Susie Wiles, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff, begins her days at 7:30 a.m. in the West Palm Beach transition headquarters. But by 2 p.m. she has typically parked herself a few feet from Mr. Trump for a daily five-hour marathon in his office, the former Mar-a-Lago bridal suite.
“The president is a night owl and I’m an early bird, so the sweet spot is 2 to 7,” she said in a recent interview.
As Elon Musk and staff members file in and out, Ms. Wiles and the president-elect go over plans for Trump II: executive orders for Day 1. Deportations. A massive border, energy and tax cut bill. Upcoming congressional hearings for cabinet nominees. And more stacks of appointments. “It’s everything from who wants to be the ambassador to Portugal to what kind of deputy does Marco need?” Ms. Wiles said, referring to Senator Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s choice to be secretary of state.
Her goal is to have 2,000 out of 11,000 appointments done by the Jan. 20 inaugural. There were only 25 completed by the first Trump inaugural in 2017, when Ms. Wiles was not in the administration. Chaos reigned over four years in the West Wing.
“So I’ve heard,” said Ms. Wiles, whom the president-elect calls the “Ice Maiden” for her coolheaded nature. This time, she said, “I feel pretty comfortable that I can instill order at the staff level.”
The president-elect is another matter. Ms. Wiles, 67, the first woman to hold one of the most important and precarious jobs in Washington, will move in less than two weeks into the large West Wing office once inhabited by the powerful James A. Baker III during the Reagan administration — and also the four men defeated in the position in Mr. Trump’s first term.
The question is whether Ms. Wiles will be able to handle the combustible Mr. Trump in the White House and survive.
She last worked in the federal government in Washington more than four decades ago as a 23-year-old White House scheduler and then at the Labor Department when Mr. Baker — she still calls him “Mr. Baker” — was chief of staff. She is a new student of foreign and national security policy in a job of cascading international crises. “Heck, yeah,” she said when asked if she was nervous about the job.
She has told Mr. Trump that it is her intention, at least, to stay all four years as chief of staff. “This job is not guaranteed,” she said. “But I’m going to try my best and give it everything I have.”
The widespread view in Trump World is that Ms. Wiles has a better chance than anyone of making it work. A veteran political strategist and lobbyist who ran Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign with a disciplined hand, she has lasted a remarkable eight years in the president-elect’s circle. Today she is by far his closest aide.
“The first person he talked to in the beginning of the day was Susie, and the last person he talked to at night was Susie,” said Chris LaCivita, who ran the campaign with Ms. Wiles. “It’s a level of trust and a degree of comfort.”
Ms. Wiles has already tried to control the mayhem. In a memo late last month, she warned all members of the new administration that none of them speak for the United States or Mr. Trump, and ordered them to get approval from the incoming national security adviser and White House counsel before any pre-inaugural contacts with foreign officials.
Her words would seem to include Mr. Musk, the tech billionaire and leader of a new Department of Government Efficiency, who since 2022 has been in regular contact with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, according to The Wall Street Journal. In November, Mr. Musk caused a commotion when he met with Iran’s ambassador to the United States.
Unlike other Trump aides, Ms. Wiles abhors attention and notably begged off speaking on election night when Mr. Trump summoned her to the microphone.
But behind the self-effacing demeanor, allies of Ms. Wiles said, is a woman who can wield a scalpel. Political operatives still talk about her stealth role in helping to torpedo Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a man she helped elect and then fell out with, in last year’s presidential primaries.
‘Susie, What Do You Think?’
In person, dressed in black pants and a black leather blazer that gave her a vaguely edgy air, Ms. Wiles projected nothing more than a friendly, crisp competence. She was decorous and modest as she spoke for nearly two hours in her office in the transition headquarters, hidden away in a dreary building off I-95, a world away from the gilt of Mar-a-Lago.
“I’ve never heard her raise her voice, ever,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime Trump adviser who has known Ms. Wiles for 30 years. “When you do something that displeases her, and you’ve made a mistake, you’ll get a one-sentence message from her: ‘Do you think you were helping when you did this?’”
Friends say that Ms. Wiles, who in 2016 described herself as a “card-carrying member of the G.O.P. establishment,” compartmentalizes the good and the bad about Mr. Trump, and picks her battles. She does not blame him for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“I don’t believe that he went to the Ellipse that day and said, ‘I’m going to cause riots in the Capitol and people are going to do destruction, and somebody is going to get hurt and die,’” she said. “Never, never did he think that.”
She also thinks Mr. Trump has changed since 2017.
“Some of the stories I hear about the first term, I can’t even conceive of that Donald Trump,” Ms. Wiles said. “Now, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get mad, and that doesn’t mean he isn’t tough. And it’s hard to get him to yes sometimes. But I think he’s different, and the organization will have different sensibilities than it had in the first term.”
Whether Mr. Trump is a new man is a matter of some dispute, and Ms. Wiles might appear to be engaged in wishful thinking, or varnishing. At a news conference on Tuesday, an aggrieved Mr. Trump did not rule out using military force to reclaim the Panama Canal or acquire Greenland. His Christmas message to 37 death row inmates after Mr. Biden commuted their sentences was “GO TO HELL!”
Ms. Wiles, the daughter of Pat Summerall, an N.F.L. kicker and celebrated sports broadcaster who was by his own account an alcoholic, has long had a reputation for tolerating and navigating famous, swashbuckling men.
Mr. Summerall, who died in 2013, wrote in his autobiography that it was a letter from Ms. Wiles read at a 1992 intervention, a gathering of family and friends to persuade him to seek help, that made him agree to treatment at the Betty Ford Center. “Dad, the few times we’ve been out in public together recently,” Ms. Wiles wrote, “I’ve been ashamed we shared the same last name.”
Allies of Ms. Wiles said she has no illusions that she can manage Mr. Trump. But she does have an effect on the man who regularly asks, “Susie, what do you think?”
She pushed Mr. Trump to embrace mail-in voting in 2024 after he denounced it in 2020. She had a major hand in bringing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the campaign. She encouraged Mr. Trump to make peace with Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia after years of conflict, which she told Mr. Trump would help him win the state. She hired many of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, and made sure they were paid, for the four indictments and 91 felony counts he faced last year.
At campaign rallies, she told the candidate to talk about the economy. “He’d be like, ‘This economic stuff, people don’t really care about it,’” said Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump’s chief pollster. “And she’s like: ‘They care about it. This is what will win us the election.’ She’d go right back at him.”
More recently she has wired herself to Congress. Last Friday, she was on the phone with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene just before Speaker Mike Johnson was re-elected to the top post in the House, as Mr. Trump wanted. “She called me and provided her view of what was going on on the House floor,” Ms. Wiles said.
After Mr. Trump’s blowup of a congressional budget deal threatened a government shutdown the week before Christmas, Ms. Wiles was an advocate for the stopgap spending bill that eventually passed to keep the money flowing until March.
Ms. Wiles insists she is not concerned about Mr. Trump’s most provocative cabinet picks, including Pete Hegseth, his choice to run the Defense Department. Mr. Hegseth, a military veteran who is facing sexual assault allegations, which he has denied, has no experience leading an agency of nearly three million people.
“That’s what staff is for,” Ms. Wiles said briskly. “It’s our obligation to give him people that understand the business of national defense.” To Ms. Wiles, Mr. Hegseth is one of Mr. Trump’s desired “disrupters” of the status quo, just like his choice of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Mr. Kennedy as the secretary of health and human services.
The president-elect, she said, “would rather have a disrupter at the top and buttress the disrupter with people who know the business or the agency. That’s the idea. And so if you think of it that way, it explains all of them.”
Football and a Job With Jack Kemp
Ms. Wiles first got into politics through her father’s world of football.
She was born during the off-season in May 1957 in Lake City, Fla., where her father farmed acres of watermelon when he wasn’t playing for the Chicago Cardinals. By 1958, when he had been traded to the New York Giants, Ms. Wiles lived from September through December, like other Giants families, in the fading Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx, three blocks from Yankee Stadium, where the Giants played at the time. “Football players didn’t get paid well then,” she said.
It was not until her father retired from the Giants and began a 40-year career as a sports broadcaster that the money flowed in. By 1964 he was already making $75,000 a year, a big salary at the time, as the sports director of WCBS radio. The family — Ms. Wiles and two younger brothers — moved to a big house in Stamford, Conn., and later to Saddle River, N.J.
But by Mr. Summerall’s own account, his drinking raged as he spent his life on the road, leaving Ms. Wiles’s mother to raise a family largely on her own. “My mother was a saint,” Ms. Wiles said.
The drinking took its toll. “I watched it really, really hurt my mom,” Ms. Wiles said. “That’s the way it affected me the most.” Overall, she said, it was “kind of a gray cloud all the time. But then, unlike a lot of people, he had periods of sobriety. And so you kind of get used to that reality, and then you go back to the other reality. Not easy. But in some ways it’s kind of character-building.”
Ms. Wiles went on to the University of Maryland, where she worked while still in school as a low-level staff member for Representative Jack Kemp of New York, one of her father’s closest friends from the Giants. From there she went to the Reagan campaign and the White House.
She met Mr. Trump years later. In 2015, shortly after Mr. Trump announced his bid for president, he asked Brian Ballard, a powerful Florida lobbyist and Republican fund-raiser, for the names of political operatives to help him win the state.
Mr. Ballard recommended Ms. Wiles, who had settled in Jacksonville after her 1984 marriage to Lanny Wiles, a former head of the Reagan White House advance team. Over three decades, Ms. Wiles had raised two daughters, worked for a succession of Jacksonville mayors, run Rick Scott’s successful campaign for governor and opened the Jacksonville office of the Ballard Partners lobbying firm.
Ms. Wiles met with Mr. Trump in September 2015 in New York, where they talked about the campaign and, briefly, her father, whom Mr. Trump had known slightly. “We had a nice chat,” she said. “It ended with him saying, ‘I don’t think I need to do anything in Florida yet,’ and me saying, ‘Well, if not now, soon.’”
Afterward, Ms. Wiles told stunned friends that Mr. Trump, viewed at the time as a joke, had political talents and a private charm different from his public bombast. She thought he could be president.
John Delaney, one of the Jacksonville mayors Ms. Wiles had helped elect and served as chief of staff, warned her about signing on. “I thought it would follow her for the rest of her life,” he said. “I didn’t think he had a prayer.”
After Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, and Florida, Ms. Wiles helped Mr. Ballard set up a Washington office rather than join the new administration. She kept an apartment in the city’s West End and lobbied for a tobacco company, Swisher International, based in Jacksonville. She also did strategy work for General Motors, among others.
She and Mr. Wiles divorced in 2017, and the next year she took over Mr. DeSantis’s then-floundering campaign for governor. After he won, Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, abruptly banished her in an episode that shocked political Florida.
In the telling of Mr. DeSantis’s allies, Ms. Wiles was leaking and empire building, something she has adamantly denied, after the new governor gave her the job of setting up his Tallahassee office and political operation. In the telling of Ms. Wiles’s allies, she was doing what was necessary to promote Mr. DeSantis’s national profile. Either way, it was catastrophic for her.
“I wasn’t just banished,” she said in the interview. “He did his level best to make me unemployed. I mean it was a vicious, all-out, frontal attack.”
Mr. DeSantis’s team went so far, multiple allies of Ms. Wiles said, as to tell Ms. Wiles’s Ballard clients that if they continued to employ her, they would not be welcome in his office at the Capitol. A spokeswoman for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment.
Ms. Wiles managed to keep some clients, but by September 2019 she announced she was leaving Ballard because of a “nagging health issue.” She did not re-emerge in politics until the summer of 2020, when Mr. Trump, against the advice of Mr. DeSantis, brought her into his re-election campaign to help him win Florida.
The embrace helped seal her loyalty to Mr. Trump. “Trump gave her back her Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” Mr. Fabrizio said.
After Mr. Trump lost the election and was in exile after the Jan. 6 attacks, he asked Ms. Wiles if she could come to Mar-a-Lago and untangle his campaign finances. Ms. Wiles — who despite all available evidence believes that “there was sufficient fraud in a number of states, and that fraud likely cost the president the election in 2020” — said yes. She was still working for Ballard at the time and in 2022 switched to lobbying for Mercury Public Affairs.
But effectively she never left Mr. Trump. By 2023, when Mr. DeSantis was Mr. Trump’s main rival for the Republican nomination, Ms. Wiles and her team were pursuing him with vigor. People close to Ms. Wiles mocked him in an infamous political ad as “pudding fingers,” based on a rumor that he had once eaten chocolate pudding with his fingers, and pushed stories that he wore heel lifts in his boots.
On the day Mr. DeSantis dropped out of the race, Ms. Wiles, who is rarely on social media, took time for a moment of glee.
“Bye, bye,” she posted on X.
The post The ‘Ice Maiden’ Cometh: Can Susie Wiles, Trump’s Chief of Staff, Survive? appeared first on New York Times.
