The first time Donald Trump cold-called Susie Wiles, she didn’t pick up.
It was 2015, and Trump was looking for a political guide to help him topple two of Florida’s favorite sons — former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio — in the state’s delegate-rich, narrative-setting Republican presidential primary.
Wiles, who played a similar role in Rick Scott’s successful outsider bid for governor in 2010, didn’t recognize Trump’s number when it popped up on her phone. He kept ringing, and eventually she answered.
“I’m told you know something about Florida,” Trump said. “Is that true?”
After a visit to Trump Tower in New York City, followed by a lengthy period of silence, Trump offered — and Wiles accepted — a post as co-chair of his campaign in the state.
Since then, he has fired her, re-hired her and made her arguably the most powerful aide in Republican politics.
Now, Trump is storming through the Republican presidential primary campaign with Wiles, his de facto national campaign manager, applying a cool temperament to the political fires — often self-started — that surround and threaten to consume him.
Wiles’ low-drama approach, forged over more than 40 years serving Republicans at every level from mayor to president, acts as a crucial counterbalance to a volatile candidate who is trying to win the White House while fighting four criminal indictments, according to GOP sources inside and outside Trump’s camp.
“The only flamboyant person in the Trump campaign these days is Trump,” said Richard Porter, a member of the Republican National Committee from Illinois, who praised Wiles for running a “tight operation” out of Palm Beach, Florida. “He’s figured this thing out in a way that’s encouraging for a person that’s not in Trump world.”
This portrait of the woman Trump has entrusted with running his presidential campaign staff is drawn from interviews with a dozen Republicans, including Wiles, most of whom are close to Trump. Her task — helping return a defeated, twice-impeached former president facing four indictments to the White House — is unlike any other faced by an American political operative.
Skeptics note that Wiles has never run anything with the scope or stakes of this undertaking, that the campaign has been spending more than it raises and that Trump’s primary victories more closely resemble those of a prohibitive favorite than a world-beater.
And yet, with Wiles at his side, Trump heads into next week’s Super Tuesday contests carrying commanding leads in delegates and most public polling of coming primary contests. Surveys indicate he will start the general election on relatively even footing with President Joe Biden.
Wiles, the daughter of legendary NFL play-by-play man Pat Summerall, has battled through adversity before. She told her father, in a letter delivered by friends at an alcohol intervention in the early 1990s, that his public behavior made her ashamed to share his name. Summerall, who would later say her note cut the deepest, got sober.
As a young aide in the Reagan administration, Wiles was personal secretary to Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan when he was investigated for alleged mob ties. Donovan, who resigned after a special prosecutor declined to bring charges and before he was acquitted in a New York trial, famously asked which office he could visit to “get my reputation back.”
And in a fateful set of moves that preceded Trump’s bringing Wiles back into his fold, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ousted her from his camp, persuaded Trump to sack her and tried to blacklist her in GOP circles.
If there is a personality trait that links Trump to the soft-spoken, media-shy Wiles, it’s that survive-and-thrive drive: Trump feeds his by disrupting order; Wiles feeds hers by maintaining order. Many Republicans credit Trump’s political comeback at least in part to her bringing a new sense of discipline and direction to his campaign.
Wiles…
This article was originally published by a www.nbcnews.com . Read the Original article here. .