Susie Wiles

Welcome to Power Players, The i Paper’s new opinion series in which our writers and experts take an in-depth look at the key figures in American politics as the US reshapes itself and the world. After starting his new war at the end of February, Donald Trump settled into the makeshift situation room at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. A photographer captured the scene for posterity. Black curtains draped from wooden beams, a President flanked by telephones, national security advisers and Secretary of State Marco Rubio , a cardboard map of the Middle East behind him. Perhaps the most telling photograph of all, however, showed the 79-year-old President leaning forward to listen attentively to the 68-year-old grandmother on his left: Susie Wiles , his chief of staff and the person he likes to call “the most powerful woman in the world”. In his first term, Trump burned through four chiefs of staff: Reince Priebus was fired by the president’s Twitter account after six chaotic months, John Kelly was pushed out after 17 fraught months, Mick Mulvaney lasted little more than a year, and Mark Meadows only just managed to hang on until the transition to Joe Biden. But Trump 2.0 has been a much more stable operation, and most insiders give credit for that to Wiles, the first female chief of staff of a US administration. There have been crises, of course, but Wiles, who prefers to operate out of the spotlight, has learned how to handle Trump’s combustible nature and how to offset his tendency to fire senior staffers at the drop of a Maga hat. “I don’t think there is anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” said Rubio. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration, that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president … Susie takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator.” Roger Stone, the long-time Trump loyalist and right-wing Floridian savant, tells me that “Susie Wiles has brought order out of chaos. She always ensures that the President is fully informed of all his decision options and she zealously protects the President’s interests. She and the President fully understand and trust each other, which is why she may be the most effective White House chief of staff in US history.” Insiders all agree that Wiles is effective because, while her boss always hogs the spotlight, she shuns it. In televised meetings in the Oval Office, three male cabinet secretaries usually sit on the sofa. Wiles tends to occupy a nearby chair, just out of shot. But that’s why it came as a shock when, back in December, Vanity Fair published an extraordinary exposé of the internal workings of team Trump, based on a series of extraordinarily candid interviews Wiles had given to the magazine’s reporter, Chris Whipple. Wiles spoke about Elon Musk “microdosing” on drugs. She called Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, “a right-wing absolute zealot”. She suggested that JD Vance’s conversion from Trump critic to America First loyalist had been “sort of political” and added that the Vice President has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade”. And she said that Trump, famously a teetotaller, has an “alcoholic’s personality”, something she understood because her father, the former NFL player and famous sports commentator, Pat Summerall, had been a drunk. It had been said that Wiles’s strictness made the second Trump administration less prone to media leaks. Yet there she was, the famously disciplined chief of staff, gassing on about sensitive internal matters to a journalist. Any other White House staffer would probably have been fired for such a breach. Yet the reaction to Wiles’s lapse was even more telling. She issued a rare social media post, calling the article a “disingenuously framed hit piece ”, and Team Trump instantly came together to circle the wagons around