A top adviser to Donald Trump said he lost in 2020 because he had too many non-locals running campaign operations in states they didn’t fully understand.
That analysis came from Susie Wiles during a Mar-a-Lago sit-down with Trump in 2021, reported Vanity Fair, which published an excerpt of Trump in Exile by Meridith McGraw on Monday.
Fast forward three years and Wiles, formerly the head of Trump’s Florida operation, is now a senior adviser on his current campaign. She’s been photographed behind Trump on his jet, on stage in Iowa, and working on the ground in New Hampshire. Wiles’ promotion may be partly credited to her blunt insight into what went wrong in 2020.
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“In the 2020 campaign, [Wiles] explained, there were too many staffers who were dispatched to places where they didn’t understand their own environment, let alone the electorate, and so when things inevitably went wrong, they did not have the connections or resources to fix them,” read McGraw’s excerpt.
It’s unclear what states Wiles was referring to specifically. Ballotpedia has a generous definition of what “battleground states” were in the 2020 election, including Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, all of which Trump won.
There were also, however, eight Ballotpedia toss-up states that Trump lost: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Trump reportedly called on the expertise of Wiles in 2021, as his election fraud claims were still in full swing. McGraw’s excerpt said it was clear to Wiles in that meeting that Trump had set his sights on running again in 2024.
“The former president was eager to understand at a granular level why he was no longer in the White House,” McGraw wrote. “And even though their dinner took place in early 2021, the subtext of his line of questioning was How can I do this again and win?”
It’s unclear if Trump and Wiles have rectified their self-reported issues of 2020 by installing locals to head up battleground state operations, but Trump’s time on the trail appears to be easing up a bit, at least this week.
NBC News reported Monday that Harris’ campaign schedule for the week includes stops in seven swing states over five days, while Trump is scheduled to have just a single public campaign event, in deep-red Montana on Friday.
