Stephen Miller is the White House Chief of Staff as of Monday morning. Trump announced the appointment on Truth Social on November 6, three days after midterms in which Republicans lost control of both chambers. Susie Wiles, who had held the position since January 2025, is out.

Wiles came to the job from Trump’s campaign, where she served as his campaign manager, and was widely described inside the administration as a stabilizing presence. Miller served as Deputy Chief of Staff and was the principal architect of the administration’s immigration and enforcement policy. He will now control access to the president, shape the daily schedule, and coordinate between the cabinet and the White House policy operation. The White House says he is the 33rd person to hold the job.

Trump told reporters last week that his deportation policies had been “too tough” and had cost him in the midterms. Miller’s record isn’t a correction toward the center. He built the enforcement architecture the president referenced. The administration hasn’t reconciled those two statements in public.

Two previous presidents reshuffled their chiefs of staff in the months around a midterm defeat. Ronald Reagan replaced Donald Regan with Howard Baker after the 1986 losses. Barack Obama replaced Rahm Emanuel with Pete Rouse, and later Bill Daley, around the 2010 midterms (NPR). Each new chief arrived with a mandate to manage a changed Congress. The 120th Congress, with Democratic majorities in both chambers, is seated in January.

(The Washington Post reported the appointment on November 6. The White House released a formal announcement.)

The House is expected to vote this week on whether to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, according to multiple reports published Saturday and Sunday.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, is forcing the vote using a privileged resolution, a procedural mechanism that bypasses committee and brings the articles directly to the floor. Democrats, who hold 214 seats in the current 119th Congress, would need three Republicans to reach the 217 votes required (House Press Gallery). Massie has committed to voting yes. Axios reported Sunday that House Republican leaders are bracing for enough defections to pass the articles. Trump told reporters he intends to keep Hegseth in his post.

The last cabinet secretary to be impeached by the House was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in February 2024, on a 214-213 vote. The Senate dismissed those articles the day after they were transmitted, without holding a trial (Missouri Independent). If the House votes to impeach Hegseth, any Senate trial would be held after January, when Democrats take control, and removal would require a two-thirds majority.

(Axios reported Sunday that Republican leaders are bracing for defections.)

Ukraine, Russia, and the United States are set to meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday for the fourth round of formal peace talks since January. It’s the first trilateral session since February, when talks broke down after Ukrainian forces launched a cross-border incursion into Belgorod Oblast.

Ukrainian President Zelensky said Sunday that a broader American proposal circulating ahead of the talks could be “dangerous” for Ukraine, without specifying its contents. No one close to the negotiations has said they expect a breakthrough. Russia’s stated position remains: Ukrainian territorial concessions in four occupied oblasts and a permanent bar on NATO membership. Ukraine’s stated position remains: any settlement must reflect current lines of control, not Russian territorial claims. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will represent the United States. Vladimir Medinsky, a close Putin aide and former culture minister, will lead the Russian delegation.

The Dayton Accords offer one template worth examining. Those negotiations ended the Bosnian War in November 1995 after three and a half years of fighting and an estimated 100,000 deaths. The talks ran three weeks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, with American negotiators applying sustained pressure on all three parties. The key condition that made Dayton possible was that each combatant had concluded, before the talks began, that continued war was more costly than a settlement. Analysts who have watched Abu Dhabi through three rounds say that shared calculation hasn’t yet emerged from either Moscow or Kyiv. Talks can run without it. Agreements that hold generally can’t.

(Axios has the confirmed session details and Witkoff’s statement. The Kyiv Post confirmed the November 10-11 dates.)

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog formally gave Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form a government on Sunday, choosing him over Benjamin Netanyahu based on a Knesset count that showed 67 of the 120 members backed Eisenkot against 46 for Netanyahu.

Eisenkot leads the Yashar party and served as chief of the Israel Defense Forces from 2015 to 2019. He has 28 days to assemble a coalition, with a possible 14-day extension if Herzog grants one. If he fails to form a government within that window, Herzog will give the mandate to another candidate. Netanyahu remains prime minister until a new government wins a Knesset confidence vote.

The coalition path is narrow. Eisenkot has backing from opposition parties Yashar, the Democrats, B’Yachad, and Yisrael Beytenu, but several bloc members haven’t committed to joining a formal coalition or guaranteeing their votes on a confidence motion. Eisenkot and former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman were scheduled to meet Monday to try to resolve differences over the coalition’s structure. Eisenkot said Sunday he would pursue what he called “unconventional steps” to form an emergency government.

Israel has held six national elections since 2019. Sunday’s mandate opens the next round of trying.

(The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported Herzog’s formal mandate on November 8. The Times of Israel has the coalition outlook.)

The 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference opened Monday in Antalya, Turkey, with more than 100,000 delegates, observers, and advocates expected over twelve days of formal negotiations (Climate Home News). Turkey holds the presidency. Australia leads the negotiations. The Leaders’ Summit is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday.

COP31 is structured around implementation rather than new commitments, an acknowledgment by the organizing body that the gap between what nations have promised and what they have done has grown too large to address with more pledges. UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said in his opening remarks that progress so far is “nowhere near fast enough.” Negotiators from nearly 200 countries are working through disputes over how to fund energy transitions in developing nations and what standards the electrification pledges made at prior conferences actually require.

The Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21 in December 2015, with 196 parties signing a framework that set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and established the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Ten COP sessions later, emissions targets are largely unmet and the gap between the 1.5-degree goal and current projections has widened. Antalya’s job, in the terms the organizing body has set for it, is to narrow that gap through enforcement and accountability rather than through additional commitment. Whether that framing survives contact with 200 governments is the question two weeks of negotiation will begin to answer.

(Asharq Al-Awsat reported the opening of COP31 on Monday.)

Nvidia’s board announced Sunday that it has opened an independent investigation into whether CEO Jensen Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation, following a New York Times report that alleged he had been the target of an effort by Chinese intelligence.

Huang acknowledged in a letter to Nvidia employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife, took full responsibility, and said he would cooperate with the investigation. His letter didn’t confirm any intelligence-related allegation. American officials, according to multiple press reports, suspect a business executive named Alice Huang, no relation to Jensen, of providing information to China and of helping to arrange shipments of advanced artificial intelligence chips in violation of U.S. export controls. No formal charges have been filed. China’s government on Monday rejected the report as fabricated (CBS News).

The chairs of three House committees, covering Foreign Affairs, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and Intelligence, sent a letter to Huang requesting that he appear before their panels to discuss his relationship with the executive and Nvidia’s security protocols. Trump, asked about the matter, called Huang “an honorable guy.”

Nvidia manufactures the most advanced artificial intelligence accelerator chips in the world. It holds export licenses that govern what computing hardware can flow to China and what can’t. What the board’s investigation is trying to determine is whether the CEO of that company was targeted by an intelligence operation and whether anything of consequence was obtained. The probe hasn’t reached a conclusion. That question is the story.

(CNN reported Huang’s acknowledgment and the board’s probe on November 8. The Washington Post reported the board’s decision to investigate.)

Something good.

Researchers reported Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine that three patients with severe drug-resistant epilepsy had their seizure frequency reduced by a mean of 92.6 percent following a gene therapy trial. The patients, who had tried multiple anticonvulsant medications without achieving control, received a chemogenetic treatment that uses an adeno-associated virus vector to deliver a gene that reduces abnormal electrical activity in targeted brain regions. Nature covered the results the same day.

Drug-resistant epilepsy affects roughly one-third of the 65 million people worldwide who live with the condition. For that group, medication adjustments, dietary interventions, and in some cases surgery have historically offered limited relief. Gene therapy approaches have shown results in animal models for years, but the transition to human patients requires precision about delivery, dosage, and long-term effect that takes a generation of research to develop.

Three patients is a small number. The trial is early-stage. The standard for a treatment being called safe and effective is a randomized controlled trial across a much larger population, and that work hasn’t been done yet. What Wednesday’s report provides is a first-in-human data point: the approach worked in these three people, without the severe adverse effects that have blocked other gene therapy approaches in neurological disease. That’s not a cure. It’s the evidence that makes the next trial possible.

(Nature covered the NEJM findings on Wednesday. The full study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.)

Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.