Who is Susie Wiles, the woman behind Trump’s historic return to the Oval Office?

President-elect Trump began putting his new team in place, announcing that his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, will be his chief of staff when he takes office next year. She is the first woman to be appointed to that position. A veteran of Florida politics, Wiles ran campaigns for Sen. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis before running Trump’s winning bid. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Marc Caputo.
Amna Nawaz:
Welcome to the “News Hour.”
President-elect Donald Trump began putting his new team in place, announcing that his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, will be the White House chief of staff when he takes office next year.
Geoff Bennett:
Wiles is the first woman to be appointed to that position. And during his victory speech Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump praised Wiles for helping engineer his sweeping victory.
Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. President-Elect: Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you, the ice maiden. We call her the ice maiden.
(Cheering)
Donald Trump:
Come on, Susie. Chris — come here, Chris. Susie likes to stay in the background. She’s not in the background.
Geoff Bennett:
A veteran of Florida politics, Wiles ran successful campaigns for Senator Rick Scott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis before running Donald Trump’s winning bid for reelection.
For a closer look, we’re joined now by Marc Caputo, national political reporter for The Bulwark and previously covered politics in his home state of Florida for years.
Marc, it’s great to have you here.
Marc Caputo, The Bulwark:
Hi. Thanks.
Geoff Bennett:
So in a traditional White House, the chief of staff oversees strategy, coordination, policy decisions. It’s arguably the most important personnel decision a president can make.
What if anything can we take away from Donald Trump’s selection of Susie Wiles to serve as his chief of staff?
Marc Caputo:
Donald Trump wants to stick with a winning team. He enjoyed great success against what seemed like great odds this cycle. His two previous presidential campaigns were always marred by sort of infighting, drama, and in some cases, like, a great amount of incompetence.
One of the reasons he was so thrilled in that clip that you played from his election night victory speech was that he had a winning team that didn’t really have any of that. Now, there was a little drama at the end, but that was more of Donald Trump’s fault. That was Donald Trump’s fault, not the fault of his campaign co-managers.
The thing about Susie Wiles is that she has had a reputation of being a winner. She’s not a braggart. As he said, she likes to stay behind the scenes. She is known for being sort of egoless. She serves the principal and she makes sure to kind of execute their will without getting too much in the way.
You didn’t hear any leaks of her sort of reining back Donald Trump or talking down to him or any sort of appearance of folks in the campaign trying to sort of defend their reputations when it looked like things were going south. None of those things happened.
And a lot of that is attributable to Wiles, the people that she hired, and the sort of the drama-free environment that the campaign itself ran on, now, not Donald Trump, but the campaign itself.
Geoff Bennett:
Susie Wiles worked in Florida politics for decades for a number of moderate politicians. She’s even described herself as a moderate.
Why Donald Trump then?
Marc Caputo:
Well, she worked for Donald Trump in 2016 running his Florida campaign, when people thought and when the polling showed that he wouldn’t win Florida. And he won, and Trump was very happy about that.
But Susie Wiles’ first big race in Florida was Rick Scott’s in 2010, when he ran for governor. And, at that time, Rick Scott looked like he had no prayer of winning the state. He did. Wiles got a lot of the credit. Then, in 2016, you had Donald Trump run his race.
In 2018, Ron DeSantis ran his gubernatorial race, and when things were going real south for him, who did he call? He called Susie Wiles. Now, the two of them had a falling out. That wasn’t Wiles’ fault. That was a result of Governor Ron DeSantis’ paranoia an inability to accept the fact that people were giving her a measure of credit for his win, which he just couldn’t stand.
So he tried to wreck her reputation and her career. She got back on her feet, got back on President Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020, working in Florida again. She helped him win the state. Obviously, he lost that race.
But he realized in 2021 when he was in a real bad spot, no one thought he could make comeback,it was after January 6, and he wanted to give it another whirl. And he wanted to make sure he had someone confident, somebody he could trust, someone who wasn’t going to sort of self-promote and cause him trouble.
And really only one name rose to the top of the list. That was Susie Wiles. And President Trump was very happy he made that decision.
Geoff Bennett:
Wiles has said that her specialty is creating order from chaos. It raises the question.
Marc Caputo:
Yes.
Geoff Bennett:
Democrats had said that if Donald Trump were to win reelection, that there’d be no guardrails. He’d surround himself with loyalties who would do his bidding. Would it be a mistake to perceive Susie Wiles as a guardrail, potentially?
Marc Caputo:
That’s a difficult question to ask, because what we don’t have insight into and what Wiles wouldn’t talk about are those times where she may have — and undoubtedly she had just kind of statistically — an adviser advises a principal.
And eventually, the principal, even Donald Trump, is going to take the adviser’s advice. So there were undoubtedly times where she told him, please don’t do this or try to kind of nudge the ship of S.S. Trump in the right way.
It’s a very difficult process if you talk to people who have been advisers, who are advisers or confidants of Trump. And so she undoubtedly did that. However, Donald Trump also does what he wants to do. And there’s always that fundamental tension that runs through his organizations.
So to the degree of comparing Susie Wiles to a guardrail, I think it’s fair. But it’s also important to remember that Donald Trump is an 18-wheeler and sometimes he careens down the hill at top speed. And there’s no amount of guardrails that can necessarily prepare against that.
We have seen in this election cycle, though, that whatever you want to call it, the guardrails, good advisers, selflessness, luck or Zen, Susie Wiles played a really key role in that, perhaps the key role.
Geoff Bennett:
Marc Caputo, national political reporter for The Bulwark, thanks again for joining us.
Marc Caputo:
Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate it.