Florida powerbroker who becomes America’s most powerful woman

Susie Wiles, the President-elect’s de facto co-campaign manager who becomes the first female Chief of Staff in the White House, led his bid for the presidency with steely calm and will.

Susie Wiles is recognised for her work during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Centre. Picture: AFP.

Every time Donald Trump boards his campaign plane, advisers and friends jockey to snag the prime seats near him. Susie Wiles isn’t one of them.

As perhaps the single most important person in Trump’s orbit, she doesn’t need to.

“I believe somebody capable of running for office at this level is better served by lots of inputs. That’s President Trump’s preferred way to operate. He has so many people he talks to,” Wiles said in an interview before the election.

“Sometimes I am the last one, but I’m rarely the first, and I’m never the only one.”

“I may be at the top of the village,” she added, “but it’s a village.”

That understated approach and steely calm propelled Wiles — who doesn’t cuss, kick or scream — through the ranks of Florida’s politics to the helm of Trump’s third consecutive presidential run and, now to the top job in the White House administration team as his chief of staff.

Even some of Trump’s detractors credit Wiles for assembling and maintaining a disciplined campaign apparatus to support a figure known for unpredictability. If Trump achieves a historic comeback, the 67-year-old is widely seen in political circles as a favourite to be tapped for a senior White House role, perhaps chief of staff.

“You don’t have to shout to get noticed,” Wiles said. “I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I think it hampers your ability to be effective.”

Whether the woman who delivered the state of Florida to Trump in both 2016 and 2020 — taking what was previously the biggest swing state off the map this year — can win her first national election will be answered sometime after Tuesday. Among Wiles’s key contributions has been persuading Trump to urge Republicans to vote early and by mail, which he had previously discouraged. She made the argument that those methods are a way to play within current election laws and expand Trump’s chances for victory.

“Susie understands how to operationalise the momentum that Trump creates,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who has worked with Wiles for years, before the election.

“If we’re headed to a close election in a few of these swing states, Susie’s worth an extra point or two at least.”

Still, there are limits to Wiles’s influence, as Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden two weeks ago highlighted when a comic invited to speak likened Puerto Rico to an island of garbage. Trump himself makes frequent inflammatory comments, including saying Harris had only recently begun identifying as a Black woman and Thursday suggested sending Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney to the front lines of war with guns “trained on her face.”

“There’s no secret sauce that makes Trump manageable by even smart people,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

Before Trump’s election win, Wiles said wasn’t thinking about future jobs, but said if her boss won, “It is probably the biggest comeback in American history. And I’ve certainly had a front-row seat for it.”

Her ascension mirrors a rise of women in top leadership roles. Trump’s final campaign manager in 2016 was Kellyanne Conway, the first woman to helm a successful presidential bid. Jen O’Malley Dillon managed President Biden’s successful 2020 campaign and served as chair of his re-election effort before he dropped out. She has continued in that role for Harris.

Wiles first met Trump in the summer of 2015 at Trump Tower during the Republican presidential primary, at the suggestion of Brian Ballard, a Florida GOP lobbyist with whom she worked for more than a decade. At the end of their conversation, Trump told her: “I just think it’s too early to get involved in Florida.” Wiles politely disagreed. They shook hands and she went home. She was in bed one night not long after when the phone rang. Trump wanted her to be co-chair of his campaign’s Florida operation.

After Trump won the primary, Wiles was promoted to a communications job at the headquarters in New York. But with Florida looking challenging against Democrat Hillary Clinton, Wiles was asked to run the general election effort in the state.

Wiles had other candidates she could have gotten behind in the primary. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was running. So too was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Wiles felt like the country wasn’t going in the right direction and needed an outsider who could shake things up.

The aspiring politician and star of TV’s “The Apprentice” was impressed with her and had known Wiles’s father, the late Pat Summerall, a star place-kicker for the New York Giants turned sports broadcaster.

Susie Wiles and Donald Trump at a football game in Pittsburgh. Picture: Press pool.

Summerall, a longtime alcoholic, credits a letter from Wiles read to him during an intervention from his friends and family for persuading him to go to rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic. “I hadn’t been there much for my kids, but Susan’s letter made it clear that I’d hurt them even in my absence,” he said in his memoir. They grew closer later in life, he wrote.

The 2015 conversation with Wiles was the start of one of Trump’s longest-running alliances with a top adviser. He has fallen out with many chiefs of staff, including John Kelly, who recently said he would rule like a dictator, and his previous campaigns were marked by staff shake ups at the top.

At one point in 2016, Trump thought he should be doing better in Florida and chewed out Wiles, saying she was low energy and too quiet. Wiles pushed back, telling Trump that if he wanted someone to set their hair on fire, she wasn’t the person for the job. But if he wanted to win Florida, she said, then he should let her do her job.

Trump won Florida with 49% of the vote in 2016, reclaiming for the GOP a state Barack Obama won twice. Trump’s win there was called early, portending his shocking win nationally. Four years later he won Florida by a bigger margin, 51% of the vote, with Wiles again running his campaign there, though he lost his re-election bid.

Those who have worked with her say she is unflappable behind her trademark mirrored sunglasses, avoids the limelight and is quick to give her team credit for her stack of victories.

“Every campaign she’s been involved with, she’s been a calming presence,” said Ballard. “He saw in her the DNA of a winner.”

Some of Wiles’s friends at the time gave her grief for joining up with Trump, she said, but Wiles thought he brought something unique.

Donald Trump greets his campaign manager Susie Wiles at his Palm Beach election event. Picture: AFP.

She had previously shepherded GOP Sen. Rick Scott to victory, winning the governor’s office in Florida in 2010 as well as coming to the rescue of Ron DeSantis’s struggling 2018 campaign for governor and netting him a narrow win.

DeSantis and his wife, Casey, later split with Wiles in part over what they felt was her getting too much of the credit, according to Florida political insiders, many of whom took Wiles’s side. Trump trounced DeSantis and others in this year’s Republican presidential primary, and many saw the former president’s savaging personal attacks against DeSantis as fuelled by knowledge only an insider would know.

A representative for DeSantis didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Earlier in her career, Wiles had worked as a scheduler during former President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and his first year in the White House and as a staff assistant for former Rep. Jack Kemp (R., N.Y.). She married Lanny Wiles, a Reagan advance man, and they moved to the Jacksonville, Fla., area in 1985. They later divorced.

After Trump left the White House in 2021, Wiles got a call in early February. Trump wanted to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. During their discussion, Trump asked her to run his political-action committee, Save America. That morphed into other responsibilities and finally the task of building out a campaign team.

“I am as competitive as the next person,” Wiles said. “I thought he could win — and I wanted to win.”

Wiles brought on Chris LaCivita, a former Marine whose combative approach to politics provided the counterpoint to her own style. And she tapped a tight group of Florida operatives, among them political guru James Blair and communications specialists Danielle Alvarez and Brian Hughes, to augment longtime Trump advisers such as Jason Miller and Steven Cheung and pollster Tony Fabrizio.

Susie Wiles in Nashville, Tennysee during the presidential campaign.

Though the race has been volatile — with two assassination attempts on Trump and Biden’s historic departure from the race — Trump’s campaign staff has kept internal drama low. In recent months, as Trump struggled to find his footing against Harris, there was some division over the return of Corey Lewandowski, a veteran of 2016 who made a play for leadership but didn’t prevail, according to several people familiar with the dynamics.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) said Wiles isn’t afraid to voice her opinions to Trump, even if they disagree, but she does so in an effective manner, he said: “When they’re together, at the right appropriate time. Doesn’t play games.”

Wiles knows how to keep her team in line through the tumult of a campaign with a well-timed text or phone call, said Gaetz. “She’s used this saying with me and others when we’ve coloured outside the lines,” he recalled: “‘Were you trying to be helpful?’”

“It just cuts to the bone,” he said.

The blunt feedback hasn’t derailed Gaetz’s affection for Wiles, who he said is a fellow avid bird watcher. Gaetz said the pair spent time birding together watching “the herons and the wood ducks and the woodpeckers” after DeSantis won and Wiles and Gaetz were leading his transition.

She loves to bake and spend time with her 8-year-old grandson, Easton, whom she says is a good reason why she is in her role.

Democrats who have faced off against Wiles’s candidates said she rarely makes missteps. For example, Scott robotically stayed on message during news conferences, said Steve Schale, who was involved with Democratic campaigns running against the former governor. “They would get wildly mocked on Twitter because he would just say the same thing over and over,” but it was effective, Schale said. “It was remarkably disciplined.”

Wiles rarely comments on social media and has posted just a few family photos on Instagram. But this week she took the rare opportunity to fire back at billionaire Mark Cuban after he said of Trump, “You never see him around strong intelligent women, ever.”

“I’m told @mcuban needs help identifying the strong and intelligent women surrounding Pres. Trump,” Wiles said on social media, pointing to herself as well as Linda McMahon, who is helping run Trump’s transition team, and Republican National Committee co-chairwoman Lara Trump.

“Well, here we are!”

The Wall St Journal