President Donald Trump's own chief of staff is steering White House leaks that break sharply with the president, author Michael Wolff alleged.
During a Saturday episode of "Inside Trump's Head," Michael Wolff pointed to two same-day stories, one in the New York Times and one in The Washington Post, that both built on unnamed advisers contradicting Trump. The first had aides pushing back on Trump's dismissal of AI fears as a "hoax." The second had them warning he should be far more worried about the midterms.
Trump "usually reacts very badly to leaks, but the nature of this leak, and the nature of the way it's expressed, both of them, the AI story, and the midterm story, is 'advisers,' not 'a adviser,'" Wolff said. "So they're speaking to, in both instances, more than one person, and where there's more than one person... that means it's likely to come from the top."
Wolff concluded that he saw the hand of chief of staff Susie Wiles behind it because of how it was coordinated. He suggested that Wiles might be trying to push the president to act a certain way, contrary to how he has been acting.
"I detect the hand of Susie Wiles in this," he said. "What he's saying about AI is a problem. What can we do here? Well, let's retail this kind of story that we are trying to talk to him, and we're protecting ourselves because we don't want to be seen like people saying this is a hoax if the world is going to be destroyed."
He added, "They would not be leaking it, I mean, if this was advice, everyday advice," and said that it signals a bigger break with the president.
"That's a big thing, that the chief of staff, the advisers within the White House, the West Wing itself, are taking issue with the president," Wolff said. "In this case, advisers saying something that is quite contrary to what the president is saying, that's a signal moment. That means something."
He described the break as something the West Wing had not risked before. "The signal that is being sent here is a signal nearly of rebellion," Wolff warned.