The woman of power who has Trump’s ear

The widespread view in Trump World is that Wiles has a better chance than anyone of making it work. A veteran political strategist and lobbyist who ran 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 Wiles. “It’s a level of trust and a degree of comfort.”

Friends say that Wiles, who in 2016 described herself as a “card-carrying member of the GOP establishment,” compartmentalises the good and the bad about Trump and picks her battles. She also thinks Trump has changed since 2017.

Whether Trump is a new man is a matter of some dispute. But Wiles, the daughter of Pat Summerall, an NFL 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.

Allies of Wiles said she has no illusions that she can manage Trump. But she does have an effect on the man who regularly asks, “Susie, what do you think?”

She pushed 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 Trump to make peace with Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia after years of conflict. She hired many of Trump’s lawyers, and made sure they were paid, for the four indictments 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, Trump’s chief pollster. “And she’s like, ‘They care about it. This is what will win us the election’.”

Wiles was born in May 1957 in Lake City, Florida, where her father farmed watermelon when he wasn’t playing for the Chicago Cardinals. By 1958, when he had been traded to the New York Giants, Wiles lived from September through December, like other Giants families, in the fading Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx.

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 $US75,000 a year, a big salary at the time, as the sports director of WCBS radio. The family – Wiles and two younger brothers – moved to a big house in Stamford, Connecticut, and later to Saddle River, New Jersey.

Wiles went on to the University of Maryland, where she worked while still in school as a low-level staff member for Congressman 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 Trump years later. In 2015, shortly after Trump announced his bid for president, he asked Brian Ballard, a powerful Florida lobbyist and Republican fundraiser, for the names of political operatives to help him win the state.

Ballard recommended Wiles, who had settled in Jacksonville, Florida, after her 1984 marriage to Lanny Wiles, a former head of the Reagan White House advance team. Over three decades, Susie 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.

Wiles met with Trump in September 2015 in New York, where they talked about the campaign and, briefly, her father, whom Trump had known slightly.

After Trump won the 2016 election and Florida, Wiles helped Ballard set up a Washington office rather than join the new administration. She kept an apartment in the city’s West End.

She and Lanny Wiles divorced in 2017, and the next year, she took over Ron DeSantis’ then-foundering campaign for Florida governor. After he won, DeSantis abruptly banished her.

In the telling of DeSantis’ allies, 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 Wiles’ allies, she was doing what was necessary to promote DeSantis’ national profile.

“He did his level best to make me unemployed,” she said in the interview. “I mean, it was a vicious, all-out, frontal attack.”

DeSantis’ team went so far, multiple allies of Wiles said, as to tell Wiles’ Ballard clients that if they continued to employ her, they would not be welcome in his office. A spokesperson for DeSantis declined to comment.

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 reemerge in politics until the summer of 2020, when Trump, against the advice of DeSantis, brought her into his reelection campaign.

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The embrace helped seal her loyalty to Trump. “Trump gave her back her Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” Fabrizio said.

After Trump lost the election and was in exile after the January 6 attacks, he asked Wiles if she could come to Mar-a-Lago and untangle his campaign finances. Wiles said yes.

By 2023, when DeSantis was Trump’s main rival for the Republican nomination, Wiles and her team were pursuing him with vigor.

On the day DeSantis dropped out of the race, Wiles, who is rarely on social media, took time for a moment of glee.

“Bye, bye,” she posted on X.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.