White House response to Susie Wiles' comments shows how indispensable she is to Trump
The comments of chief of staff Wiles to Vanity Fair have “sparked frenzied speculation across Washington,” says Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic.
Wiles has rarely given interviews and has been lauded in Trump world for instilling a sense of discipline and providing steady leadership, he says.
So her comments that Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality,” Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and an “odd, odd duck,” J. D. Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” Russell Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot,” were unexpected, to say the least.
Yet the usually vindictive Trump and the others Wiles mentioned have made their support for her clear.
Lemire says: “The show of force underscored Wiles’s importance to Trump, who churned through four chiefs of staff during his first term. After Trump left office in disgrace in early 2021, Wiles agreed to coordinate his fundraising efforts and political activity. A year later, she took the helm of his reelection campaign, which, at the time, seemed like a long-shot bid. She, along with the GOP consultant Chris LaCivita, put together a far more professional operation than in any previous Trump campaign, and cut down on the staff infighting and leaking that defined his two earlier runs.
“She publicly claimed that she never tried to control Trump, but she did, on occasion, get him to back away from outlandish ideas. In a moment famous in Trump’s circles, Wiles stepped into the candidate’s line of sight during a particularly dark and rambling Pennsylvania rally in the campaign’s final week and simply glared at him. The unspoken message: Stop it, and move on. Trump eventually did.”
“The circle of power in the West Wing is small — Vance, [Stephen] Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a few others — and Wiles, in many ways, wields the most influence. She streamlined processes, cracked down on talking to the press, and demanded loyalty from the staff. Wiles largely reduced the chaos, dysfunction, and turnover that permeated Trump’s first term and was able to help secure passage of a sweeping tax bill and a dramatic expansion of executive power.”
“The president is deeply fond of her, staffers told us, and once praised her as the ‘most powerful person in the world’ while also, oddly, at times calling her ‘Susie Trump.’”
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