Miranda Devine: Susie Wiles brings calm to Trump admin—helping the president rack up wins
Wiles, 68, has brought a sense of order and calm to Trump's second presidency, which has given him the space to notch up wins at breakneck speed.
In a rare interview on our new podcast 'Pod Force One' she explained how she does it.
'I gave a piece of advice to myself when I started this job,' she told us this week in her large sunny office in the West Wing, down the hall from the Oval Office.
'I am the chief of staff. I'm not the chief of Donald Trump.'
She starts early each day with a security briefing, followed by a 7:30 a.m. staff meeting in her office with deputies including Stephen Miller, Taylor Auerbach and James Blair at the big conference table that stands in front of French doors that lead to a prized private patio where she held a 'cigar party' after she moved in.
She usually doesn't finish until late at night, when younger staff members have gone home to their young families, and she has barely had a day off since she started.
But when people ask Wiles what is the hardest thing about her job, she replies: 'Here's what's not hard about my job: Donald Trump. He is predictable and open and approachable and honest and honorable and committed and all of those things, which does not mean he can't be irritated or frustrated, but I view my job as trying to keep as much of that away from him so that he can think clearly about the big picture. We'll take care of the back office.'
That's high praise from someone who is with Trump for hours every day, and has been with him off and on since 2015 through some of his darkest hours, including his near-death in an attempted assassination in Butler, Pa., one year ago this Sunday.
They know each other so well now that if he does get irritable when something goes wrong, she has worked out the simplest way to mollify him.
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'I've never found him to be irritated or angry for no reason,' she says.
'So, solving the underlying problem is where I focus. He'll be angry. He'll say so. But at the end of the day, what he wants from me is to fix whatever made him angry. So, I try to go to the root cause.'
The fact that Wiles is competent and organized means that she generally fixes problems before they reach him, a far cry from the catastrophes that used to land in his lap under his revolving door of four chiefs of staff during his first administration.
Asked if her boss has any annoying habits, she pauses and then offers: 'He's known to be tardy, and so the day gets out of control pretty quickly. But . . . what you see is what you get, and that's a blessing for a staff member because then I don't wonder when I come in on Monday, 'What's it going to be like?' I know what it's going to be like. It's going to be breakneck speed to get as much done as fast as possible for the people that need it and matter. And that's really what we do here every day, all day. Seven days a week, by the way.'
The Floridian grandmother's talent is to create order out of the chaos that comes from a gregarious commander in chief whose office door is always open, and who has an ambitious agenda, boundless energy, and the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Preferable chaos
'There is a natural chaos, and he prefers it,' she says.
'He prefers as many inputs on any given topic as he can possibly get, and I prefer that for him. It makes for better decisions.
'But at a certain point, you've got to rein it all in, and he's got to make a decision, and he does. And then we execute.'
Any visitor to the Oval Office or the president's civilian life office in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue can see he is a neat freak, with tidy piles of paper on his desk.
And contrary to popular belief, Trump is a 'voracious reader,' says Wiles.
'His reputation is different, but I can tell you he is a voracious reader.' He reads his hometown newspaper, the New York Post, cover to cover, and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, 'and sometimes The Washington Post. And anything else that comes his way, the Financial Times and all of the periodicals.'
She is in awe of his work ethic, and says he sets a 'superhuman pace,' which is extra remarkable at the age of 79.
'I don't know of another mortal who could really keep up [with him]. I work as hard as I can, and I think I do fine. Or at least if I don't, he hasn't told me that yet. But it is a superhuman pace. There's no question. And if you look around at the staff, they're all young but me. So there's a reason for that!'
The first time Wiles, then a successful Florida political consultant, met Trump was at Trump Tower in 2015 during the Republican primaries, when she saw something in the outsider that she thought made him a standout prospect in the unwieldy field of 17 candidates.
'I've been a traditional Republican all my life and I thought, this is just not working, not for the American people. We need a disruptor here. We need somebody that thinks about how to serve the American people differently . . . And after talking to this billionaire who I didn't really go into the meeting thinking would have his finger on the vein of the middle class, I realized he did. And then that decision [to work for him] was easy after that.'
The daughter of legendary sportscaster Pat Summerall, former NFL placekicker for the Giants, Wiles cut her teeth on Republican politics early, with an entry-level job on Capitol Hill, working for an old football friend of her father's, New York Rep. Jack Kemp.
She soon graduated to the White House — for the first time — as a scheduler for Ronald Reagan, where she met her former husband, Lenny Wiles, with whom she had two daughters. For the next 20 years she worked for local Florida politicians and took time off to raise her children. She launched her own political consulting shop and managed Rick Scott's successful 2010 outsider campaign for Florida governor, before pulling off another upset victory for Ron DeSantis in 2018. She had a famous falling out with DeSantis, who she agrees tried to destroy her career.
She went back to run Trump's final campaign when he was at his lowest point, trying to pull off what almost everyone thought was the impossible feat of winning back the presidency in 2024. He was being attacked with lawfare by Joe Biden's DOJ and other rogue Democrat lawmakers. But throughout Trump's darkest days, when his home was raided by the FBI and he was arrested in Georgia, she never saw him downbeat.
'Never, never. In the dark days, when truly they were persecuting him, he put a suit and tie on and came to the office and worked all day, every day.
'I believe fundamentally, thoroughly, completely in what he believes, and I believed he could and would come back, believed he would overcome everything that was thrown at him, which was everything. And frankly, going through that just gave me more resolve to help every way I could.'
How lucky is Trump and all of us that she made that decision.
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