Susie Wiles Told MAHA’s Calley Means: ‘We Need Money for the Midterms.’ Republicans Lost Them Anyway.

Calley Means helped build the Make America Healthy Again movement, then walked out of the Trump White House on Oct. 22. On Friday he sat down with Joe Rogan for more than two hours and finally said why. His target wasn’t President Trump, and it wasn’t Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It was Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and the small circle of political operatives around her.

“Susie said to me many times, ‘We need money for the midterms, Calley. We need money for the midterms,’” Means told Rogan. “So when you convince yourself that money is the most important thing for the midterms … then you can justify almost anything.”

Three days earlier, Republicans lost the House and the Senate. The same day, Trump announced on Truth Social that Wiles is moving over to his political operation and Stephen Miller will take her job Monday.

Who Means says really ran the White House

Means opened with a claim he said nobody would dispute: this White House is “the most centralized control up to the Chief of Staff Office of any administration in American history.” In his telling, Wiles had “a stranglehold on any policy decision,” and “no policy decision gets done without her office giving it the okay.” Cabinet secretaries, he said, spent meetings “constantly worrying about how to get on Susie’s good side.”

He then went down the list by name. Wiles, he said, spent her career as a top lobbyist and consultant, with clients including the drug and pesticide industries and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Deputy James Blair, who left to run the midterm effort, is a longtime consultant who “has taken a lot of money from industries like the sugar industry.” Means also named aides Walker Barrett and Richard Walters, and Trump’s 2024 campaign co-chief Chris LaCivita, who he said works from the outside as a lobbyist and consultant paid by special interests.

Then there’s Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster. Means said “every single policy issue goes through him,” and that Fabrizio’s own website shows he takes money from Pepsi and drug companies. When Means pitched healthier school meals, he said Fabrizio waved him off: “MAHA’s not really a big part of our strategy.”

The strategy instead, according to Means, was redistricting and a campaign message built on no tax on tips, affordability and the tax cut in the One Big Beautiful Bill. “I don’t think Trump got shot in the face and almost killed and has gone through everything he’s gone through to run on these gimmicks,” he said.

The money trail we could check

Means made two money claims about lobbying firms tied to Wiles. Here’s what the federal disclosure records show.

Ballard Partners, where Wiles worked before the White House, took in a record $88.1 million in federal lobbying fees in 2025, about 3.5 times its 2024 haul, according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of Senate lobbying reports. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi also came from Ballard. Means put the firm’s 2026 take at $98 million and called that “the down payment.” That 2026 figure is his, and full-year filings aren’t in yet.

Continental Strategy, where Wiles’s daughter Katie is a partner, was hired by 129 clients for $27.5 million in 2025, per OpenSecrets’ firm profile. Means said the firm had “almost zero” before Trump returned and “shot up to $30-ish million.” His bigger charge, that “if a company hired Susie’s daughter, then that was getting a high priority” and that it “was an open discussion in the White House,” is his account alone. Wiles hasn’t answered it publicly.

Think of it like a restaurant where the owner never sees the kitchen. Means says the people running the kitchen were also selling the reservations.

What Means is not saying

Here’s the part the headlines skip. Means went out of his way to defend Trump. “I don’t think President Trump knows about most of this,” he said. “He can’t be everywhere at once.” He said Trump’s administration had been “infiltrated by the very people that he energized voters to say he would get out of D.C.”

He also accused Wiles’s team of setting Trump up to take the fall. “There’s a mass effort among staffers right now, senior staffers, to throw him under the bus,” Means said. Before the votes were even counted, he said, they were leaking quotes praising their own strategy. “You guys did not win this election,” Means said of 2024. “President Trump won this election.”

And he didn’t spare the other side. Means said Chuck Schumer told hospital lobbyists he’d have their back, and that former Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries staffers are already cashing in. “This is a structural problem,” he said, not “a Trump problem or a Democratic problem.”

The White House answer

Wiles has not responded publicly. White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster didn’t take on Means’s claims when The New York Times asked. She pointed instead to the administration’s new dietary guidelines and its push to pull artificial ingredients out of food.

Those wins are real. Means listed them himself when he resigned: Dietary Guidelines reform, removing soda from SNAP, removing food dyes and overhauling government food buying. His argument is that they came in spite of the political shop, not because of it.

Why it matters

The MAHA moms were a big piece of the coalition that put Trump back in office in 2024. Means is telling them their issues were treated as a fundraising problem. With Miller taking over Monday and Wiles moving to the political side, the question for the next two years is simple: does the new chief of staff put the voters’ agenda back ahead of the donors’?

Means put it bluntly: Americans “didn’t vote to have people like this” running the policy shop.