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Susie Wiles and Donald Trump
Wiles is a veteran but low-profile Republican political operative who was one of the people leading Trump's 2024 campaign.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, to be his White House chief of staff, and she’ll be the first woman to hold the post, multiple media outlets report.
Wiles is a veteran but low-profile Republican political operative. She has worked in GOP politics since the 1970s, and she was a scheduler on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and then held a post in the Reagan White House. A native of New Jersey, she has long been a resident of Florida, where she ran the state’s operations for Trump in 2016 and Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial campaign in 2018. But she eventually fell out with DeSantis and his team, and she is one of the reasons Trump and not DeSantis became the 2024 Republican presidential nominee,Politiconoted earlier this year.
She has avoided a public role but has been powerful behind the scenes. “Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you,” Trump said in his Election Night victory speech. “The Ice Maiden. We call her the Ice Maiden.”
She was named CEO of Trump’s Save America PAC in 2021 and became a leader in his presidential campaign as soon as he announced he’d run in 2024.
In naming Wiles chief of staff, Trump released a statement saying she is “tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected” and that it will be “a well deserved honor to have Susie as the first-ever female Chief of Staff in United States history.”
Political observers will be wondering how long she’ll stay. Trump went through four chiefs of staff in his first term — Reince Priebus, Mick Mulvaney, Gen. John Kelly (who turned against Trump and called him a fascist), and Mark Meadows.
“She would be what I’d call left on LGBT+ issues,” former Jacksonville, Fla., Mayor John Delaney told The Independent. Wiles ran his successful campaign for mayor in 1995 and became his chief of staff after he was elected. “And I can’t believe she would necessarily agree naturally with Donald Trump on immigration, but that’s more me speculating,” Delaney added. She wasn't able to keep Trump from demonizing transgender people and immigrants during the campaign, however.
“Delaney says politics is about what people can overlook in one candidate and what they can’t overlook in another,” The Independent reports. “In that way, she’s very much like the voters who might have held their noses at the ballot box; ‘dyed in the wool’ Republicans who may not have loved their candidate, but who got over the line.”
Peter Schorsch, publisher of Florida Politics, told The Independent that Wiles has a “let Trump be Trump” philosophy. “He says certain things to the MAGA crowd, but he also offers an incredible tax policy to the billionaire crowd, and they like that,” Schorsch said. “I don’t want to say she’s made a deal with the devil, but she knows what Trump’s about.” However, she ran a “disciplined ground game” in the campaign, he said.
CNN notes, “At times, she also had to confront Trump about keeping certain people at arm’s length — though, her inability to prevent far-right provocateur Laura Loomer from joining the former president at a debate and a 9/11 memorial service created significant blowback for her boss.”
But she plans to keep fringe elements out of the White House, an anonymous source told CNN. “The clown car can’t come into the White House at will,” the source said. “And he agrees with her.”
Wiles has guarded her personal information closely, but some facts are known. She is one of three daughters of the late pro football player and broadcaster Pat Summerall. His alcoholism damaged his relationship with his daughters, but the family eventually reconciled, according to The Independent. She was married to Lanny Wiles, another Republican political operative, for many years, but they divorced in 2017. They have two daughters, Katie and Caroline. And she doesn’t appear to be connected to anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Semitic minister Rick Wiles, although he has a wife named Susan.
