We’re sorry to see Susie Wiles out as White House chief of staff: She was crucial to President Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office and the excellent start to his second term.

You could not ask for a more loyal gatekeeper — one dedicated to forwarding Trump’s core agenda without pride or prejudice — nor a hand more deft at balancing attack and defense, conflict and cooperation.

With her out battling cancer, removing her for large tracts of time, it makes no sense to blame Wiles for the GOP midterm massacre; others in the inner circle plainly bear more blame.

News that she’ll be replaced by Stephen Miller removes almost all hope that the nation’s partisan warfare will ease after the elections. 

Miller represents the sharpest fighting edge of the Trump administration. When Trump says he wants to do deals with the Democrats, he has signaled that he’s going to bring his pit bull along.

He probably feels he needs the menace of Miller to take on the Democrat majorities and fight back the inevitable tsunami of investigations that will flood the White House in January. 

Yet the appointment is going to raise some Republican hackles and increase the odds of an internecine war.

For example, while former Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem and her consigliere Corey Lewandowski are most responsible for last winter’s ICE debacles in Minneapolis, Miller has always pushed the kind of full-on immigration-enforcement raids that flipped the issue from a plus to Republicans in 2024 to one for Democrats this year.

On top of that, Miller and Trump are now guaranteed to push the boundaries of executive power, to the point that even those who believe in a strong executive could instead see a lawless one.

In short, the president is circling the wagons in a way that’s likely to leave a lot of potential allies on the outside.

It also signals that Trump has decided that he wants to appeal to his shrinking base, rather than attempt to rebuild the wider coalition that swept him to power but soundly rejected him and his party this week. 

Democrats’ reaction to Miller is telling. House Speaker-to-be Hakeem Jeffries wasted no time in calling him a “malignant tumor”; incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called him “the architect of the most barbaric, inhumane policies of this administration. Trump couldn’t have made a worse choice.”

They never showered such blindly partisan praise on Susie Wiles. 

But it’s probably the reaction Trump was hoping for.

Those of you who were wishing for a type of Christmas Day truce after a decade of punishing political trench warfare are out of luck.

The coming spectacle will be more bloody than a cage fight on the White House lawn.