks thin or employers interpret long unemployment durations as a negative signal,” the researchers warned.

Seven months off the workforce also marks the jarring time when workers stop being able to claim most — if not all — of their government unemployment benefits, which generally end after 26 weeks in a year.

“Now, the average unemployed person takes longer to find a job than their benefits would last,” said Stahle. “That is a really key point of this.

Add to this the highly publicized reports that Disney is removing thousands of jobs, as well as news of further layoffs at American Express, and it becomes clear why workers are picking up a soured feeling about the Trump economy.

Bloomberg reports President Donald Trump appears to have put his war on Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on hold this week after Democrats swept Republicans out of their House and Senate majorities.

Lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department actually joined Cook’s attorneys in asking a federal judge to put the legal battle over Trump’s scheme to fire Cook on hold as the White House prepares to set a hearing on the litigation in December.

“Legal teams for DOJ and Cook filed a brief, joint report on Friday to U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb saying the court should pause upcoming deadlines and that they’d come back to her with another update in early January,” reports Bloomberg.

Trump announced that he was firing Cook “effective immediately,” citing allegations of mortgage fraud. If successful, Cook’s removal would allow Trump to select a replacement more open to interest rate cuts.

Cook has denied wrongdoing, and she has accused Trump of trying to remove her in a bid to undermine the central bank’s independence. Trump has openly attacked both Cook and former Chair Jerome Powell for refusing his demand to cut interest rates.

Critics like Bulwark correspondent Andrew Egger described Trump’s pretext for removing Cook as “ridiculous.”

“Trump has relied on a loyal functionary wielding a formerly nonpartisan executive-branch post as a political weapon,” said Egger, referring to Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who submitted the research to the White House suggesting a possible argument against Cook.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided against Trump earlier this year, ruling that Trump failed to give Cook a legitimate opportunity to defend herself before initially trying to fire her last year. And the justices allowed Cook to stay in her post and bounced the case back to Judge Cobb.

The conservative-leaning Roberts Court has rarely hesitated to cede Trump new power in his first nine months of office, particularly when it comes to firing federal employees or inhibiting the work of federal agencies created by Congress. The Court has granted the Trump administration requests to block lower court rulings in more than 70 percent of cases brought by the administration that were decided via the shadow docket.

Nevertheless, the litigious president revived his effort to oust her in August. Bloomberg reports that there’s been “no action in the case in the months that followed,” and Cobb, is likely to keep the proceedings frozen as long as the government and Cook agree that’s the best course of action.

But the case appears to be heading to a stalemate, as Bloomberg reports Trump “convened a White House committee to investigate whether he has ‘cause’ to remove her — specifically digging into the unproven mortgage-fraud allegations Trump relied on to fire her the first time.

The panel is set to meet Dec. 14, according to a White House official. At this point, Cook and the White House are discussing the “specifics and details” for how Trump’s “committee of inquiry” will proceed, the lawyers wrote in Friday’s filing.

Former Trump Homeland Security analyst and whistleblower Miles Taylor says the billionaires who paid Trump’s big bills for political favors are panicking — and they should be.

This is because the incoming Democrat majority is already drawing up a second blue tsunami of investigations into corporations that spent the last two years sopping up to President Donald Trump, said Taylor on Friday. And the executives who oversaw the various Trump influence campaigns are now bracing “for an onslaught.”

“I know many of the people who’ve got twisting stomachs this morning. I used to work with them,” said Taylor. “After I left government, I spent a period of time advising some of the top emerging technology, AI, defense, space, and biotech companies in the country on how to deal with Washington, D.C. (and often why to stay away from it). Far too many of them were eager to become ‘MAGA’ once Trump was re-elected, despite warnings about how quickly power changes hands in Washington.”

But Trump is “obviously susceptible to being bought off, whether it’s through flattery or funding,” said Taylor. “I saw it myself inside his first administration. Hell, everyone saw it. The man is a malfeasance magnet. And the tech titans and billionaires were all too willing to influence a man who was ready to be influenced.”

And now, he said, “those CEOs have no idea what’s about to hit them” after showering “the president with literal gifts.”

“They wrote checks to his inaugural fund, underwrote the monument he is building to himself on the White House lawn, aired documentaries about his wife (and paid her for the privilege), settled lawsuits they should’ve won, and showed up in the Oval Office bearing tributes made of actual gold,” griped Taylor. “All the while, those same companies were asking the federal government for billions of dollars in contracts, tariff exemptions, or regulatory sign-off on blockbuster mergers.”

The name for this is “corruption,” said Taylor. And soon the nation will see “evidence of a more damning word: bribery.”

Mark Zuckerberg threw Trump off Facebook In 2021 because of the risk he posed to society. But three and a half years later he was “wiring a $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and sitting beside the president at a White House dinner.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai blasted Trump’s January 6 insurrection. But by 2025, he was at dinner and praising the man behind it.

Jeff Bezos offered to strap Trump to a Blue Origin rocket and send him to space. But this year he was describing Trump as “more mature,” despite Trump calling Obama a “traitor” and sharing AI images of himself “escorting a handcuffed alien, kissing a statue of Jesus, carved into Mount Rushmore, looming over Greenland, and wading shirtless through the Reflecting Pool beside a woman in a bikini,” said Taylor.

And Elon Musk was spending roughly $290 million to put Trump in office after initially advising Trump to leave politics.

All that groveling was embarrassing, said Taylor, but a secret donor list recently revealed Apple and Nvidia each put in $25 million in the $330 million fund Trump raised to “bulldoze the East Wing of the White House and build himself a gilded party hall.” Nvidia even asked that its gift be kept anonymous — like at least $77 million from other donors who insisted their names also be kept hidden.

“I’ve helped run corporate giving initiatives at major companies before,” said Taylor. “I’ve steered money to wounded veterans and anti-poverty work. This was not that. Not a single soul at Nvidia believed the Donald J. Trump Ballroom was the most pressing social need in America.”

It’s clear why the billionaires are panicking, said Taylor.

“For every one of these acts, there’s a paper trail somewhere. Each major company has a D.C. office, and each of those offices spent late 2024 and all of 2025 trading emails, texts, and Slack messages about how to position their company with the incoming president,” he said.

And now Democrats have access to them. In fact, Taylor suggested the first thing Dems do is fire off document preservation requests to “every single one of these companies.”

The billionaires involved will “be rewarded” for “pay[ing] off a president who was abusing his power and torching the U.S. Constitution,” said Taylor. “Just not in the way you hoped.”

First Lady Melania Trump is taking the spotlight just days after President Trump’s GOP was utterly wiped out in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Amazon dropped the trailer for the two-part docuseries, and it is quite bizarre. The series follows the first lady’s January documentary feature film of the same name, which critics widely panned and reportedly grossed just under $17 million against a $75 million budget.

In the docuseries trailer, she says, "Everybody wants to be close to power, and sometimes it can be very dangerous.” It also features clips of Barron Trump, who Melania describes as her "priority." Melania is seen in a lot of fashionable outfits alongside her husband as they move across America. As jazzy action-noir music plays over some police sirens, the first lady can be seen on Air Force One with a 25-carat chip on her shoulder.

The trailer cuts from one image of a glamorous White House Melania to an airport tarmac version of her before showing footage of an unnamed town laid waste by what appears to be a natural disaster, which she describes as “devastating.”

Sound bites from Melania are interspersed throughout. She offers up such platitudes as “I’m a mother, a wife, also first lady” and “America deserves the best.” She also takes a shot at the media, saying "they want gossip" before describing it as "noise."

“The Series reveals never-before-told stories, offering unprecedented insight into Melania Trump’s life,” says Amazon in its press release, “including the extraordinary days immediately following the 47th Presidential Inauguration.”

The two episodes of the docuseries have their own themes. Episode one, “Family & Trust,” has Melania setting priorities in the run-up to becoming America’s first lady. “But inside the White House, trust is tested, and the incoming First Lady must protect those closest to her while navigating the demands of power,” the description says.

Then there is “Pride & Honor,” the second episode, which has Melania setting “her mission in motion for the American people.” The press release goes on to say the series will take viewers beyond what they have already seen with material not previously made public.

A voiceover from an uncredited man in the trailer is more direct: “On November 20th, experience new, never-before-seen moments.” All this comes on the heels of what Amazon calls “the historic success of MELANIA, The Film.”

Melania announced the documentary in September on Fox & Friends. Brett Ratner, who directed the 2026 documentary, teased the docuseries in an August Instagram post. “It will come out this year, and it will be very different what is in the movie,” she said at the time. During the interview, the first lady also said that "there’s some private questions that I will answer that people never heard before.”

White House staff shakeups are common after a midterm drubbing, but few Republicans apparently expected President Donald Trump to remove one of his more sober aides and replacing her with a ‘dark lord’ lightning rod for litigation and congressional outcry, said Sources Say reporter Juliegrace Brufke.

Trump announced on Truth Social that he was moving controversial Stephen Miller up to chief of staff and jettisoning veteran Susie Wiles to his campaign wing.

"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. 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!" Trump announced online.

The president had said three weeks ago that there was “zero chance” he’d replace Susie Wiles, however. When asked, the president had even told Politico “TOTAL FAKE NEWS,” and he called Wiles “my loyal and longest serving Chief of Staff.” He’d even claimed she’d be around “for a long time.”

“Turns out ‘a long time’ was about three weeks,” reports Brufke.

But Miller is nothing if not controversial himself. He is a top Trump aide and a leading force behind the immigration enforcement operations that lead to the deaths of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good at the hands of federal agents earlier this year.

Immediately after Pretti’s killing, Miller called Pretti “a would-be assassin,” even though videos appeared to contradict claims by Trump officials that Pretti had attacked agents.

And not all Republicans are thrilled about the promotion, reports Brufke.

“‘Yuk,’ one lawmaker told us,” said Brufke, adding that even before news broke of Miller’s promotion GOP lawmakers were blaming Miller’s border policies for the party’s losses on Tuesday, referring to him as “the prince of darkness.”

“After my surprise, my first thought was the President doesn’t plan to back down the next two years,” said another lawmaker.

“Let’s double down on stupid,” a senior GOP member told Brufke, who then added that “we’ve heard that one a lot this week.”

Still more GOP lawmakers delivered major venom and harsh language at the prospect of Miller being the face of the Trump White House.

“F—— idiot,” one Republican lawmaker told Brifke, referring possibly to either Miller or Trump for promoting him.

“Buckle the f—— up. Things are about to get wild,” a GOP operative said.

Meanwhile, Brufke said Democrats are chomping at the bit for a fight with Miller, with Miller appearing to “have only sharpened the Democratic appetite for investigations.”

She then cited likely-soon-to-be House Oversight Chairman Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) posting ““Lawyer up,” on X.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal that once helped power Donald Trump’s comeback played a real role in Republicans’ midterm rout on Tuesday, according to GOP insiders, pollsters and operatives who spoke to The Atlantic.

A Republican close to the White House described the Epstein issue as the “nuclear fuel” behind a new brand of American populism. It first lifted Trump, the magazine reported, but this week, it turned against him, “bringing him down to the lowest point of his presidency,” as many of his voters came to see his handling of the case as a betrayal.

Republican pollster Brent Buchanan told The Atlantic that Epstein became “a proxy for corruption” in the campaign. Rich Baris, director of Big Data Poll, traced the beginning of the fracture in the MAGA coalition to July 2025, when the Justice Department and FBI announced there would be no further Epstein disclosures. He said that the Iran war following the Epstein scandal made it “a devastating one-two punch.”

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to release the Epstein files and stocked his administration with figures who had stoked interest in the case, including Kash Patel, Dan Bongino and JD Vance. Once in power, the process sputtered. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the supposed client list was on her desk, only for the administration to reverse course months later with little explanation.

Trump then lashed out at his own base on Truth Social, writing of past supporters who believed the story: “I don’t want their support anymore!” Some former backers told pollsters that deepened their suspicions. Trump later tried to stop Congress from voting to release the files, relenting only once enough Republicans broke ranks to pass the measure.

Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the party should have voted to release the files sooner, calling the election as close to an “extinction-level event” for Republicans in parts of the country as any in probably a century.

Democrats seized on the issue, branding opponents the “Epstein class.” AdImpact tracked at least $76 million in ads mentioning Epstein, overwhelmingly from Democrats. Epstein surfaced in ads in at least 79 races across 26 states.

The White House pushed back. Spokesperson Lauren Bis said that “President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.” The Atlantic also noted the Iran war and soaring gas prices may have been most voters’ top concerns.

Now Democrats face their own test. Rep. Jamie Raskin, expected to chair the House Judiciary Committee, plans to press the Justice Department to release roughly 2.5 million remaining Epstein-related documents. The department says it has released everything the law requires.

Robert Garcia, the incoming House Oversight chair, summed up his plans in two words: “Lawyer up.”