Ex-MAHA Insider Tells Rogan What Trump Didn’t Know About His Own White House
ZeroHedge.com
Former senior White House advisor Calley Means says he had full White House approval for a federal look at how much sugar American children eat – until Trump’s former Chief-of-Staff Susie Wiles killed it.
“And that’s where Susie told me, we can’t do that. I need the sugar industry money. I need the money for the midterms,” Means told Joe Rogan in an episode published Friday. In fact, according to Means, Wiles was up to all sorts of bad stuff.
Means, who quit on Oct. 22 without giving a reason and says he connected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with Donald Trump in 2024, spent more than two hours naming the people he says stood between MAHA voters and what they voted for. He said a Wiles aide put an executive order on his desk declaring glyphosate, the weed killer in Bayer’s Roundup, a national security issue, told him it was “final,” and said Kennedy “should not be calling the president or calling anyone.” Trump, he said, didn’t know his own Justice Department then pushed the Supreme Court to take the case Bayer went on to win.
“There is a very concentrated group of people in the Trump administration that are antagonistic to what people voted for and are frankly, I think it’s very clear, doing things for other reasons, particularly in many cases to enrich their families,” Means said near the top of the episode.
The episode went up the same day Trump announced that Stephen Miller will replace Susie Wiles as chief of staff on Monday, with Wiles moving to the Trump political operation after Republicans’ midterm wipeout. Means taped it before the shakeup, and Wiles is who he spent most of the first hour on. He marked the news on X:
“No Policy Decision Gets Done Without Her Office”
“Susie Wiles is the most powerful chief of staff in modern American history. And she has taken a stranglehold on any policy decision,” Means said, adding that cabinet secretaries spend meetings “constantly worrying about how to get on Susie’s good side.”
He then walked Rogan through the people around her. Wiles, he said, was one of the country’s top lobbyists before the White House, and “her career has been taking money from the industries and foreign governments who would pay her the most money” – including, in his account, as a top consultant to Benjamin Netanyahu and to the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries. James Blair, the head of political operations and “her friend from Florida,” he said “has taken a lot of money from industries like the sugar industry.”
Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s chief pollster, is the one every policy “goes through,” Means said, because his polling tells the team what is politically worth doing, while he takes money from “almost every single industry we’re fighting against right now to this day.” Later in the episode the show pulled up what Means said was the client list on Fabrizio’s website: Pfizer, PhRMA, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, R.J. Reynolds and Dow Chemical among them. On school lunch reform, Means said, Fabrizio was “getting paid by Pepsi and giving political analysis that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
When Means pitched healthier school meals to Fabrizio, citing Rogan’s listeners, the pollster brushed it off, he said: “[MAHA] is not really a big part of our strategy.” The strategy, by Means’ account, was gerrymandering (“they were obsessed with redistricting”) and campaign gimmicks like no tax on tips, all justified by the need for campaign cash.
Richard Walters, who joined the White House from FGS Global, came from a firm that “lobbied for pesticides, lobbied for pharma” and was paid by the pesticide trade group CropLife right before he left, Means said. While Wiles was “out getting cancer treatment,” he added, “Richard was effectively chief of staff.” Trump disclosed Wiles’ breast cancer diagnosis in March, saying she would keep working through treatment.
Then the family business. Wiles’ daughter Katie is a lobbyist at Continental Strategy, and Means said that was an open channel. “If a company hired Susie’s daughter, then that was getting a high priority,” he said, calling it “an open discussion in the White House.” By his account the firm had “almost zero in revenue” before Trump’s return and shot up to “30-ish million dollars a year in revenue.” Florida filings already put Continental’s lobbying pay near $5 million in 2023.
Ballard Partners, where Wiles worked before the campaign, was the other route. “If you hire Ballard, you get a meeting with Susie and you can get things done,” Means said, calling the firm’s reported $98 million “the down payment.” Later in the episode he laid out the whole menu:
“If any special interest is watching, and you’re trying to rig the system, unless it changes, pay Ballard, pay Continental, Susie’s daughter, pay Checkmate, Chris [LaCivita’s] son. That’s another one that shot up. And, you know, pound Susie with donations and calls. Everyone knows this playbook. It’s an open secret in DC.”
Chris LaCivita ran Trump’s 2024 campaign with Wiles. His son, Chris LaCivita Jr., joined Checkmate Government Relations after the election and registered to lobby for more than 40 clients in 2025.
Means stressed it isn’t a Trump problem alone. “This is how DC works,” he said, and he said he doesn’t think Trump “knows about most of this.”
“This Is Final. It’s National Security.”
Means’ most detailed account was glyphosate, the herbicide in Bayer’s Roundup. He said getting the word into the first MAHA report was “the biggest policy battle I had seen up to that time,” and that as Bayer’s push for legal immunity stalled in the states and in Congress, he warned Wiles’ team and USDA leadership that the administration should stay out of it.
Then, he said, a Wiles aide called him into a room and put an executive order on the desk. “And it was the glyphosate EO that says it’s a national security issue,” Means said. “And he said, this is final. It’s national security. It’s coming out tomorrow.” The aide told him to “please inform Bobby” and that Kennedy “should not be calling the president or calling anyone,” Means said. Wiles then called Kennedy’s office, and the order came out the next day.
That was February’s “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides,” published in the Federal Register on Feb. 23, which Kennedy publicly defended at the time. “I will tell you, the Secretary of War, the major generals, they don’t see our lack of glyphosate on US farms as a national security issue,” Means said. He said the order was driven by Courtney Knupp, then a National Security Council staffer – “she, with Susie, drove the E.O.” – who has since been named CEO of the United Soybean Board.
The Supreme Court came next. Means said Heidi Overton, then a White House aide and now Trump’s pick for FDA commissioner, worked with the Justice Department, without consulting Kennedy, on the argument for the Court to take up the Roundup case, and that the solicitor general’s office brought in Sarah Harris, who he said came from Bayer’s main law firm. The solicitor general urged the justices to take the case, and the Court ruled for Bayer’s Monsanto in June.
Trump himself didn’t know his Justice Department had pushed for it, Means said. When a regenerative farmer raised the ruling at a meeting with Trump and Kennedy, he said, the president called it “a terrible idea.” “And the people around him, I think treat him horribly. They treat him like they talk about him like a baby,” Means said.
“The Top Issue Among These People For All Of Health”
The single most prioritized health issue for Blair, Means said, was “to get a better pathway for fruit flavored vapes” – ahead of Medicare, health access or food. Blair argued that approving vapes “was a core midterm issue,” aimed at young men, Means said.
Then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary was pressed on it “meeting after meeting” in the West Wing and held his ground, Means said. Makary was pushed out in May. Overton then “wrote up a policy to relax standards” on fruit-flavored vapes, Means said, and public health groups sued over the FDA’s flavored e-cigarette policy in July.
When Means pushed the other way on food, he said, Blair told him “the food industry, we don’t want to beat up on them too much.”
“How Demonic This Culture Is”
Asked by Rogan what was stopping Trump, Means pointed at the bureaucracy. Kennedy, “my hero,” runs a 90,000-person department, and “he’s surrounded by demons who want him out and want him just destroyed,” Means said. “They were sending around a memo, a CIA manual, about how to be a bad bureaucrat and subvert an institution from within. That’s like sent around by all the career officials.”
Means appeared to be describing the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a 1944 guide from the CIA’s wartime predecessor, the OSS, which the CIA publishes on its website. It tells saboteurs inside an organization to insist on going through channels, refer everything to committees and haggle over the wording of communications.
Means also pointed to Moderna’s mRNA flu shot, which the FDA refused to review in February. He said the trial compared it against an outdated flu vaccine and showed “a 0.8% absolute risk reduction.” Asked about side effects, he said, “it can’t be definitively said, but there were deaths,” in the trial group.
Overton, a Makary protege from Johns Hopkins, told the two of them the corporate pressure had grown too much, Means said. “And I’m like, okay, this place turns you into demons,” he said. The shot was approved in August after what Means called a “sham advisory committee.” After Makary’s exit, he added, the FDA told Pfizer it no longer has to run the new COVID vaccine study that had been a condition of the shot’s reapproval.
Kratom’s concentrated opioid compound 7-OH, which Means called “gas station heroin,” followed the same path. He said regulators set a strict 0.05% limit early in the term, then, after “unrelenting lobbying,” raised the allowed concentration 20-fold. “Again, I don’t think Trump even knows about this,” he said.
“I Need The Sugar Industry Money”
The line Means said he heard most from Wiles was about the midterms. “Susie said to me many times, we need money for the midterms, [Calley]. We need money for the midterms,” he said.
The sharpest example came when David Kessler, the 1990s FDA commissioner who took on Big Tobacco, petitioned the FDA to examine sugar and refined carbohydrates in children’s diets. Means said the initiative had a 60 Minutes segment behind it, full White House approval and a pass through the interagency process before Wiles told him she needed the sugar industry money. Earlier in the episode he gave it as a “direct quote”: “I need the money from the sugar people to win the midterms.”
“Okay. The midterms are over. Now what?” Rogan asked. Whatever the strategy was, he added, “they got destroyed.” Means pinned the loss on “the strategy of James Blair and Tony Fabrizio and Susie,” and said the point now is “why the hell aren’t we doing these now?”
Rogan didn’t let Trump off the hook. “Don’t you think he takes some responsibility?” he asked, pointing to the Iran war and “the cryptocurrency thing.” “Of course he’s the ultimate responsibility,” Means said, while arguing that senior staffers are now working to throw the president under the bus for the loss.
The Last Straw
What finally pushed him out, Means said, was a federal definition of ultra-processed food that was “simply a definition, not even tied to regulation.” He said he had Harvard, Tufts, the American Heart Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association lined up behind it. A Mondelez lobbyist told him “we don’t want it done. This will hurt our business,” and said he would call Wiles. “He talked about these people at the White House like they were extensions of him,” Means said.
In a meeting with Means and Kennedy, Wiles said they were “doing great” and that she didn’t know “about any special interest concerns,” Means said, adding that she “lied to us to our face.” Afterward, he said, he heard her saying “we need to do something about [MAHA].”
School meals were the other casualty. Means spent six months on an interagency rule to end donuts and sugary pastries at school breakfast, the most common breakfast for American schoolchildren in his telling, and to add a protein requirement. “There was dozens of meetings and calls saying that taking junk food out of school lunches would hurt the companies,” he said. “And when I left, the day I left, the stocks of the major junk food companies went up 8 percent.”
The market data back up the size of the move. General Mills closed up 8.0% on Oct. 22, the day Means resigned, and Kraft Heinz gained 6.8%, though it was a strong day for consumer staples broadly, with the Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR ETF up 3.3%.
When he left, Means said, Wiles texted him “saying how much she admired me” and asked him “not to speak negatively of her.” Asked what he would tell Trump now, he said, “I would recommend that he clears house,” and that the president should “go to war with Congress” and stop “trying to make friends with John [Thune] anymore, who’s a demon.”
“I Haven’t Even Gotten Started”
The fight moved to X on Saturday. Means posted what he called “a formal request” for Wiles and Blair to stop “harassing” him with texts and calls, and offered to “vigorously correct and apologize” for any factual error sent to him in writing:
Blair answered 42 minutes later, saying he had called Means the night before and told him he would consider suing if Means defamed him. “Calley, your poor me act is tiring and embarrassing for a grown man who launched a smear campaign,” Blair wrote. “I’ve been called worse things by better people than you. And I haven’t even gotten started.”
Kennedy, whom Means called “a hero,” didn’t name him. Within two hours of the episode going up on Friday, he posted that “draining the swamp is a mandate” – and then thanked Wiles, crediting her, not Means, with his partnership with Trump:
“After years of being on the political sidelines, the MAHA coalition has found a champion in President Trump, who has made incredible strides to Make America Healthy Again,” White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster told the Daily Caller News Foundation, which could not reach Wiles.
Meanwhile: