Why Susie Wiles will be invaluable to Trump

“Susie Wiles is a great choice for President Trump’s chief of staff,” said Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and the man Donald Trump so humiliated in 2016.

Bush’s approval of the second Trump administration’s first major appointment instantly rang alarm bells in some quarters of the new American right.

Wiles, who ran Trump’s campaign with Chris LaCivita, is seen by some Trump insiders as a suspiciously old-fashioned operative, in hock to the moneyed interests who used to run the Republican Party. There were whispers of clashes between Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s most doggedly loyal aide and his 2016 campaign manager, and Wiles and LaCivita over funding in the summer.

But Wiles is not some secret agent for NeverTrumpism. She worked on the Trump campaign in 2016, for starters, and she been quietly instrumental in Trump’s revival over the last four years. Her elevation now signals that Team Trump now wants to head towards a more harmonious Republican future. It also suggests that the future of America is all about Florida, baby.

Florida is, increasingly, where the center of the Republican Party’s gravity sits, and the Donald’s club in Mar-a-Lago is the Trumpian equivalent of the Palace of Versailles. 

Not so long ago, Florida was a key battleground state in American elections. Barack Obama won there narrowly in 2008 and by a whisker in 2012. Yet the advent of Trumpism has turned the Sunshine State into a Republican stronghold. On Tuesday, Trump triumphed in Florida with a sizable 13 percent majority.

Wiles, a mild-mannered Episcopalian whose manners and politics are more moderate than some in the Trump sphere, has been a key figure in this transformation. A longtime Floridian operative — hence Jeb’s backing — she understands the Floridian power dynamics better than anyone. 

She was a key player in rise of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, but then fell out with Team Ron after becoming embroiled in a complicated power struggle involving Casey, the governor’s wife. The DeSantis family felt that Wiles, with her support for Trump, was getting in the way of their ever greater ambitions. So they pushed her out. 

But that ended badly for DeSantis and well for Donald Trump, as Wiles helped Trump destroy DeSantis in the Republican primaries and then take the White House. 

Wiles once wrote that her specialty is making “order out of chaos.” That presumably makes her invaluable to Trump, whose instinctive and transactional approach to the business of politics can create havoc. Moreover, in her understanding of Florida, Wiles has a unique insight into the coming reality of American politics. 

Florida has a reputation for being a bit of a tropical backwater. “I like Florida,” said the great American comedian George Carlin. “Everything is in the eighties. The temperatures, the ages and the IQ’s.”

But Florida has been thriving in recent years, thanks to an influx of capital and aspirational people escaping the suffocating progressive politics of California and other Democratically run states. 

Moreover, with its a mixed population of rich and poor, whites Latinos and African Americans, and expanding number of senior-citizen retirees, Florida looks a lot like the future. 

As Philip Bump, author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America, put it, Florida is “the state that looks most like most like what we’d expect the United States to look like in 2060.” By basking in Sunshine State, in other words, Team Trump’s new coalition has the potential to thrive for decades to come. 

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.