It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes hundreds of staffers to run the White House effectively.
Last January, few in Washington, D.C. anticipated how quickly President Donald Trump would be able to implement much of his promised agenda.
Trump is still calling all the shots, but a large share of the credit for the speed and breadth with which the administration has enacted the president’s will goes to a close-knit group of officials who’ve learned from the chaos and internal infighting that characterized Trump’s first term.
“President Trump has assembled a strong, proven team fully committed to Making America Great Again,” White House spokeswoman Liz Huston told the Washington Examiner when asked about Trump’s deep bench.
A select handful of these aides, such as press secretary Karoline Leavitt, have become legitimately famous over the past year, but the overwhelming majority rarely see the spotlight. Here’s a look at four individuals who were integral to keeping Trump on target and the White House running in 2025.
James Blair: White House deputy chief of staff for legislative, political, and public affairs
Though James Blair may be the best-known member of this list to the public, the longtime Florida-based Republican operative rarely speaks in public. Instead, he spends the bulk of his time as the president’s top policy and political go-between with Capitol Hill and the Republican National Committee, despite lacking the depth of D.C. experience of others in the White House.
Blair, 36, entered Trump’s orbit last election cycle after he and his direct boss and mentee, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, were excommunicated from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R-FL) circle of advisers. The pair helped lead Trump’s 2024 campaign to an easy victory in November of that year, destroying DeSantis’s primary bid in the process. Blair himself reportedly made the call to outsource much of the Republican grassroots organizing efforts to outside groups and other strategies that helped the president earn an outsize share of black, Latino, and young votes, compared to past Republican presidential nominees.
Now, Blair sits just two doors down from the Oval Office — the midway point between Trump and Wiles’s own corner office — where he’ll play a huge hand in crafting the president’s plan to support GOP candidates in the midterm elections, and lobbying for Trump’s legislative priorities in the years to follow should Republicans maintain their congressional majorities next November.
Margo Martin, special assistant to the president for communications
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Margo Martin’s worth to the president may be immeasurable.
A former all-state high school tennis player in Oklahoma, she began working for Trump as a White House press assistant in 2019 and accompanied him to West Palm Beach after leaving office in 2021. There, she served as an unofficial body woman for the president in exile but, more importantly, began workshopping what would become a critical leg of the White House’s current communications strategy — namely, photograph and film virtually the entirety of the president’s exhaustive slate of events and immediately post it to social media.
That concept proved to be a smashing success. Trump 2.0 has leaned more into social media than any other modern president, with a clear aim of catering to the youngest voters. Furthermore, the candid, behind-the-scenes, and often heartwarming moments she shares not only help humanize the president but also allow the White House to broadcast Trump directly to millions of Americans while bypassing an often-hostile White House press corps.
Beau Harrison, White House deputy chief of staff for operations
Of all the president’s political appointees, Beau Harrison may do the most to literally and figuratively keep the lights on at the White House.
He is among the longest-tenured Trump officials, taking his first White House job as a special assistant to the then-deputy chief of staff for operations back in early 2017. And, like Martin, he went on to work personally for Trump in West Palm Beach in January 2021.
As his title suggests, Harrison is in charge of coordinating operations and logistics for the Trump administration, including all domestic and international travel for the president, not to mention the thousands of aides, reporters, and guests attending the associated events at those stops.
It’s a thankless job, but there are some perks. Harrison met his wife, chief of staff to first lady Melania Trump, Hayley Harrison, while the pair worked at the first Trump White House.
Saurabh Sharma, special assistant to the president for personnel
By far the youngest member of this list, Sharma likely has the most influence over who exactly is carrying out Trump’s orders.
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Sharma didn’t begin working for Trump until last January and was still a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin by the time the president left office in 2020.
But during former President Joe Biden’s term, Sharma kept very, very busy. After a brief post-collegiate career in conservative media, he moved into the think tank world, eventually launching his own, American Moment, in 2021. There, he and other conservative activists began cataloguing hundreds of young potential hires to staff out a possible second Trump administration. That list was a primary document used by Trump’s White House Office of Presidential Personnel during the Biden-Trump transition, and a core reason Trump was able to staff his executive branch at a record-setting pace.
