Meet Donald Trump’s inner circle with eyes on the prize
A big reason for Donald Trump’s dominance of the Republican presidential race is his team of experienced professionals who have taken all the drama out of organising his campaign.
The front cabin of Trump Force One, Donald Trump’s gleaming Boeing 757, has space for eight or nine advisers on its sofa and white leather chairs, with 24-carat gold-plated belt buckles, grouped around a highly polished wooden table.
Just the right amount of room for the former president and his inner circle to plan the latest moves of an election campaign that is far removed from the chaos of his 2016 run and could carry him back to the White House.
Trump showed after last week’s New Hampshire primary, when he unloaded on his last remaining rival for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, that he is still the erratic and vindictive figure capable of sabotaging any carefully scripted preparations. But a big reason for his dominance of the Republican presidential race is the counterbalance provided by a team of experienced professionals who have taken all the drama out of organising for the early primary states that are so crucial for building the momentum necessary to win.
Unusually for a Trump campaign, they all seem to get along.
“Trump likes to have staff meetings [in person], so he’ll put seven, eight people in the room or on the plane, around one of those long tables,” said Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer who is not a member of the campaign team but can testify to the transformation since 2016.
The two top campaign staff, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, make a formidable partnership and, together with a cadre of long-serving loyalists and a couple of rapidly rising newcomers, have created a highly disciplined operation.
Wiles, 66, a veteran Florida political adviser who acts as Trump’s de facto chief of staff, is the rock around which the 2024 team is anchored. A birdwatcher who hates the limelight, she ran Trump’s 2016 campaign in Florida when it was seen as a swing state and helped him to score a bigger than expected win against Hillary Clinton.
In the days when Ron DeSantis was an ambitious and loyal congressman, she went to work on his 2018 campaign to become governor of Florida. “Susie Wiles saved his campaign,” Jim Clark, a senior politics lecturer at the University of Central Florida, said. “Then he pushed her out. Got to be one of the worst political moves ever.”
Trump recruited her to help repair his image after the US Capitol riot by his supporters in 2021, and she also brought an insider’s perspective on how to needle “Ron DeSanctimonious”. The rest is history, with DeSantis bowing out of the race for the Republican nomination after finishing a distant second in Iowa on January 15.
When building her teams, Wiles “kept out the crazier”, according to one source. She has largely remained at the campaign base in Florida overseeing strategy while LaCivita, 57, spent a lot of time in the field, particularly in Iowa, putting in place the most impressive “ground game” that many observers had ever seen there.
The plan was to overwhelm all rivals with a knockout blow in Iowa. There were hundreds of hours of training sessions for local “team captains”, assigning one to each of the state’s 1,678 precincts and directing them to motivate at least ten supporters to come to the evening caucuses where votes were cast. It worked a treat.
LaCivita, a former marine who cut his teeth with the Swift Boat Veterans, a smear campaign against the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over his Vietnam War record, knows how to hurt opponents.
Both he and ally Brian Jack, 35, a senior campaign adviser who served as Trump’s White House director of public affairs, came to Trump’s attention by masterminding the effort to thwart the Never Trump movement at the 2016 Republican convention.
Along with Jason Miller, 48, a long-serving Trump communications staffer turned political adviser who worked on Giuliani’s 2008 presidential run, they have pored over attack material to find just the right clips and memes to undermine DeSantis and Haley.
These are often packaged by Dan Scavino, 47, who started out by introducing a tech-phobic Trump to Twitter – which turned out to be one of the most unpredictable features of Trump’s first term. Scavino stuck around and now oversees social media for the campaign.
Several other key figures are regular attenders at strategy meetings on Trump Force One or at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida. They include John McLaughlin, Trump’s main pollster, who previously worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was governor of California; Steven Cheung, the combative head of communications recruited in 2016 from the mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship in Las Vegas; and Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s counsel, who got to know the family after befriending Trump’s son Eric at university.
Also part of the team are TV advertising consultant John Brabender; Stephen Miller, architect of immigration policy and speechwriter; Natalie Harp, described by Giuliani as “like assistant chief of staff, she’s with him probably more than anyone else”; and the rising star Karoline Leavitt, the 26-year-old national press secretary from New Hampshire.
This close-knit team is backed by the advertising operation of several fundraising committees dedicated to Trump’s re-election, as well as two Washington-based think tanks – the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation – that are working on preparing policy and screening personnel for the second term. All to ensure that the next Trump administration is as professional and effective as the campaign.
Giuliani attributes the campaign team’s success not just to its discipline but also the way that Trump has set out a raft of policies, in stark contrast to his 2020 campaign, which vaguely promised more of the same and did not even have a manifesto. The other key ingredient are rallies, he said, which were largely abandoned in 2020 because of the pandemic.
“The rallies generate such an enthusiasm – and our parties are so close, whoever has more enthusiasm wins,” said Giuliani. “Unless you cheat.”
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