When Donald Trump decamped Washington for South Florida in January 2021, he was in a foul mood – seething about losing the presidential election and shouting at advisers.
Two dinners with Susie Wiles, a veteran Florida political operative who had helped run both of his previous campaigns in the state, set him on a different course, people familiar with their interactions said. She convinced him he could mount a political comeback and retake power.
Her efforts set the country on a different course as well and altered the trajectory of her own career. Wiles became his de facto chief of staff, then campaign manager once he launched his bid to return to the White House in 2022. Following his election victory this week, Trump named Wiles, 67, his incoming White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the all-important role.
Wiles has already lasted longer, as a private adviser running his political operation, than any of Trump’s chiefs of staff during his first term in office. His longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Corps general John Kelly, served from July 2017 to January 2019 – and in recent weeks has warned that Trump is a fascist who had professed admiration for Hitler and aspired to rule like a dictator.
Wiles has stayed in Trump’s good graces, friends and other advisers said, in part because she’s a foil for him – unflappable where he is volatile. Colleagues said they had never seen her lose her temper. She rarely swears.
She stood out and commanded respect on a campaign otherwise mostly staffed at the senior level by pugilistic men prone to infighting, according to advisers. Inside the President-elect’s orbit, she has many fans and few critics. She says no to Trump, but only occasionally, believing this approach lends her dissent greater impact, four people who know her said.
Wiles did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump campaign also did not respond. In announcing her role, Trump said: “Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected”.
A moderate in the mould of Jack Kemp, the star quarterback turned Republican congressman from New York who hired her as an assistant in 1979, Wiles hardly started out as an evangelist for Trump or his hardline views, said two people who’ve worked with her.
As a political adviser in Jacksonville in the 1990s and 2000s, she was known for promoting environmental causes and seeking greater spending on local services. But Wiles concluded that Trump was the best vehicle for Republican power, a longtime Florida lobbyist who has worked with her said, especially after she fell out with her former boss, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in 2019.
Once she arrived at that conclusion, she was prepared to serve Trump unflinchingly, people who know her said. When she has disagreed with his words or actions, she will offer comments such as, “Oh, that wasn’t helpful”, according to people familiar with her reaction, or, “We’re going to get that into a better place”. But multiple Trump advisers said they had never heard her utter a critical word about him as a person.
People who know Wiles said she may tame some of the staff conflict that marked Trump’s first term but is unlikely to restrain his impulses. She was considered a shoo-in for White House chief of staff and did not have to sit for an interview with Trump, according to a person familiar with the process.
“She seems like she’s a grandmotherly figure, but she’s tough, she’s steely, she’s a survivor, and she continues on,” said Brian Ballard, a prominent lobbyist and Trump ally who hired Wiles and tapped her to help launch a DC outpost of his firm, Ballard Partners, in 2017.
It was Ballard, a longtime Florida lobbyist, who introduced Wiles to Trump and helped her land a job managing the first-time candidate’s 2016 campaign in the Sunshine State.
Her reputation as a formidable political operative was built over decades. The daughter of star placekicker and NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles was raised in New Jersey and worked in Washington, for Kemp and then Ronald Reagan. Then she relocated to Ponte Vedra Beach, a suburb of Jacksonville, after getting married to a fellow Reagan staffer in 1985. The pair later divorced.
She went on to work for two middle-of-the-road mayors of Jacksonville, John Delaney and John Peyton. In 2010, she ran Rick Scott’s victorious campaign for governor, helping the healthcare executive and first-time candidate forge ties with the GOP establishment at a time when Florida remained a closely contested swing state. The following year, she briefly managed the Republican presidential primary bid of Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor.
In 2011, she joined Ballard Partners as a managing partner in the firm’s Jacksonville office, lobbying the municipal departments where she once worked as a government aide.
By the time she joined Trump’s campaign in 2016, she had amassed respect from both sides of the aisle.
“Bringing on Susie is one of the few smart decisions that I’ve seen the Trump campaign make this year,” Chris Hand, a Democratic consultant in Jacksonville, told the Tampa Bay Times in October 2016. “Frankly, if Donald were running as a Susie Wiles Republican – reasonably conservative, pro-environment, pro-investment – he might have a real chance of being elected president on November 8.”
Wiles clashed with the candidate when she asked him to fund a pricey mail programme near the end of the race. He shouted at her at his Florida golf club, according to people familiar with the interaction, and she thought she would either quit or be fired. But the two made peace, and within weeks, they were able to celebrate a victory in the state – and throughout the country.
With Trump in the White House, Wiles took on federal lobbying work while landing new campaign clients. During his first year in office, she advocated for a wide range of companies in the healthcare, energy, and communications sectors, disclosures show, including a Tampa-based chemical company and a Venezuelan news network registered in Miami.
In 2018, Wiles managed the upstart gubernatorial bid of DeSantis, at the time a Trump-aligned but little-known Republican congressman from the eastern Florida coast. Once in office, DeSantis banished her based on suspicions that she had fed embarrassing information about his interactions with donors to the news media, which she denied.
The governor also chafed against her efforts to advise him of restrictions about taking gifts from lobbyists. DeSantis sought to exile her from Republican politics in the state, successfully urging Trump to drop her from his re-election bid in 2019. DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
She also left the Ballard firm in 2019, saying in September of that year that she was stepping away from both the lobbying effort and Trump’s re-election campaign “because of a nagging health issue”. She told others that it was the worst year of her life.
Her split with Trump was short-lived. She began volunteering for the Republican National Committee to put together plans for a convention in Jacksonville, which were set aside as the coronavirus made its deadly march across the state. Then Trump brought her back into his fold over the objections of DeSantis, who lobbied against her during a summer 2020 phone call with the President.
When Trump moved to Florida after losing the 2020 election, he put Wiles in charge of his whole political operation.
In addition to their dinners in early 2021, Wiles spent many days in Trump’s post-presidential office above the gilded Mar-a-Lago ballroom, the beating heart of his private club and residence in Palm Beach. She listened to him complain about the election. She explained the political paths available to him and began hiring additional staff. She explained some of the mechanics of how she believed he could run a better campaign to him, particularly on early voting and mail-in ballots, which she urged him to support.
Most of all, Wiles became a trusted companion and confidante, eventually getting an apartment in Palm Beach instead of travelling back and forth from her Jacksonville home. As boss of Trump’s Save America PAC, she decided how to spend the former President’s cash haul. And in that role, she became his right hand, sitting in on his conversations with foreign leaders and managing not just political, but also legal crises as Trump was indicted in four separate criminal cases.
According to Trump advisers, Wiles was among his first calls when federal authorities raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 as part of their probe into his alleged retention of classified documents. She spent hours in front of a grand jury testifying about his handling of those documents.
And she was the primary intermediary between the former President’s extensive teams of lawyers and political aides, deciding how to handle legal fees and how to spend the gusher of campaign contributions that came in as a result of his various criminal indictments. She even accompanied him for his various mug shots, including to Atlanta, where he was photographed in a publicly released image. She told others that the jail there was “filthy”.
In 2022, three years after her departure from Ballard Partners, she joined Mercury Public Affairs, a global consulting and lobbying shop, saying the firm would be her “corporate home”. The hire caused internal strife at Mercury, a bipartisan shop, where some Democrats blanched at the association with such a high-profile Trump operative, according to people at the firm.
She has not been especially active as a Mercury lobbyist in recent years, registering to lobby for just one client in the first quarter of 2024. The client, Swisher, is a Jacksonville-based tobacco company and maker of Swisher Sweets, the popular flavoured cigars.
Wiles is one of at least five people advising Trump who have advocated for tobacco, vaping, or cannabis interests in recent years, according to lobbying disclosures and interviews.
The tobacco industry spent millions backing Trump’s bid this cycle, campaign finance records show, and Trump promised to “save” vaping in September after a meeting with a leading vaping lobbyist. Wiles has maintained that she hasn’t influenced Trump’s position on nicotine-related issues and hasn’t been involved in policy conversations on the topic, people who have spoken to her said.
“She’s been more about strategy than ideology,” an adviser said. “Susie is not a firebrand. She’s not coming into the White House trying to accomplish her own agenda.”
Multiple advisers to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris said they were impressed with Wiles, noting that the campaign she ran was more disciplined than the candidate himself. “She ran an impressive campaign,” one senior Harris adviser said. “You have to give her that.”
Her proximity to Trump made her a target of hostile foreign efforts to interfere in the campaign. Wiles was a target of alleged Iranian hacking attempts this year, according to people familiar with the investigation. She was backstage when Trump was shot in Pennsylvania, urging other staffers to get on the ground.
She so often shied from the spotlight during the campaign that other advisers were shocked when she positioned herself right by the stage at Trump’s rally on the Sunday before the election – making her presence known after the candidate said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot at the news media and suggested he shouldn’t have left office in 2021.
Trump’s team viewed his comments as a strategic blunder in the closing days of a race they believed they were going to win. Wiles, with her large sunglasses, stood gazing at Trump just beyond the stage, seemingly urging him to get back on script with a look alone.
Other aides began texting and calling each other about her movements. “I’ve never seen her in the buffer before,” one aide said, describing the area near the stage.
Her presence spoke to her singular influence in Trump’s orbit. Now, that influence is set to extend across the federal bureaucracy.
“Susie is in a much different place than I was,” said Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, who served from January 2017 to July 2017 and engaged in a running battle with other White House aides for influence with the President. “She isn’t sharing power with anyone.”
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