Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.

They sang it in Munchkinland when the house came down. Now, a version of that chorus is being whispered in Washington, getting louder with every verse. The tune is for the character Susie Wiles spent years building: the lobbyist-in-chief, and big corporate America’s best buddy in the West Wing. She inked the monikers for herself: “the ice maiden” or “ice queen.” Now, she’s gone.

In mid-October, however, President Trump had said there was “zero chance” he was replacing her. He seems to have been broadly unaware of, well, anything she kept from him. Wiles has a reputation in Washington for hiding some of the most important information from the President. The things that were unpopular? She tamped the stories down. The critiques he needed to hear from his base? She muffled them with extreme prejudice. The grift going on in his inner court? “Tut-tut, simply jealous gossip, Mr. President. Now about that war…”

You cannot, however, say you weren’t warned. In fact, The National Pulse is today revealing that we were in fact banned from covering latter Trump rallies during the 2024 campaign, at the behest of Susie Wiles, because of our objective criticisms of her and of her campaign co-chief Chris LaCivita. Internalise that for a second: the campaign didn’t ban the BBC, or the New York Times, or Al Jazeera. It banned The National Pulse. One of the most conservative, MAGA publications in the world.