Who is Susie Wiles, America’s first ever female chief-of-staff?

Published

6 hours ago

November 8, 2024

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Donald Trump has named Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff in his first major appointment as president-elect.

She will be the first female in history to take up the role – one of the most important non-elected posts in Washington.

In his victory speech, Mr Trump described her as an “ice maiden” and has credited her with his “best-run” campaign.

Here’s what we know about her so far.

Daughter of American footballer

Susie Wiles grew up in New Jersey. Her father was the late American footballer Pat Summerall.

Before his death in 2013, he credited her with helping him get sober and checking in to an alcohol rehab programme.

“I hadn’t been there much for my kids,” he wrote in his memoir. “But Susan’s letter made it clear that I’d hurt them even in my absence.”

Ms Wiles’s first job in politics was in the 1970s as an assistant to the late Jack Kemp, who became a Republican representative for New York after playing alongside her father at the New York Giants.

The now 67-year-old was later part of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign and subsequently worked as a White House scheduler during his term.

Following the Reagan administration, in 1988 she worked on the vice-presidential campaign for George H W Bush’s deputy Dan Quayle.

Having moved to Florida, she worked as an adviser to two Jacksonville mayors.

Outside politics she has worked in the private sector as a lobbyist, for both Ballard Partners, whose clients include Amazon, Google, and the MLB (Major League Baseball), and then Mercury, who works with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Embassy of Qatar.

On her appointment to the Trump team, Mercury chief executive Keiran Mahoney said: “This is great news for the country. Susie has been a valued colleague. We are all proud of her and wish her the best.”

From DeSantis to Trump

In recent years, Ms Wiles has worked for some of the Republicans’ more divisive figures.

After helping Rick Scott become governor of Florida in 2010, she worked on Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign there.

With the Sunshine State win credited with helping Mr Trump take the White House, Ms Wiles was brought in to help Ron DeSantis’s ailing campaign to replace Mr Scott as governor in 2018.

The pair are reported to have fallen out after he was elected, which was seemingly confirmed when Ms Wiles was in charge of Mr Trump’s 2024 bid. Mr DeSantis was up against Mr Trump in the primaries, but was widely ridiculed and forced to pull out early on.

It was later claimed that Ms Wiles was behind some of the media stories that made fun of Mr DeSantis.

‘Ice maiden’

Although unsuccessful, Mr Trump credited Ms Wiles with being an “integral” part of his second presidential bid in 2020.

She was co-manager of his effort this year alongside Chris LaCivita.

After her appointment this week, he described her as the “perfect pick” with a “master ability to manage multiple things of significance simultaneously”.

During the campaign, she also lobbied for the tobacco company Swisher International.

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Throughout her decades-long political career, Ms Wiles has stayed out of the limelight and scarcely engaged with the media.

Speaking to the Tampa Bay Times in 2016, she hit back at criticism of Mr Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.

“I will tell you this: The Donald Trump that I have come to know does not behave that way, and the lens that I look at him through, I don’t see any of that. I see strengths, I see smarts, I see a work ethic that is unparalleled,” she told the newspaper.

She is believed to have been behind the campaign material that targeted Latino and black voters, who were key in taking votes from the Democrats.

At a rally in Milwaukee earlier in the year, Mr Trump said: “She’s incredible. Incredible.”

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People living in US border town offer insight into why Kamala Harris ‘lost big’

Published

9 hours ago

November 8, 2024

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People living in US border town offer insight into why Kamala Harris 'lost big'

In a town that sits between two nations, Arnoldo Montiel knows exactly where he stands on immigration.

The 80-year-old has lived in Nogales, on the border between Mexico and the US, virtually all of his life.

He says the issue is one of the main reasons he voted for Donald Trump.

Trump latest: President-elect makes first major appointment

“These are people who are illegal. They don’t belong in the United States,” he says. “If they need to come in, we welcome them. But they have to be legal.”

Driving towards the border wall that straddles the Arizona town, he says he believes the issue is why Kamala Harris lost the election.

“Why do you think she lost big?” he asks, before answering his own question: “The border and foreign affairs.”

In many ways, Arnoldo’s life has been defined by the border issue, not just because of where he lives, but because of who he loves.

His wife Lupita lived on the Mexican side of the border wall, meaning she had to apply for citizenship.

Like her husband, she supports Trump’s approach to immigration, which the president-elect says will involve mass deportations.

She calls President Biden‘s approach “horrible”.

“He just let everybody come in, there’s been crimes, there’s been murder,” she adds, echoing some of Trump’s claims on the issue on the day he told NBC News he would push ahead with mass deportation plans no matter the price.

For some, like young mother Corinna, the subject is more than a debate, it’s their reality.

She voted for Kamala Harris, with her family a central concern, because she wants her two-year-old daughter to grow up in the US.

Her Mexican husband is currently in the process of applying for American citizenship and she fears that tighter rules around border controls will separate her family.

“I want my family to be together and I want a better future for my daughter,” she said, adding: “I just hope everything works out eventually.”

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US election 2024: The Democratic Party blame game has already begun after Kamala Harris’s loss

Published

17 hours ago

November 8, 2024

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US election 2024: The Democratic Party blame game has already begun after Kamala Harris's loss

As the sun set on Howard University in Washington DC, a group of women gathered on a grassy patch in the centre of campus.

They held hands in a wide circle and sang hymns, many wiping tears from their faces.

They had just watched a concession speech given by Kamala Harris.

Many had been at the university the night before, hoping to witness America electing its first female president.

US election latest: Trump begins selecting top team

“I don’t think she could have done anything differently,” one said, “she ran a good campaign, I just think misogyny and racism is deep-rooted in America.”

Another lay the blame at the door of President Biden.

“Unfortunately I think if he’d have gone sooner, she would have had more chance to tell her story and establish herself,” another said.

In Democratic Party circles, the inquest had begun even before Harris spoke.

Not only had she been defeated in all seven of the key swing states, the map showed rightward shifts across the country. Questions about what went wrong for the campaign and the Democratic Party are at a fever pitch.

David Plouffe, a senior campaign adviser for Harris, posted on X: “It was a privilege to spend the last 100 days with Kamala Harris… We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.”

Many are reading that deep hole as one left by Joe Biden, who some say didn’t leave his vice president enough time to make her pitch to the nation known. Mr Plouffe has since deleted his entire X account.

Others wondered whether President Biden’s ego had led him to cling to power too long. Had the man who once pledged to be a transition candidate been so intoxicated by the heady heights of the Oval Office that he couldn’t bear to step aside?

Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen told Sky News she didn’t “think this was so personal towards Kamala Harris”.

She said: “The campaign miscalculated the importance of the economy as a central message.

“I think they thought it was going to be a referendum on Donald Trump and a referendum on abortion. And those two calculations, I think, had them underplay what we know voters’ key issue was, which is the economy.”

President Biden spoke in the Rose Garden, paying tribute to Ms Harris’s campaign and promising a peaceful transition of power to president-elect Donald Trump.

But his speech will probably be remembered as much for what he didn’t say. There was no introspection about the loss, no answers offered for why it was such a bruising defeat.

Brett Bruin, former White House director of global engagement who worked under Barack Obama, said: “I can’t help but think back to what President Obama said after his first defeat at the congressional level. He acknowledged it was a shellacking.

“We didn’t hear that from President Biden. This has been part of the problem throughout his presidency, it’s part of the reason why Biden and Harris were so unsuccessful when it came to unpopularity is that they didn’t acknowledge the problems, they didn’t address the problems.

“I wonder when the Democratic Party are going to say, ‘we have to change’.”

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US election 2024: How will Trump 2.0 be different to his first presidency?

Published

18 hours ago

November 8, 2024

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US election 2024: How will Trump 2.0 be different to his first presidency?

At the end of the last Trump presidency, the New York Times declared: “The terrible experiment is over – President Donald J Trump: The End.”

That didn’t age well. If Trump 1.0 (2016-2020) was the experiment, then maybe Trump 2.0 (2024-2028) will be the real deal.

In 2016, Donald Trump was a political novice. That was the attraction for those who chose him. He didn’t know how Washington worked, and he didn’t know how to govern. But he learned on the job as he meandered chaotically through that first term.

US election latest: Trump begins selecting top team

With Apprentice precision, he fired those who crossed him. They were largely people drawn from the establishment and in the end, that was their downfall.

This time, Trump watchers here in Washington believe he will be more organised. He will know who to hire. They will be loyalists – the people he’s eyed up and got to know over the past eight years.

The first appointment has already come.

Susie Wiles will be his White House chief of staff. She is the veteran political consultant who ran his winning campaign. In his shadow for many years, she is an astute political operator whose career began as a junior staffer on Ronald Reagan’s election campaign.

She had the Apprentice treatment once – fired by Mr Trump in 2020 in the run-up to that presidential election after a falling out. But he soon saw her value again. He trusts her and she knows precisely how he ticks.

Mr Trump knows Ms Wiles better than any of the four chiefs of staff he hired during his first term, and crucially she is credited for trying to keep his campaign disciplined. She may be a guardrail in the next White House.

Her appointment is an indication of what his other appointments will look like. They will be people well-known to him or they will be fully signed up surrogates like Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Expect family members to be signed up too. Last time his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were key figures.

For good or bad, and with little experience, Mr Kushner played a central role in moulding Mr Trump’s Middle East policy which culminated with the historic Abraham Accords.

And so the first difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0 will be the hires. The second will be the power he has.

The landslide victory and likely control of both Houses of Congress gives Mr Trump a powerful mandate to govern. It also gives him a huge confidence in his conviction to do what he wants to do.

A far-reaching agenda is now much more achievable than it was in his last term. He also has a clearer idea of what he wants to achieve.

His manifesto, which has always been a little opaque and subject to change, is likely to include scrapping the department of education and making education a state, not federal, issue.

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It would include a pledge for “mass deportations” of illegal immigrants, tax cuts, the imposition of tariffs on foreign goods and an overhaul of the mechanics of the federal government.

On that last pledge he hopes to reintroduce a plan, unimplemented in his first term, called Schedule F which would see the removal of thousands of non-partisan federal civil servants and replacing them with loyal political appointees.

Some of his policies would require the approval of Congress, which is easier if the Republicans hold control in both Houses.

Other policies could be implemented via presidential executive orders.

This privilege gives the American president broad executive and enforcement authority to use their discretion to determine how to enforce the law or manage the resources and staff of the executive branch of government.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a top Trump advisor who told me that if re-elected, Mr Trump would sign a pile of executive orders on inauguration day. Only half joking, the official said the president would take the pile to the inauguration ceremony and sign them there and then. Quite the image.

Above all, governance is about confidence. In 2016, Mr Trump didn’t have that confidence. You could see it was missing on his face when outgoing President Obama welcomed him to the White House for transition talks.