The Woman Who Engineered Donald Trump’s Rise From the Ashes of 2020

On a warm February evening, Susie Wiles arrived well-prepared for dinner with Donald Trump.

During the 2020 election, Wiles was put in charge of winning the state of Florida. She had held the same role in 2016, and the second time around managed to help Trump widen his margin in the state by two percentage points. Following the election, Wiles put together an exhaustive after-action report on Florida, chock-full of data and information about how people and resources were used throughout the state. Businesslike and organized, Wiles wanted to have detailed documentation of the campaign.

Sitting at Trump’s table on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, Wiles went page by page through her findings with Trump over dinner and Diet Coke.

Wiles was a shrewd political operator, but disarming in her appearance and demeanor. A grandmother in her sixties, she had short blond hair and a warm smile, and liked to bring up her dog and grandson in conversation. She was known for checking in on people working around her, was quick to give credit, and developed a loyal following among several top political operatives in the state—relationships Trump would later benefit from in his 2024 bid.

Throughout 2020, she had been the only state director during the campaign to send nightly reports on the state of play in Florida. Still trying to make sense of the election, Trump spent their two hours together asking detailed questions about what had worked, but also about what had gone wrong.

The former president was eager to understand at a granular level why he was no longer in the White House. 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?

Wiles believed the conversation would be one of the few opportunities she had to be blunt about the 2020 campaign, so she laid out what she thought was a critical weakness in their operation.

One of the main reasons they had been successful in Florida, she said, was that she was from the state and knew the laws and the people. In the 2020 campaign, she 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.

And she would know. Doing just that—knowing who the players are and building relationships in the world of politics—was something Wiles had worked hard at for decades.

By the end of their dinner, Trump told Susie Wiles that he was getting ready to start another super PAC.

“Would you like to be on its board?” Trump asked Wiles. She agreed.

The daughter of Pat Summerall, the former NFL player turned legendary sportscaster, Wiles grew up in the world of sports and fame. She cut her teeth in politics in 1979, working for Representative Jack Kemp, a New York Republican and former teammate of her father’s, before joining Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In the first year of Reagan’s White House, Wiles was a scheduler before moving over to the Labor Department.

At the very start of her career, she got a front-row seat to the masters of crafting a political image. Among the people Wiles worked closely with in Reagan’s White House was Michael Deaver, a close aide to Reagan who was known as a “visuals guru” and “media maestro” and who changed the modern presidency with his carefully choreographed photo ops and careful attention to the president’s image.

Wiles went on to work for the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush before settling near Jacksonville, Florida, to be closer to her family.

She took the lessons she learned working for Reagan and Bush to start her own public affairs firm, where she gained a reputation as a top political consultant for the northeastern part of the state. She ran Republican representative Tillie Fowler’s office in Jacksonville and later managed the successful campaigns of several Jacksonville mayors. She was never wed to any particular type of Republican and worked for every stripe under the “R” tent.

In 2010, Wiles was introduced to Rick Scott, a wealthy healthcare executive and Tea Party favorite who planned to use his millions to propel a long-shot, last-minute bid for the governor’s mansion, and signed on as his campaign manager. There were others from Scott’s campaign who would come back to serve in top roles for Trump, including pollsters Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin. After Scott won his race, she jumped onto the presidential campaign of Jon Huntsman Jr., a businessman and former governor of Utah, before bowing out after one month, eventually signing on to the Florida campaign of the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney. Romney would narrowly lose the state to Barack Obama.

She worked with the Florida lobbyist Brian Ballard before taking her next step—signing on to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Trump did not have anyone in Florida when he announced his 2016 run for president, and Trump had asked Ballard if he knew someone for the job. He did: It was Wiles, who, coincidentally enough, had recently reached out to Ballard after seeing Trump’s announcement and said she thought Trump had something special and could win the presidency. After a meeting with Trump at his eponymous high-rise in Manhattan, Wiles joined his campaign.

The move raised eyebrows in national Republican circles. Wiles went from working for two members of Mormon GOP royalty to working for Trump at the encouragement and recommendation of some close to Trump, including then-governor Rick Scott. It was a trajectory that Wiles herself felt the need to explain away.

At the time, Wiles wrote in an email that was published by The New York Times, “As a card-carrying member of the GOP establishment, many thought my full-throated endorsement of the Trump candidacy was ill-advised—even crazy.”

And yet Wiles signed on, giving his outsider campaign serious bona fides among the political class in Tallahassee. And when Senator Marco Rubio ran for reelection after being humiliated by Trump, it was Wiles who was a conduit between the two as the Trump and Rubio camps tried to bandage the wounds.

Wiles once came close to quitting. During a dinner with Trump, former New York mayor Rudoph Giuliani, and campaign aides at Trump National Doral in Miami, Wiles asked for a large check to help with direct mail as they chased ballots in the state. The news that he was behind and the request that he write a hefty six-figure check set Trump off. He berated Wiles in front of everyone at the dinner, in a blowup that left Wiles shocked and rattled, and aides wondering if Trump was going to fire her.

The next day, Trump was holding his last fundraiser of 2016 at Mar-a-Lago and saw Ballard, who he knew was close to Wiles. “Your girl doesn’t have it,” Trump said. Ballard told Trump he was wrong. Wiles needed the check—and badly—for direct mail. “Okay,” Trump said. “But if I lose Florida it’s on you,” he added, pointing his finger at Ballard.

That 2016 hiccup aside, Trump had an affinity for Wiles. He liked that her father was the celebrity television sportscaster, and respected her opinion as someone who had won in Florida before. And it was because she was a successful person in her own right that Wiles was of particular value to Trump. She didn’t need him the way that so many in his orbit did—often desperately. And because she wasn’t a sycophant, she seemed to understand him with a rare clarity, as the strange and complicated human he was. Unlike so many others around Trump, she wasn’t afraid to tell him bracing truths that he didn’t want to hear.

It wasn’t the first time she had confronted a powerful man. She had watched as her famous father, who died in 2013, struggled with his own demons. In 1992, she was part of an intervention that her father credited with saving his life from alcoholism. In his autobiography, he wrote about his close friends and daughter describing his embarrassing behavior when he was drunk. She told him in words that, he wrote, made him weep “tears of regret” that his alcoholism made her feel “ashamed we shared the same last name.” His daughter’s words prompted Summerall to check into the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs, California, for treatment and get sober.

Wiles continued her winning record in Florida when she stepped in to run the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a young Florida congressman who had set his sights on the governor’s mansion but was floundering after an unexpected primary victory. Florida Republican representative Matt Gaetz, a Trump loyalist through and through, recommended Wiles for the job, and with just one month remaining before Election Day, she delivered DeSantis a win.

If Wiles made one mistake, it was sticking around the Florida Republican Party after successfully installing DeSantis in Tallahassee. She stayed on with Ballard Partners, the lobbying and public affairs firm, and was set to play a critical role in Trump’s reelection efforts in the state. But DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, had other plans. According to multiple people working in Florida politics at the time, they were deeply suspicious that Wiles had so much influence in the state party and believed she was more loyal to Trump than to them. They were also suspicious of political advisers making money off their proximity to the governor.

To prove their point, the DeSantises ordered an audit of the Republican Party of Florida and hired an investigator with close ties to billionaire Ike Perlmutter, the former chair of Marvel Entertainment. The report wasn’t published because nothing was found.

In September 2019, the Tampa Bay Times broke a story about an internal DeSantis campaign committee memo that outlined ways the governor could raise money and make powerful connections with lobbyists in the state, including $25,000-per-person golf fundraisers. The story wasn’t a good look for the young governor who had higher ambitions. Without any evidence, DeSantis and his wife blamed Wiles for leaking the memo to the paper. She had written the fundraising memo that was splashed across the front page of the paper, but vehemently denied playing a role in the story.

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Two people close to Wiles suggested that the DeSantises were still annoyed by a different memo Wiles had presented to them at the governor’s mansion outlining the laws and ethics of gifts, especially because there had been issues with the family accepting inappropriate gifts from GOP donors, such as a golf simulator that was installed in the governor’s mansion in 2019.

But Wiles’s denials didn’t stop the DeSantises from going out of their way to try to make her unemployable in Florida politics. The new governor started a whisper campaign about her, making it clear that as long as he was governor, Ballard Partners would have a hard time retaining clients if she remained employed there. Seasoned Florida political hands were astonished at the degree of DeSantis’s vindictiveness. He was blackballing Wiles, trying to kill her ability to earn a living anywhere in the state.

Wiles eventually stepped down from Ballard Partners, citing personal health reasons. “Due to a nagging health issue, it’s time for me to focus on taking care of myself, so out of fairness to the firm and its clients, I have decided to separate from Ballard Partners,” she wrote in a statement shared with the Sunshine State political blog Florida Politics. One person close to Wiles said that she simply understood that the friction between her and the governor was a distraction, and she was personally feeling the stress and pressure from it all.

But the DeSantises’ crusade against Wiles continued. The same month that the Tampa Bay Times story broke, DeSantis personally called Trump to ask him to fire Wiles.

The episode left her shell-shocked. But that thin-skinned heavy-handedness would come to mark DeSantis, and soon enough would become his fatal flaw. After all, Wiles had worked in Florida politics for decades before DeSantis had come on the scene.

Wiles kept a low profile for the next several months. But when Trump’s campaign was losing juice in Florida in the summer of 2020, Trump asked his closest advisers, people like Bill Stepien, Kellyanne Conway, David Bossie, and Michael Caputo, about who they should bring on to recreate the “magic” of 2016. Only one name kept coming up: Susie Wiles. And yet DeSantis would try to block her again.

In a phone call, DeSantis told Trump that he’d heard the Trump campaign was thinking about hiring Wiles. You shouldn’t, DeSantis said.

Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, was patched into the call and said yes, it’s true. “We are thinking about hiring her.”

DeSantis told Trump and Stepien that he thought Wiles lied and leaked to the press.“Fair enough,” Stepien replied. “But you won, and so did Donald Trump in Florida in 2016.”

Trump made the final decision. “We’re hiring Susie.” She was back in the fold by the beginning of July.

The most immediate prospect for reasserting control over his party—which would also double as a test of rank-and-file fidelity to him and his MAGA movement—would be picking and choosing among the GOP candidates announcing for office in 2022 and issuing a battery of his trademark “complete and total” endorsements. But without any kind of process in place for Trump to make endorsements, he had already begun to endorse candidates haphazardly, doling out his support to Republicans that Donald Trump Jr. and some of his aides viewed as “squishy,” or not sufficiently MAGA, like Kansas senator Jerry Moran, who in their view had been too critical of Trump’s trade policies and was not sufficiently loyal.

At the end of February, his closest remaining political advisers were summoned to Mar-a-Lago to start charting out how they would approach things like endorsements.

It was a strange and empty time at Trump’s club. COVID-19 had scared off some of its members (the next month, the club would be temporarily shut down by an outbreak of the coronavirus). Other members had left after Trump’s 2020 loss and January 6, when it became clear to them the hefty membership fee was worthwhile only when Trump was in power. Being associated with someone who inspired a bloody attack on the Capitol didn’t have the same social clout as being associated with a president.

The meeting was held in the empty tea room at Mar-a-Lago, a dining room just off the main living room. Trump’s former campaign managers, Brad Parscale and Bill Stepien; Justin Clark, a White House lawyer and deputy campaign manager; Dan Scavino; Jason Miller; and Corey Lewandowski sat in banquet chairs around a table with a white tablecloth. After working in the White House and on Trump’s 2020 campaign, they found the setup oddly informal.

There was no set agenda. No one was in charge, and—unusual for Trumpworld—no one was angling to be. Trump wanted to be a political Godzilla, but at the moment he barely had the capacity to send out an email, let alone fundraise. Among the top priorities they discussed that afternoon was sorting out who was going to do mail, and some kind of process for making endorsements, so as to block people from pushing their friends on Trump. Word had already gotten back to Trump Jr. that Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump’s ally and golfing buddy, had been lobbying endorsements.

For those who had worked for Trump since 2016, having clearly delineated roles and responsibilities was a novel concept—an exciting change of pace, actually.

And even if not much came from the meeting beyond an online process for candidates to make endorsement requests and a weekly call, there was also the sense in the group that if Jared Kushner had run things in 2020, it was Donald Trump Jr. who was going to assume a larger role moving forward.

Kushner and Trump’s son were both wealthy, Ivy League–educated men, born just three years apart, but they had very different views of the world. After Kushner he served as a top adviser to Trump in the White House, he and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, were eager to move on and reingratiate themselves with the jet-set New York crowd, while Trump Jr. looked forward to disappearing into the wilderness of Pennsylvania to hunt deer and was eager to make his own mark on the MAGA movement.

Don Jr., as he was referred to, made clear that when it came to his dad’s political capital, they needed to be scrupulous: Unless Trump was getting something in return, or unless the candidate in question proved they were true believers or allies, Trump wasn’t going to give out his endorsement.

One idea came from Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist who had worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign as war-room director under Steve Bannon and went on to work closely with Don Jr. He suggested that candidates answer a one-page questionnaire about their positions on issues like immigration and foreign policy, and whether they would endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024. Everyone loved the idea, and questions were drafted. But the idea was later scrapped by Trump himself.

Trump’s small team of advisers also needed to figure out fundraising vehicles that could drop money into upcoming midterm races. Save America, a leadership PAC, was formed right after the election, and Trump planned to use that to pay for staff and political expenses. In addition to Save America, a new super PAC, Make America Great Again Action, was created to raise and spend an unlimited amount of money on advertising in upcoming midterms races.

Trump had just announced his first endorsements—for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary turned gubernatorial candidate in Arkansas, and for Moran in Kansas—but he was eager to start endorsing more and was hell-bent on upending the campaigns of the Republicans who supported his impeachment or he felt had crossed him in the 2020 election.

Trump endorsed Max Miller, a former White House aide who announced he was running against Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, one of the ten House members who had voted for Trump’s impeachment. Miller was close to Trump and the entire Trump operation—in August 2022 he got married and received a toast from Trump at his Bedminster club. It kicked off an avalanche of endorsements Trump would roll out over the coming months, sometimes at random, and not always in complete agreement with his circle of advisers.

But one race and one endorsement emerged as top priority for Trump—where they couldn’t afford to elevate the wrong person—and it was the Wyoming Republican primary against Liz Cheney. For the next year, it would be an all-hands-on-deck effort to identify and elevate a competitive candidate that could take down Cheney, the one Republican who dared to stand up against Trump and challenge the former president on January 6 and his falsehoods about the 2020 election. Trump’s political fate, they believed, rested on taking Cheney down.

Two weeks after Wiles’s dinner with Trump, he frantically called and asked her to return to Mar-a-Lago for another meeting.

Wiles, who lived four hours away in Ponte Vedra Beach, had gotten in her car for the long drive down the coast to Palm Beach when Trump called again.

“It’s a fucking mess,” Trump said, sounding exasperated. “I don’t know who’s in charge. I don’t know how much money I have. I don’t know if they’re stealing from me. I don’t know who’s who. I need you to fix it.”

The sudden job offer in early March took Wiles by surprise. Although she had worked for Trump twice, and had seen him a few times over the years while he was president, she didn’t consider herself part of the inner circle, someone like Kellyanne Conway or Corey Lewandowski. She wasn’t a household name or a regular on Fox News. And while she was always grateful to Trump for bringing her back into the fold in 2020, she currently had a job she didn’t want to leave.

“It’ll just take you a couple weeks,” Trump explained. “Just get it straight.”

Except that getting Trump’s current operation in line, from fundraising to personnel, didn’t take two weeks—it took around two months. After Wiles did a thorough review of his political operation, she drove back down to Palm Beach for a meeting with Trump to brief him on everything she had put together on the money he had available to him, who he needed to hire, and who he didn’t need working for him. If Trump ever needed someone who was experienced and competent, it was then. Trump agreed to all of her suggestions on the spot.

And there was the added benefit that unlike many of the people who had surrounded Trump for decades, Wiles never asked to be compensated for her work. According to CNN, she only requested reimbursement for her travel expenses when she accepted the job. It was a breath of fresh air for Trump and his family.

Wiles—much to the relief of Trump’s family, who viewed her as trustworthy, and his longtime aides, who were happy to see an adult in the room—was now in charge.