Who is Susie Wiles, the woman behind Trump’s historic return to the Oval Office?
Originally published by Geoff Bennett and Azhar Merchant for PBS News Hour
President-elect Trump began putting his new team in place, announcing that his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, will be his chief of staff when he takes office next year. She is the first woman to be appointed to that position. A veteran of Florida politics, Wiles ran campaigns for Sen. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis before running Trump’s winning bid. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Marc Caputo.
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- Amna Nawaz:Welcome to the “News Hour.”President-elect Donald Trump began putting his new team in place, announcing that his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, will be the White House chief of staff when he takes office next year.
- Geoff Bennett:Wiles is the first woman to be appointed to that position. And during his victory speech Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump praised Wiles for helping engineer his sweeping victory.Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. President-Elect: Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you, the ice maiden. We call her the ice maiden.(Cheering)
- Donald Trump:Come on, Susie. Chris — come here, Chris. Susie likes to stay in the background. She’s not in the background.
- Geoff Bennett:A veteran of Florida politics, Wiles ran successful campaigns for Senator Rick Scott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis before running Donald Trump’s winning bid for reelection.For a closer look, we’re joined now by Marc Caputo, national political reporter for The Bulwark and previously covered politics in his home state of Florida for years.Marc, it’s great to have you here.
- Marc Caputo, The Bulwark:Hi. Thanks.
- Geoff Bennett:So in a traditional White House, the chief of staff oversees strategy, coordination, policy decisions. It’s arguably the most important personnel decision a president can make.What if anything can we take away from Donald Trump’s selection of Susie Wiles to serve as his chief of staff?
- Marc Caputo:Donald Trump wants to stick with a winning team. He enjoyed great success against what seemed like great odds this cycle. His two previous presidential campaigns were always marred by sort of infighting, drama, and in some cases, like, a great amount of incompetence.One of the reasons he was so thrilled in that clip that you played from his election night victory speech was that he had a winning team that didn’t really have any of that. Now, there was a little drama at the end, but that was more of Donald Trump’s fault. That was Donald Trump’s fault, not the fault of his campaign co-managers.The thing about Susie Wiles is that she has had a reputation of being a winner. She’s not a braggart. As he said, she likes to stay behind the scenes. She is known for being sort of egoless. She serves the principal and she makes sure to kind of execute their will without getting too much in the way.You didn’t hear any leaks of her sort of reining back Donald Trump or talking down to him or any sort of appearance of folks in the campaign trying to sort of defend their reputations when it looked like things were going south. None of those things happened.And a lot of that is attributable to Wiles, the people that she hired, and the sort of the drama-free environment that the campaign itself ran on, now, not Donald Trump, but the campaign itself.