Meet the 66-year old ‘ruthless’ grandmother plotting Trump’s Super Tuesday success

On one hand, Susie Wiles is the generous neighbour who brings you casseroles and sends you flowers when you’re in hospital. On the other, she’s a ruthless political operator who is masterminding the plan to get the former president back to the White House. Alex Hannaford finds out more…

Could the cake-baking strategist help usher in the next Trumpian era? (Reuters)

On her Twitter/X profile, she wears a blouse and cardigan, drop earrings, and a gold necklace, her grey hair perfectly set. But Susie Wiles’ “Golden Girl”, grandmotherly image belies the role that currently consumes her. Wiles is one of the most powerful players in Republican politics, running Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election. A ruthless political operator, her focus is on absolute victory.

The Hill political newspaper called her “the most powerful Republican you don’t know”; The New York Times described her as “perhaps the most significant voice inside Mr Trump’s third presidential campaign”.

Some say if he manages to beat Joe Biden to the presidency in November, he’ll have Wiles to thank. But who is she, and what makes this cake-baking, bird-watching 66-year-old grandmother tick?

Wiles has worked in Republican politics since the late 1970s and went on to become a campaign scheduler on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential bid, and later in his administration. In her late twenties, she moved from New Jersey, where she was born and raised, to Jacksonville, Florida, with her then-husband, Lanny, an “advance man” who handled publicity for candidates during political campaigns.

When the couple had their two daughters, Katie and Caroline, she took some time out to raise them but then went full-throttle back into the game – eventually running Trump’s Florida operations in his first bid to become president. Many attribute him winning the state by 1.2 percentage points over his rival Hillary Clinton to Wiles.

Choosing to stay in Florida instead of heading to the White House, Wiles focussed her efforts a couple of years later, on helping the Trump-anointed Ron DeSantis in his campaign to succeed Rick Scott as governor. Their relationship soured, with him blaming her for leaks and despite her denials, it is thought he was behind her ousting from the team. She officially left for health reasons in September 2019, but one friend of Wiles told me she was “really down at that point – at the very bottom”, and that leaving presented an existential crisis for her.

But then, in 2020, she got a call from Trump. He wanted her back on his team. And not only that, he wanted her to head it up.

Wiles’s father, Pat Summerall, was a professional football player and later a well-known sports broadcaster. Peter Schorsch, publisher of Florida Politics, who has known Wiles for a decade and considers her a friend, says Summerall would reach tens of millions of people each Sunday with his broadcasts and was such a voice of authority that he thinks some of that ability to take control; to command an audience, rubbed off on Wiles. Another former colleague and friend agreed that her gift as a “people person” was probably inherited from her dad but that her warm personality came from her mother, Katherine Jacobs, “who was a wonderful woman”.

Wiles has worked in Republican politics since the late 1970s (Reuters)

However, it wasn’t all apple pie and roses. Summerall was an alcoholic and, after divorcing Katherine, was estranged from Wiles and her two siblings, Jay and Kyle, for some time. But, as an adult, Wiles left the door open for him to reconcile, and Summerall credited her with eventually helping get him into rehab for his addiction.

In 2017, Wiles and Lanny separated. Schorsch described it as a “quiet divorce between two prominent people” but he thinks it had the effect of freeing Wiles up to focus on her political career in her sixties, “to where she can be devoted to whoever her principal is at the time; undistracted when working on a candidate”.

Her soft edges however aren’t enough to hide a reputation for being a rottweiler, unafraid of baring her teeth. As a political operative, “Susie does not f*** around,” Schorsch says. “There is no other way to say it. It’s not that she’s hard, it’s not that she’s mean, but if you try to promote yourself or if you flimflam or you’re not honest about something, Susie will knife you herself.” It’s perhaps a trait her new boss is particularly fond of.

Schorsch recalls an instance when she oversaw the DeSantis campaign and a consultant who was brought in chose to speak to the media when they were told not to: “Susie immediately cut this person off and it took years for them to repair that relationship.”

I don’t want to say she’s made a deal with the devil, but she knows what Trump’s about

Peter Schorsch

But he says she also possesses this “southern grandmotherly kindness”. For example, he says, she knows the name of the volunteer working tirelessly for the campaign in a far-off county, and she takes care of the people working with her. “She’s very good at offering familial advice to a lot of her young staffers.” He recalls one such staffer had just had a baby and Wiles emphasised the importance of taking time off. “There’s an emphasis on making sure the people working for her are taking care of their home lives too.”

Schorsch says she’d very much fit into the kind of decorum and stagecraft that is a hallmark of British politics. Unlike her boss maybe “she just respects so much of the institutional stuff, the discipline of it all, while at the same time being a very savvy operator”.

But it’s a savvy “Team Trump” to have recruited Wiles to the campaign. If you take all the “craziness” that surrounds Trump but add what Schorsch calls a “disciplined ground game”, then it’s a sleight of hand that means Trump could very well win the presidency in November. Schorsch notes: “Mar-a-Lago is so much more disciplined since Susie became the chief gatekeeper.” What’s more, he thinks that Wiles sees no need to rein in Trump’s worst excesses. “It’s a much more pragmatic ‘let Trump be Trump’ philosophy: he says certain things to the Maga crowd, but he also offers an incredible tax policy to the billionaire crowd, and they like that. I don’t want to say she’s made a deal with the devil, but she knows what Trump’s about.”

Trump talks strategy on a plane back from New Hampshire, with Wiles not too far away (The Washington Post/Getty)

It’s this ability to think two things at once and instinct to know what people want that makes her such a smart operator. John Delaney hired Wiles when he ran a successful campaign to become mayor of Jacksonville back in 1995, after which she became his chief of staff. “Four weeks into the campaign she kind of transformed the thinking and the messaging,” he says. And there are certain Trumpian elements to her too – in terms of her ability to connect with a crowd and give them exactly what they want. “She is an absolutely brilliant political savant with incredible instincts about what the public thinks; what can fly,” Delaney says.

Delaney says Wiles wants to help the people she works for reach the goals they are aiming for, even if she doesn’t always agree entirely with their politics. “She has no ego. She’s very much a behind-the-scenes person.” But despite friends and colleagues being willing to talk about her and her ability to do a difficult job, she remains an enigma and fiercely guards her personal life. Even members of the Trump campaign are reluctant to talk about her.

As for working for Trump, Wiles might not always agree with his delivery, his choice of words or even his political stance on an issue, but Delaney says elections are about what people can overlook in one candidate and what they can’t overlook in another. In that way, she’s very much like the voters who might be holding their noses at the ballot box; “dyed in the wool” Republicans who may not love their candidate, but who will get him over the line in November. Delaney doubts that Wiles’ politics always chime with Trump’s. “She would be what I’d call left on LGBT+ issues. And I can’t believe she would necessarily agree naturally with Donald Trump on immigration, but that’s more me speculating.”

Trump speaks at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday (AP)

Delaney agrees with Schorsch that, political career aside, Wiles is a sweet, good-natured person. “If she lived in your neighbourhood and you were sick, she’d bring over a casserole,” he says. “If you needed an electrician to be let into your house, she’d figure out how to do that. And if you were in the hospital, she’d visit and send you flowers. She’s just a really nice person.”

When Wiles is at home, he says she likes to tend her garden and she enjoys cooking. She’s known to be an avid birdwatcher, too, although as one person who knows her told me, “I doubt she’s doing much birdwatching at the moment.”

“And she’s crazy about her girls and her grandkids,” Delaney says. She’s not flashy, doesn’t splurge on five-star hotels, and he says as a practising Episcopalian she’s a “church-every-Sunday person and prays frequently”.

Nate Monroe, a columnist for the Florida Times-Union newspaper who has known Wiles in his capacity as a journalist for a decade, says her critics would say that sweet, personable demeanour “masks a very, very calculating, hard-charging operator. As much as she is very well thought of in Jacksonville’s halls of power, she is equally feared. And she is a dangerous person to cross.”

In January, Monroe penned a devastating editorial, castigating DeSantis for his presidential campaign and pointing out personal traits which ensure he “always chooses cruelty over kindness, dog whistles over empathy, divisiveness over grace”. Just to ensure the knife was well and truly twisted, Monroe added: “Who was it that Trump called out during his victory speech [in Iowa], that diminutive figure standing at the periphery of his entourage on stage? Susie Wiles, the adviser DeSantis cast out, is one of Trump’s most trusted confidantes. Oops.”

Monroe says those familiar with Wiles knew that by cutting her out of his inner circle – and humiliating her in the process – DeSantis would eventually get his comeuppance. He also says Wiles is “almost allergic to drama” – which may sound illogical – comical, even – when you consider who her boss is. But Monroe has another take. Perhaps it’s a good fit. Perhaps, in Susie Wiles, Donald Trump has found a calm, steady hand.