White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has organized a West Wing that, unlike Donald Trump’s first administration, doesn’t distract him with constant squabbling, the president’s biographer says.
Author Michael Wolff argued on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that Wiles, the 68-year-old longtime Florida political operative, sold Trump on her ability to be chief of staff by explaining why “everything that went wrong” in his first term “was the result of a fractious White House staff.”
After “push[ing] out everybody else who might challenge her” for the chief of staff role, Wolff said, Wiles told Trump what he apparently agreed with.
“Success depended on two things, in her view: Trump being able to do what Trump wanted to do—let Trump be Trump—and him not to be frustrated by internal, internecine squabbling at every single minute,“ Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles.
“You have to remember how bad the first administration was,” Wolff continued. “These people within the West Wing would have killed each other—I mean, between [Steve] Bannon and [Jared] Kushner, Gary Cohn, Kellyanne Conway, John Kelly, Reince Priebus...“
Lesser figures, like “random people from The Apprentice,” as Coles said, also contributed to tension. Season One contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman, for instance, was fired in December 2017 by then-Chief of Staff John Kelly over “integrity” and “money” issues. She would later go public with her criticism of the administration in the 2018 book Unhinged, and even produced a tape of her firing, which she recorded in the Situation Room—an embarrassing moment for the administration.
Wolff said that while Wiles “very clearly” does not run Trump, and that she isn’t even the main gatekeeper to him, she has taken on the role of chief of staff differently—and more effectively—than Kelly and her other predecessors.
“What she has managed to do is to absent herself from Donald Trump’s immediate circle. So, she runs the West Wing. She runs the staff, but she very clearly does not run Donald Trump,” he said.
“To some extent, he’s doing his own scheduling. To some extent, he’s relying on Stephen Miller [and] a few other people,” he continued. “And a lot of the scheduling is, of course, pro forma, and it’s just waving in whoever gets on line to see him. And that will somewhat go through Susie Wiles. But again, on the pro forma side, on the side where it...occupies Trump’s mind share, she’s not getting involved in that.”
Wiles, Wolff added, doesn’t deliver bad news to Trump because she understands that that’s “not a good look.”
“It’s an important aspect of this administration: Trump functionally and fundamentally gets no bad news. Even if the news is bad, and even if it has to be delivered, it’s delivered actually as though it were good news.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast that Wiles “is the best chief of staff in history and has more integrity in her right pinky than Michael Wolff has in his whole body.”
Wiles, who has normally remained a quiet, behind-the-scenes figure, did speak out on a host of topics in a two-part Vanity Fair interview last December.
Among her revealing comments were that Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality‚” Attorney General Pam Bondi had “whiffed” on her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, JD Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and Elon Musk is an “avowed ketamine [user].”
Trump, she also admitted, was indeed on a “score settling” mission against perceived political rivals despite having said during the campaign that he wouldn’t have time for it.
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