There’s a whole lot more to Susie Wiles than meets the eye.
She looks like a grandma straight out of central casting. But when Donald Trump’s demure campaign operative becomes the first female White House chief of staff in January, she’ll also be the most powerful the president-elect has ever had.
He trusts her more than any adviser. And she knows how to manage him. As his campaign chair who got him elected in 2016 and propelled him to a stunning landslide victory over Kamala Harris this week, Wiles is someone Trump counts on and appreciates.
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“Susie Wiles just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history, and was an integral part of both my 2016 and 2020 successful campaigns,” Trump said in a statement. “Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected. Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America Great Again.”
Their close relationship fuels Wiles’ incredible authority. Her command over Trump’s agenda—mass deportations, tax cuts, tariffs, slashing federal jobs, and more—will extend all along Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Oval Office to the Capitol.
There’s also no guesswork involved for Trump as there was in his first Oval Office rodeo, when he blew through four different chiefs of staff, including one who recently labeled the former and incoming president a “fascist” with no regard for the Constitution or rule of law.
Wiles, a 67-year-old grandmother, is a formidable woman who has put many a man in his place—of power, that is.
A campaign strategist who prefers winning behind the scenes, away from the limelight, her successes include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—with whom she later had a public falling out—and Sen. Rick Scott, a former two-term Florida governor who won re-election to his Senate seat on Tuesday.
Scott is now running to become Senate majority leader, and Wiles’ stealthy influence is already being felt. The Florida senator immediately congratulated Wiles when Trump announced she’d be coming to Washington as his chief of staff.
Soon enough, Scott’s competitors to replace Mitch McConnell as the powerful Senate GOP leader, called on Trump to “stay out of the race.” There was little chance of that happening.
“Susie Wiles combines being a strategist with a shrewd tactician, which has made her formidable,” Doug Heye, a Republican operative, told the Daily Beast on Friday. “She is also a steady hand for a ship that sometimes steers itself off course.”
Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told Politico last spring that Wiles “touches everything.”
“There is nobody, I think, that has the wealth of information that she does. Nobody in our orbit. Nobody,” Fabrizio said.
Wiles knew her way around the White House way before Donald Trump ever arrived. She was Ronald Reagan’s executive office scheduler after working on Capitol Hill for New York Rep. Jack Kemp in the 1970s.
And from January 2025, she’ll be overseeing the entire White House staff. Serving as chief of staff to a president can be a brutal job, especially at times when an Oval Office regime is besieged by chaos and competing interests.
Ron Klain, who served an unusually long stint as chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore and then to President Joe Biden, had this to say when asked what advice he would lend to Wiles:
“I wish her the very best,” Klain told the Daily Beast. “I think it’s important not to view the job as a process job or a neutral arbiter of competing views but rather as being the person in charge of delivering on the president’s agenda in the face of entropy and the demands of others.”
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