This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
An underappreciated aspect of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was an absence of something that defined his 2016 and 2020 campaigns: constant Gossip Girl–esque internal drama spilling into hourly push alerts. This absence, according to those who covered the campaign, was not coincidental.
Whereas in 2016 and 2020, senior advisers would come and go, get fired and replaced, and see their personal lives subject to their own campaign narratives, the personnel manning the 2024 campaign were steady. Leaks about Trump losing his mind in screeching anger were fewer. The boss himself seemed less interested in playing out The Apprentice with his staff in broad daylight. And the campaign—while not necessarily the candidate on the stump—relentlessly stuck its paid advertising to two or three effective messages, rather than jumping around the board. This was not the circus of Trump’s first two runs. That reality would often bore the candidate. But the job was executed convincingly and the goal attained.
And the credit for that mostly goes to Susie Wiles, Trump’s de facto campaign manager and incoming chief of staff. Or, as Trump calls her, the “Ice Maiden.”
You probably don’t know much about Wiles. That’s certainly true compared with other Trump campaign managers or chiefs who had their own tabloid (or legal) sagas, like Kellyanne Conway, Paul Manafort, Mark Meadows, or Corey Lewandowski. That’s by design. Wiles, though she has been accompanying Trump in her trademark, mirror-lensed aviators across the country, doesn’t give many interviews, doesn’t do cable news hits, and doesn’t speak at rallies. That disinterest in using Trump as a vehicle for her own stardom has kept Wiles in Trump’s orbit since the beginning, almost 10 years ago. A longtime Florida-based political operative and lobbyist, Wiles managed Trump’s Florida campaign in 2016 and 2020 before taking over his political operation in 2021, and eventually running his 2024 campaign.
Wiles’ father, legendary sportscaster Pat Summerall, was a longtime alcoholic. Wiles’ specialty, unsurprisingly, is in bringing order to chaotic situations led by flawed principals. She righted the ship managing Rick Scott’s gubernatorial campaign in 2010, and she did the same for Ron DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign eight years later.
Not long after DeSantis narrowly won that race over Democrat Andrew Gillum, he sought to bury Wiles. While the details are still murky—that she was taking too much credit for his win; that she was leaking; that she was too close to Scott, who had a frosty relationship with DeSantis—DeSantis let Wiles go and discouraged the Trump 2020 campaign from retaining her. (Trump ultimately ignored him.)
It proved to be a catastrophic move, ceding to Trump the central person who had a road map, and a motive, to destroy DeSantis years later. As Michael Kruse described it in an excellent Politico profile of Wiles last year, no one could exactly prove who was behind the shift in the electorate’s popular understanding of DeSantis as a pudding-fingered, socially awkward freak—but they were certain it was Wiles’ doing. When DeSantis dropped out of the primary in Jan. 2024, Wiles posted her first tweet in five months: “Bye, bye.”
“A group of people are here for a reason. That reason wasn’t to destroy Ron DeSantis,” Wiles told Kruse. “But,” she added, “the opportunity presented itself.”
With the potential exception of Ron DeSantis, just about every faction in American politics was pleased with Trump’s selection of Wiles as chief of staff. Florida people, both pro– and anti-Trump, Democrat and Republican, lauded the pick, because they’re either excited over how she’ll be able to help implement Trump’s agenda or relieved that Trump will have an adult he respects in the room. Aside from some gigs earlier in her career, she’s not really a Washington expert. But there are plenty of those around. There may be no one else besides Wiles who can convince him not to let Laura Loomer live in the Lincoln Bedroom.
The question of how these two—a vulgar revolutionary and a soft-spoken, polite epitome of the GOP old guard—have stayed together for so long, with such limited drama between them, can baffle observers. But the relationship works because it works. For Trump, Wiles wins, and she does so without trying to steal his spotlight and by keeping disagreements she may have with him private—and she stayed loyal to him in his worst days after Jan. 6, 2021. For Wiles, meanwhile, staying with Trump has put her to the very top of her profession, something that political consultants tend to appreciate. She understands that she neither could nor would change Trump. But in a way that no one else can, she can harness the unstable compound.
So far.
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