President Trump spent part of Wednesday in the Oval Office explaining that two of the most powerful people in his political operation do not really work for him. “Chris LaCivita and James Blair are outside consultants. They do not work for me, other than as outside consultants,” he posted, adding that if there turned out to be a conflict he would “terminate them, immediately!” Then, speaking to reporters, he settled the question before anyone had asked it twice: “They don’t have a conflict because they’re independent people.” The trigger was a New York Times report that the two men had traveled to Republika Srpska, the Serb-run entity that makes up roughly half of Bosnia, for its October 4 election, and that each had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Washington law firm retained by that government to advise on voting. Nearly every account since has accepted Trump’s frame, two consultants with a client problem, and that frame leaves out a promise Trump made himself in April.
“James will be taking a short leave of absence to lead the charge from the outside against the Radical Left, Country Destroying Democrats. He will do a fantastic job, and then, after the Election, return again to the White House, so we can finish the job.”
That is how Trump announced Blair’s departure on April 10, in a post that called him “my Deputy Chief of Staff.” Blair did not resign so much as step outside for the midterms, with the stated plan of walking back in after November 3. CNN now describes him as one of the president’s former deputy chiefs of staff, and neither man currently works in the White House. Both statements are true, and both skip the part where the president promised Blair his old desk back. So the man who spent the final weeks before the midterms on the payroll of a foreign government is, by Trump’s own account, on leave from the West Wing rather than gone from it. Whether that plan still stands is the one question Trump did not answer on Wednesday.
The client matters as much as the calendar. Republika Srpska is run by the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, the party of Milorad Dodik, who is barred from public office for six years after being convicted of defying Bosnia’s international envoy and its Constitutional Court. He was not on Sunday’s ballot, and his face was on billboards anyway. When his candidates won, he told supporters in Banja Luka, “If it had not been for Donald Trump’s magnificent victory, we would probably be political corpses today,” and thanked Vladimir Putin in the same speech. His party campaigned on secessionist rhetoric against the state the United States helped hold together at Dayton thirty years ago.
Dodik also has a specific reason to be grateful to this administration. He was first sanctioned by the United States in 2017 for obstructing the Dayton agreement, and the Biden Treasury later extended sanctions to his family and companies over corruption. On October 29, 2025, Trump’s Treasury lifted them all, on Dodik, his children, dozens of allies and their businesses, with no explanation in the bulletin and one day after Dodik met Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. The delisting followed a lobbying campaign that included Rudy Giuliani and Rod Blagojevich. By August, Republika Srpska had signed lobbying contracts worth at least $9 million since Trump’s inauguration, according to Justice Department filings. Blair was deputy chief of staff when the sanctions came off.
Nothing in the reporting ties Blair to the sanctions decision, and we are not suggesting it does. The point is narrower and, to our eyes, worse for being entirely legal. A government spent a year and millions of dollars lobbying to get back into Washington’s good graces, got the sanctions relief it wanted, and then, through its Washington law firm, paid the president’s senior political aide during a leave that Trump said would end with Blair back inside the White House. Foreign governments do not pay American political operatives for their knowledge of Balkan turnout models. They pay for proximity, and for the ability to tell their own voters that Trump’s people are in the room. Dodik said as much from the stage on Sunday night.
LaCivita has been here before. In May 2025 he was advising Albania’s opposition Democratic Party, led by former prime minister Sali Berisha, whom Secretary of State Antony Blinken had sanctioned in 2021 for alleged “significant corruption” and barred from the United States along with his family. LaCivita called Berisha “a true friend of the United States” and compared his legal troubles to Trump’s. That is two Balkan clients in seventeen months, and both had been sanctioned by the United States. The coverage of each treated it as a one-off. Read together, they look like a product line: the 2024 campaign’s brand, sold abroad to politicians who want Washington to see them differently.
None of this would be unusual for a retired operative with a consulting shingle. That is exactly the cover the “outside consultant” label provides, and it is why Trump reached for it within hours. Blair runs the president’s outside political operation, including the MAGA Inc. super PAC that is spending heavily to hold the House and Senate, and LaCivita is its senior adviser. One Republican told CNN the overseas work was “tone deaf” in the final weeks of a campaign the two are being paid to win. Trump himself, according to CNN’s sources, did not know about the Balkan work until he was briefed on the coming Times story.
So who does the framing serve? It serves Trump, who gets to sound like a demanding employer while describing the arrangement as normal (“I’m a client over there, they have a consulting firm I guess, separately, as all people in Washington do. That’s pretty common.”). It serves the two consultants, who get a review by a boss who has already announced the verdict. It serves Dodik, whose government spent millions lobbying Washington before its sanctions came off and now gets to say it hired Trump’s team. It does not serve the voters who will choose a Congress on November 3, and it does not serve anyone who thought the White House was a public office rather than a waiting room.
We think the answer is not complicated. Trump should say plainly whether James Blair is still coming back to the White House after the election. If he is, the conflict is not a matter for MAGA Inc. to sort out with its consultants; it belongs to the administration, and it should be handled the way any senior official’s foreign income would be, with full disclosure of who paid him, how much, and for what. If he is not coming back, Trump should say that too, because he is the one who told the country he would. What he cannot credibly do is call the same man his deputy chief of staff in April and an outside consultant he barely knows in October.