America First, Consultants Abroad: The Wiles Wobble

Opinion. Every figure below is sourced in the box at the end; the conclusions are the author's.

In the United States, nineteen days before the November 3 midterms, President Donald Trump has been asking allies what they think of his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and floating names to replace her, according to four people with direct knowledge of the conversations who spoke to Politico Playbook on Thursday, October 15, 2026. The names floated include Stephen Miller, Randy Levine, Steve Witkoff, Bill Pulte and Kevin McCarthy.

Trump answered on the record: "TOTAL FAKE NEWS." Wiles, he said, is his "loyal and longest serving Chief of Staff" and has his "COMPLETE confidence."

Fine. Take the denial at face value. The more interesting question is not who sits in the corner office. It is what started the whispering.

The receipt from Banja Luka

On October 6, the New York Times reported that James Blair and Chris LaCivita, the two men who run MAGA Inc., the super PAC at the center of Trump's midterm operation, spent days in Republika Srpska, the Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ahead of its October 4 elections. According to the Times, each was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, through a Washington law firm retained by Republika Srpska's government, to advise on voting issues. The Times describes that government as aligned with Vladimir Putin.

Blair is a former White House deputy chief of staff. LaCivita co-managed the 2024 campaign. While they were in the Balkans, the president was crisscrossing the country trying to help his party avoid a blowout.

On October 7, Trump wrote on Truth Social that they are "outside consultants" who "do not work for me," and added: "if there's a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!" Days later, by several accounts, he said he had found no conflict.

Politico Playbook now reports that Wiles' critics have been forwarding exactly these headlines to the president, along with the fact that her daughter, Katie Wiles, is a partner at Continental Strategy, a lobbying firm that signed a $35,000 a month contract to represent Republika Srpska. The firm says she did not lobby U.S. officials on its behalf.

Legal is the problem

Here is what bothers me, and it is not a crime, because there is no evidence of one. It is the business model. You win an election on America First. Then the people who ran the campaign sell their skills, at six figures each, to a foreign government's election, during your own midterm season. Every word of that is legal in Washington. That is exactly what voters meant when they said the swamp.

Washington has a word for this: consulting. The rest of the country has another one, and it is not polite.

I'm French. I've seen this movie. In Paris the revolving door between ministries, consulting firms and foreign clients is so normal that nobody even asks anymore. The populist right in Europe built its whole case on that door. It would be a strange joke if the American version of the movement installed one of its own.

Who pays the bill

Firing a chief of staff nineteen days before an election would not answer the question. It would change the subject. If the problem is people "monetizing his ecosystem," the fix is a rule, not a scapegoat: no paid work for foreign governments for anyone running the president's political operation, period, written down and public.

Democrats should hold the applause. The rule does not exist for their side either, and nobody there has proposed it.

Verdict

The denial may be true. Wiles may stay. But the story is not about one woman in the West Wing. It is about a movement that promised to close the door and then let its own people walk through it with a briefcase. Nineteen days is enough time to write a rule. It is also enough time to sign another contract.