And so the untouchable Susie Wiles lost her job at the White House. The allegations against her daughter Katie

Following his defeat in the mid-term elections, US President Donald Trump has made his first sacking: that of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who has been replaced by her deputy Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner. Wiles has been an adviser to Trump since 2021 and served as his campaign manager for the 2024 presidential election. The two have been working together since 2016, when Wiles helped him win in Florida while serving as his campaign manager in the state; she appeared to enjoy a degree of freedom unheard of in the Trump world. In an interview with Vanity Fair months ago, she stated that Trump had “the personality of an alcoholic”, and despite this, the White House had closed ranks around her.

During her tenure, Wiles had become one of the main points of access to the Administration for large corporations: she was highly regarded on Wall Street, so much so that JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was in frequent contact with her. Furthermore, she was known for encouraging companies to invest in the United States: after a foreign car manufacturer had announced a new plant in the country, Wiles had sent messages of thanks to the organisation’s managers. However, this closeness was heavily criticised by those within the Administration. During an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, Calley Means, an official close to the recently resigned Health Secretary Robert Kennedy, accused Wiles of bowing to pressure from lobbyists, prioritising campaign fundraising over the health of American citizens. According to Means, Wiles allegedly thwarted his attempt to make children’s diets healthier, citing the need to secure funding from the sugar industry. He went on to claim that Wiles’s team had relaxed the standards for the approval of nicotine-based products – a priority for tobacco companies, which donated more than $20 million to Republicans in 2026. Means refrained from criticising either Kennedy or Trump, placing all the blame on Wiles, who he alleged had thrown the White House doors wide open to lobbyists, thereby treating the president like a child. Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, who after the election victory had already advised the Trump family to “get themselves a good lawyer,” has promised to investigate the corruption allegations raised by Means. Attorney General Todd Blanche, however, took a completely different view, stating that he had no interest in “something someone said on a podcast.”

However, the allegations are intertwined with the sensitive issue of Wiles’s daughter, Katie, who works for a US lobbying firm: Continental Strategy, founded by Carlos Trujillo, an adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016 and subsequently ambassador to the Organisation of American States during the tycoon’s first term. The firm has signed a contract worth $35,000 a month to represent Republika Srpska, the autonomous Bosnian Serb enclave within Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has a pro-Russian government. The firm has stated that Katie Wiles visited the enclave, but on behalf of a US company, and that she did not lobby US government officials on behalf of the enclave. Over the past two years, Republika Srpska has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbyists aligned with the MAGA movement, in an attempt to lift sanctions and push for a review of the Dayton Accords, which brought the war in Bosnia to an end in 1995.