Trump Names Susie Wiles as His White House Chief of Staff

 

Trump Names Susie Wiles as His White House Chief of Staff

 

The president-elect turned to his top political aide to fill a key post managing the White House when he returns to office.

 

Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan

By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Nov. 7, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/susie-wiles-trump-white-house-chief-of-staff.html

 

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named Susie Wiles, the Florida strategist who has run his political operation for nearly four years, as his White House chief of staff for his incoming administration.

 

It is the first job announcement Mr. Trump has made since winning the election on Tuesday, and one his advisers were eager for so he could begin rolling out his choices to populate the top ranks of government.

 

In Ms. Wiles, Mr. Trump turned to an aide he knows well and who has worked closely with him, understands how he operates, is close with his family and to whom most of his current team is loyal. She will be the first woman ever to hold the job.

 

Ms. Wiles has shown an ability to survive Mr. Trump’s chaotic management style, which led him to churn through four chiefs of staff during his first term in office. She worked on Mr. Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020, but in less senior roles. Mr. Trump brought her back to run his political operation in early 2021, soon after he left office in disgrace after trying to overturn the 2020 election. She has been the only campaign manager to survive an entire campaign working for him.

 

In addition to having run his political operation, she has helped deal with the lawyers on his various criminal and civil cases.

 

“Susie is tough, smart, innovative and is universally admired and respected,” Mr. Trump said in a statement announcing the decision. He added, “I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”

 

His decision to choose someone in his inner circle is a sharp contrast to his choice after first winning the presidency in 2016. Then, he selected someone with whom he had little history for the chief of staff role: Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time.

 

Most members of Mr. Trump’s extended orbit wanted to see Ms. Wiles as chief. She has close relationships with Vice President-elect JD Vance and with Mr. Trump’s family, including his two older sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric.

 

Her appointment will help move along the transition process. In the coming days, Mr. Trump is set to begin reviewing names for the most important jobs in government, including cabinet posts.

 

Ms. Wiles, the daughter of the football legend Pat Summerall, did not emerge in politics from Mr. Trump’s hard-right political base. But she kept his world functioning as he was charged criminally four times in four courthouses, and steered him through primary victories, the aftermath of a criminal conviction, two assassination attempts and a change in his opponent just after the Republican National Convention.

 

Ms. Wiles championed the former president’s effort to expand his coalition in the general election beyond the party’s older white base to appeal to Black and Latino voters who typically had not supported Republicans.

 

She is a rare operative who has become close to the leaders of the MAGA movement while still maintaining relationships with some members of the old-guard establishment that Mr. Trump has trounced. After her appointment was announced, she was praised on social media by Republicans ranging from Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor whom Mr. Trump defeated in the 2016 primary, to Charlie Kirk, a MAGA influencer who leads the group Turning Point USA.

 

The role of chief of staff is crucial in any White House — traditionally serving as a gatekeeper and driving the president’s agenda. It is often described as the second most powerful job in Washington, behind the presidency. But Mr. Trump, whose leadership model in his real estate business had little structural hierarchy, has never understood the role and bucked against efforts to create an orderly process.

 

One of his chiefs of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said it was the worst job he had ever had.

 

Donald F. McGahn II, who was Mr. Trump’s first White House counsel, once described Mr. Trump’s management style in the Oval Office as a “hub and spokes model” — often assigning the same task to more than one person. It is unlikely that will change in his second term.

 

There was no theme to Mr. Trump’s previous picks for chiefs of staff. They were chosen either because they were recommended by top Republicans in Washington, in Mr. Priebus’s case, or because they seemed likely to bring order to chaos, in Mr. Kelly’s case.

 

When the relationship with Mr. Kelly went irretrievably south, Mr. Trump brought on in an “acting” capacity his budget chief, Mick Mulvaney. During the coronavirus pandemic, he replaced Mr. Mulvaney with a right-wing congressman, Mark Meadows, who was inclined to “let Trump be Trump” and was ultimately indicted in a Georgia case stemming from Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power.

 

Mr. Trump had spent relatively little time thinking about who would serve as his chief for his second-term administration compared with his interest in a handful of cabinet posts — attorney general, defense secretary, and C.I.A. director.

 

He was superstitious about discussing any government jobs before he won the election, so there was an edict among his team to talk as little as possible about governing plans when they were in Mr. Trump’s presence. He would get angry if he thought that his staff was thinking past Election Day, so the transition planning was kept largely out of his earshot.

 

Still, Mr. Trump did muse privately about another potential choice for chief of staff. He asked several people what they thought about Brooke Rollins, who heads a policy institute that supports Mr. Trump and worked in his last White House.

 

But Ms. Rollins, who is close to Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, is not trusted by most in Mr. Trump’s current tight circle of aides. Her policy views, including her passionate advocacy for criminal justice reform, have been viewed with skepticism by many on the hard right.

 

Most of the people who joined Mr. Trump when he first went to the White House were a mash-up of campaign hands and aides who had worked on Capitol Hill or elsewhere in Washington. But Ms. Wiles is likely to put in place a White House staff composed of people who have more experience working directly with Mr. Trump.

 

Unlike most of Mr. Trump’s previous top staff, Ms. Wiles, a grandmother who has two daughters, keeps an extremely low profile and has little interest in appearing on television, where the incoming president likes to see people defend him.

 

When his latest win was called by Fox News in the early hours of Wednesday and Mr. Trump stood on the stage at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, he tried, twice, to get Ms. Wiles to come to the microphone to speak. She declined. Mr. Trump praised her as an “ice queen,” echoing his own mentor and lawyer, Roy M. Cohn, who used to say his client urinated “ice water.”

 

Ms. Wiles, who lives in Florida, briefly advised Jon Huntsman’s ultimately failed presidential campaign in 2012. She also helped Senator Rick Scott of Florida win his seat, and helped Ron DeSantis to victory in the 2018 Florida governor’s race. Mr. DeSantis later fired her and denounced her in ways that even his allies found unseemly, but she got her revenge earlier this year when she helped Mr. Trump crush Mr. DeSantis in the G.O.P. presidential primaries.

 

She worked in Washington in the 1970s, and later on one of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns and in his White House, in the role of scheduler. She has also worked for Ballard Partners, a Florida-based lobbying firm, and then for Mercury Public Affairs.

 

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

 

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan