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James Blair is one of the most important people in the White House you’ve never heard of — yet.
As White House deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs, he’s got a rather expansive portfolio. In a nutshell, he oversees the White House’s messaging to Americans, obsesses over politics and public opinion and even helps corral lawmakers to get Trump’s agenda through Congress. Even if it means asserting just a little pressure on his own party.
As one of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’s deputies, Blair — known to his colleagues as “The Oracle” — is at the helm of a Trump administration that’s so far operating a lot more efficiently than the first time around.
I sat down with Blair in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Wednesday in a taping of the Playbook Deep Dive podcast. There, Blair pulled back the curtain on how Trump 2.0 has managed to do so much, in just two months; Wiles’s style as chief of staff; the White House reaction to the latest Democratic dysfunction on Capitol Hill; the administration’s hope to ease tariff concerns and the president’s true strategy behind threatening judges with impeachment.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive Producer Kara Tabor. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here:
Listen to this episode of Playbook Deep Dive on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm told by your fellow Trump campaign staff that they had a nickname for you on the campaign trail. They called you “The Oracle.” What is that about?
That started with my dear friend, Tony Fabrizio, years ago, which is kind of half pejorative, half friendly.
So basically you didn't know what you were talking about?
I would say that the pejorative side is “He's a know-it-all.” I would say it's [also] probably because they think I'm actually right a lot. I'm known for my strongly held opinions and predictions.
President Trump is in the Oval Office right now. So I guess you can say, “I told you so.”
Whether people love President Trump or hate him, the undisputed fact is that you guys have been extremely successful in following through on your campaign promises. How have you been able to do this so quickly?
He had four years out of office to think about what he wanted to accomplish and how he was going to accomplish it. And he educated the team and his leadership on that over time. And then you had a group of people — Stephen Miller comes to mind — who spent a lot of that time working in hopeful preparation of being back in the White House and being ready to pick up the work that ended when he left office. And he was really well-prepared. Then momentum builds momentum. So once you start to get wins, once you start to get confident and comfortable in what you’re doing and the abilities to succeed, I think the whole administration right now is, in certain ways, positively competing to achieve something.
You’ve been close with chief of staff Susie Wiles for a long time. You worked with her well before you worked with the Trump campaign, back to your time with Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida. There is this perception in the media and some GOP circles that she is something of a gatekeeper. Is that true?
No. Honestly, she’s the opposite of a gatekeeper in the way some traditional chiefs of staff have been, or even previous chiefs of staff to President Trump are said to have operated internally.
Susie is good about getting the group beneath the president to work together and be aligned and stay focused on the key mission. When you're in the right role and you have a competence, she really gives a wide berth for you to operate as a manager. I think that is something the president enjoys. That is the way she’s always been in all the different iterations I’ve worked with her over close to a decade. And so, gatekeeping in the traditional sense, no.
People have said that this White House is more disciplined. The campaign was more disciplined than they had seen before with President Trump because there were fewer leaks and a lot of people say that’s because of Susie Wiles. How does she enforce order with the staff?
I think that she does a better job than most people I’ve worked with in life — if not all — in setting out a direction and getting the core group, the decision-making apparatus, however big or small it is, to really work as a team.
The worst thing you can be around Susie is an intentionally siloed or solo actor. She expects you to be part of the team. And when that works — and it does — people gain respect for each other. People just want to do their job. And everyone just wants their colleagues to mutually respect that people are trying to do their job.
I think you start at a higher baseline than you do with most bosses and managers. And then — I mean, the president has said it — she is the Ice Maiden if she must be.
What does that look like? Does she yell?
No. She doesn’t raise her voice. She doesn’t need to. Susie has a way of expressing a deep disappointment [laughs] in a way that’s maybe more painful than yelling.
For a month now, Elon Musk and other MAGA influencers have talked about Congress impeaching judges who are blocking various rulings, and notably President Trump didn’t join course until Tuesday. Can you tell us what changed for him and how he reacted to this ruling regarding sending these alleged gang members to El Salvador?
The president is the chief executive and the executive power is vested in him by the Constitution and the Constitution lays out a framework for the Supreme Court, not the entire judiciary system below it.
The president has been uniquely victim to corrupt, highly politicized, obviously partisan judges, both when he was out of office — one could argue in the first term, too — and now. I just saw a stat today on X that said some extraordinary number of stays on an executive, like almost 70 percent or something, have been on President Trump. Like in history.
But isn’t that because — you guys boast yourselves — he is doing stuff that no other president has even tried?
It’s because there's a whole array of left-wing groups that are well-funded that circuit shop and look for left-wing radical judges who are ideologically against what we are doing. They’re legislating from the bench. The president is making a point. The judiciary should rule based on what the law says.
It is a tactic for judges to throw a stay on something so they can bounce it around in court for three years. Maybe it’ll end up at the Supreme Court. During that time, we won’t be able to deport any gang members because these judges have decided so. And they’ve effectively neutered an entire plank of our administration and the chief executive for the majority of his term. They know what they're doing.
I spent President Trump’s first term writing a bunch of stories about how he was using the courts to stonewall Democratic investigations of him and that actually helped him in a way and now it’s on the other foot here. Does the president expect Speaker Mike Johnson and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to actually start impeachment proceedings when they come back to the Hill?
I think it’ll be up to the speaker to figure out what can be passed or not. It’s the speaker's job and I won't speak for what the speaker’s opinion of that is.
The thing that is important right now is the president is highlighting a critical issue and he is doing what he does, which is shine a big old spotlight on something that otherwise may be obscure or only sold through the mainstream media in a way that misrepresents his position.
The administration has argued that the courts have no power over stopping them from firing federal workers, stopping them from reducing spending that had been appropriated by Congress, curbing their actions on foreign policy or deportations. So where can the courts actually check the president’s power?
Ultimately the Supreme Court will be the ones to answer that question. But there should be recourse. There is a recourse system through impeachment. We cannot have the will of the people, the will of the majority of this country — by both the popular vote and the electoral college — usurped by judges that nobody elects. And ultimately the people will render judgment on this at the ballot box. If people think judges should have all-knowing and all-consuming power, then I guess they’ll tell us that in 2026. But I think that’s a debate we're willing to encourage in the public.
I asked Hill Republicans about this and the reaction I got was as follows: “Idiotic” was the one-word response I got from Sen. John Kennedy, who is not exactly a RINO. He's a Trump ally. You have Sen. Josh Hawley telling me that “If Republicans impeach judges they disagreed with, they'd be stuck in perpetual impeachment hearings.” John Cornyn told me, “You don't impeach judges who make decisions you disagree with because that happens all the time. What you do is appeal and if you're right, then you win.” What is your reaction to this? Because it isn’t just Chief Justice John Roberts who’s saying this judge shouldn't be impeached. It’s some of your own members on the Hill.
My reaction to that is that the members are entitled to their opinion, including our members. And I think we expect a wide variety of opinions.
Do you plan to call them?
What we’re encouraging is a public debate, and I think it’s a reasonable public debate. And I mean, absolutely no disrespect to any of those senators who are wonderful people that I’m friends with. They weren’t elected by the popular vote of this country. There is one person who over 77 million Americans have said, “I want this guy to lead and I want this agenda.”
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So it sounds like you guys want to make a point about being discontented with these judges. That you’re not necessarily looking for them to be impeached.
No. To be clear, I think the president is right. We should impeach activist partisan judges. The question is, “Will that happen?” We’ll see, but we should.
It is not judges we have a problem with. It is not the judiciary we have a problem with. In each of these cases, we can point to an obvious partisan bent with these judges that have given the president the worst deal. Whether done by Democrats in a circuit completely controlled by Democrats in the case of say, D.C., overwhelmingly Democrat voters in the criminal trials that were happening here. Whether we’re talking about the daughter of Judge [Juan] Merchan. Judge Merchan’s daughter is a multimillionaire Democrat fundraiser. They have donated to a litany of Democrats.
You express all this discontent with these judges, and yet President Trump has been out there saying that he is going to follow the courts. I am wondering why he has come to this decision given that a lot of people in the MAGAsphere are saying, “Look, just go full Andrew Jackson and do your own thing.” Is it an inherent respect he has for the courts?
The president respects the three branches of government, which is not the same for some of these partisan judges. They don't respect who the president is, that’s clear.
So even though he wants to impeach at least this judge — maybe more judges, let’s see — he is going to listen to those orders, even if he hates them?
The president has said very clearly: He is not looking to defy court orders.
One of your areas that you oversee is legislative affairs. Are Democrats coming to meet with the president? It’s surprising to me they’re even in touch with you.
Sure. We talk to Democrats from time to time. We welcome Democrat input, Democrat engagement. They have to be constructive, though. When Democrats are ready to be constructive, that’s great. I called a few over the weekend with some of the actions that were going on militarily, both Democrats and Republicans, and they were grateful.
You guys have been able to get Republicans on the Hill, specifically conservatives, to do things I have never seen them do in my more than decade as a congressional correspondent. We know President Trump has a lot of sway with these guys. He can pick up the phone and get them to change their minds very quickly, but from a legislative affairs perspective, is Susie also calling people that you guys think might be problem children? How are you using JD Vance to come in to put pressure on this senator or get the pressure to come off that senator? How are you guys operating?
I’d say it’s a big team effort, for sure. Susie’s involved at times, the vice president’s certainly involved, but the president is involved.
First of all, the president has such a unique bond and strength. For one, he has the people’s mandate, so he has this inherent political strength that is not always the case, in a really unique way. In the House, particularly, but in the Senate, too, he helped get a lot of these members elected, both when he was in office the last time and since then. He’s got deep personal relationships with these guys.
If he was not as plugged-in and connected as he is, and as sort of politically strong as he is, I don’t know that any great staffer could make up for it when, as you said, we’re wrangling a very wide-ranging and sometimes disparate and disagreeable coalition. I think what we try to do is we try to elevate work up the chain at the time that someone can no longer get it done. We try to be respectful of the president’s time. And that’s not because he doesn’t want to talk to members, he does, but he has a lot to do all the time and he talks to the members constantly.
I’ve had two stories in the past month that begin with an anecdote where the vice president or his team is either calling someone on the outside, asking them to stop tweeting at a senator because that senator’s vote is in jeopardy and we need that person or, conversely, giving the signal that the senator is not falling in line. When is it the carrot and when is it the stick?
Have we used sticks so far? I hadn’t noticed.
I’m talking about the public pressure campaign because the members are terrified of it.
I think that our goal is always to resolve things privately. And that’s what we strive to do. And I haven’t read those two stories, so I can’t comment on those specific situations. But I’d put it this way, the president and the vice president, the whole team is pretty aware of the various levers that can be pulled to move the agenda along. And I think we are not bashful and will not be bashful about pulling those levers. And fortunately, we have a president who does it himself.
They’re all terrified of the tweets. You guys just jammed Senate Democrats on funding. I’m curious what you make of the Democratic Party’s total freakout right now over what [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer did.
Schumer had guts. I would quote the president: Schumer had guts, did the right thing.
It’s probably tough on him. Now they’re talking about primary-ing him and removing him from leadership and Nancy Pelosi stabbed him right in the heart in a public comment.
That’s pretty brutal.
So it’s a rough time over there. I think they’re in the wilderness. I think they’re looking for the leader of an unpopular agenda. They’re still clinging to things that the vast majority of Americans disagree with: men in women’s sports, having gang members roaming free here from other countries that illegally came in. I think until they — not all Democrats — but they as a collective party come back into common-sense land, it’ll be hard for them not to be angry at each other. And then if Chuck Schumer does the common sense thing — keep the government open — something every Democrat has always supported forever and he’s the only guy that has the guts to speak up, they eat him alive.
Do you feel confident that Republicans will keep both chambers of Congress in the midterms because of where the Democratic Party is right now?
I think it’s way too early to predict what's going to happen.
In certain ways, the vote motivation right now is on the other side because they’re fighting, angry and riled-up Democrat base voters and Republican base voters are very happy. So in certain ways that can be a challenge politically at the ballot box.
Truthfully, I think the Republican Party’s success in the midterms will rise and fall on its own actions between now and then, irrespective of what the Democrats do.
If we stay unified and they fall in behind the president, we’ll be rewarded at the ballot box. And I’m not suggesting they will, but let’s just say for instance, if Congress tries to pass a circa 2008 to 2012 or ’14 Republican agenda, rather than a 2024 Republican coalition agenda, then they’ll probably be punished at the ballot box for it.
A lot of Republicans like that Elon Musk is taking this wrecking ball to a bloated bureaucracy. Some independents like it too. But we are starting to see the tide turn in some of the polling. We’ve seen the clips of the town halls where people are coming out and protesting Republicans. Is Elon Musk becoming a liability right now for President Trump?
I don’t think so. I think Elon is adding a lot of value. Many people are saying this is literally the most aggressive, successful first couple months of a presidency ever. We’ve not been here very long and we’ve gotten a lot done. And it’s going to take us some time to keep finishing the job and see the fruits of our labor. What Elon is focused on is fundamentally tackling a problem that exists that everyone agrees to, including all these Democrats that have been around for a long time. Chuck Schumer was saying 10 years ago that we've got to get the waste, fraud and abuse out of Medicaid.
But he wasn't saying we’ve got to get rid of the Education Department or USAID.
Okay. Well, I mean, the president campaigned on sending education back to the states. The people voted for that. It was in every single rally speech. That’s not a new concept.
Do you think most voters, some of the swing voters or low-propensity voters that showed up and got him back to the White House were interested in that issue more than pricing?
You’re asking me how to rank the issues. What I’m saying is these are not surprises. Do we have to stop the growth of prices? Yes.
Joe Biden destroyed the economy and gave us 40-year high inflation for decades. What primarily drove that? Government spending. And that’s a complicated problem to unwind. And Elon is focused on that. I ask Elon, “What is sort of the right-sizing here? What does success look like?” And I’m not saying we’re going to get there this year, but as we’ve got to bring the deficit down, right? We can't keep spiraling out of control with debt. And as interest rates are up, so the interest on the debt payments are up, so the deficit grows. We have to tackle the spending problem for the current situation in the country, for the voters. And the president’s doing all the other things too. Like egg prices have come down massively. Gas prices have come down in every single state. Energy is going to continue to come down, which is going to continue to bring down inflation. The first full inflation report came in lower than expected. Domestic manufacturing is up. That’s what the first job report said. So there’s a lot of very good, positive, healthy indicators.
I have to tell you that when President Trump won, I remember my brother and my dad, who are two Trump voters, by the way, cheering on a family text message…
Very smart guys.
Cheering on a family text message that the stock market was going to soar, and it did for a time, but now the S&P 500 is lower than it was before Election Day. Some were saying last week that this is the worst week for stocks in two years. There’s talk about a potential recession. What gives? You guys keep saying it’s going to get better. Short-term pain, long-term gain. But when are things going to turn around?
First of all, what they teach you in business school is you can't look at the market day to day. Every day that the market is up is a day we all love, right? What you're talking about within a few weeks of some correction doesn't mean a ton in the grand scheme.
The question is what does the trend look like over time? I think that things will settle out. I think as we get into April, particularly, some of the tariff stuff comes into clearer focus for the markets to be able to absorb and price in, then the volatility — and I’m not an economist, but this is just sort of basic sense — will settle down a little bit.
April, you said?
Yeah. And the president has said very clearly the volatility will settle down. As Treasury Secretary [Scott Bessent] said, we’re having to wean off the government spending. But I think that as we can sort of wean that off, get the government out of the business of competing with the private sector, reinvigorate the private sector, both through deregulation and encouraging domestic manufacturing, all of these things that we’re working on and we want to do, giving money back to the voters through tax cuts, tax relief and all of these sorts of things, then you will see the growth take off. We will push as hard as we can to get that done as quickly as possible. But yeah, there’s going to be a little bit of adjustment.
Can you guarantee to the business community that they are going to see, cut and dry, what the tariffs are now? This is what the regime is going to look like. If so and so does this, it’s going to go up. If so and so does this, it’s going to go down. Will you be able to give them that predictability?
The president is a businessman and he understands how business planning and business cycle works. And again, we’ve only been here eight weeks. But the president does want to provide predictability to the markets, to businesses, so that they can do their business planning in a way that they can count on. And so I think that we will get to a place very soon where they feel pretty comfortable with how to plan.
There’s also tax cuts that are expiring at the end of the year unless they’re renewed. That adds an element of uncertainty. Weaning off the government spending. That adds an element of uncertainty. The tariffs — an element of uncertainty. So it’s really just stopping the bleeding and sort of a stabilizing process that’s leading to some volatility. Again, not an economist, but I think that will settle down pretty soon.
Listen to this episode of Playbook Deep Dive on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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