The Most Feared and Least Known Political Operative in America
November 12, 2024 at 11:25PMThis week, Donald Trump announced that his White House chief of staff will be Susie Wiles, the first woman to ever hold the role. Wiles is a longtime political strategist and lobbyist in Florida, where she’s both respected and feared. Outside the Sunshine State, she isn’t well-known. That low profile is by design. As Michael Kruse shows in this chilling profile, Wiles is slippery. She’s masterful at accomplishing what she wants without leaving a trace of herself in the doing. Now she’s hitched her wagon to a man hellbent on running the US government in as fascistic a way as possible. Kruse wants to know why, and he posits that the answer lies in what one of his sources describes as Wiles’s need to be “the most important person to the most important person”:
She went to work for Trump in the 2016 cycle. “I said, ‘Susie, I don’t think this is who you are,’” John Delaney told the Tampa Bay Times. She was, after all, a self-identifying, “card-carrying member of the GOP establishment.” And the sexual misconduct, the conspiracy theories, the attacks on John McCain and Gold Star parents, “and on and on,” as the former Tampa reporter Adam Smith wrote at the time—“the Donald Trump that I have come to know does not behave that way,” she said. “The Donald Trump that I have come to know,” she said, “I would feel 101 percent confident in his ability to do the right thing.” And then she went to work for him again in the 2020 cycle, and then again, of course, in the still raw wake of Jan. 6—“clearly,” I said here now outside the Starbucks, “not a breaking point for you …”
She paused.
“I didn’t love it,” she said.
“It wasn’t so …”
“I didn’t love it,” she said again.
“… odious to you …”
“Well,” Wiles said, “I didn’t think he caused it.”
What was that sound? Compartmentalization? Accommodation? Rationalization?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/12/the-most-feared-and-least-known-political-operative-in-america/
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