Trump’s team was divided on whether Putin’s goal was anything less than a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine. “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August. But privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told me.
In October I asked Rubio if that was true. “There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.” (In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”)
Will Marco Rubio challenge Vance for the top spot on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? His answer: “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
I asked Wiles about the remarkable 180-degree conversion of the secretary of state and the vice president from fierce Trump critics to high-ranking acolytes—and heirs apparent. Trump has floated a Vance-Rubio GOP presidential ticket in 2028. Rubio’s transformation was ideological and principled, she said: “Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles. He just won’t. And so he had to get there.” By contrast, she suggested, Vance had other motivations. “His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.” During another visit to the White House on November 13, when I asked Vance about his conversion to Trump loyalist, he said: “I realized that I actually liked him, I thought he was doing a lot of good things. And I thought that he was fundamentally the right person to save the country.”
Will Rubio challenge Vance for the top spot on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? His answer: “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
Wiles is known for having an open-door policy. Trump sometimes comes in unannounced (“he apparently never did in the first administration”). During lunch, no one interrupted us, and Wiles checked her phone only once. She was enjoying a rare moment of downtime. “They don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, motioning toward the Oval, and laughed out loud. After an hour, as I got up to go, I told her about how President Barack Obama’s chief Rahm Emanuel used to complain to visitors about how thankless his job was: “This is nice,” he said, pointing to the wood-burning fireplace, “and this is nice,” gesturing toward the outdoor patio. “And everything in between sucks.” Wiles replied: “I don’t feel that way at all.”
In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Vladimir Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”
To the left of the fireplace was a freestanding video monitor: a live feed of Trump’s Truth Social posts.
The average tenure for a modern White House chief of staff is a year and a half. George W. Bush’s Andrew Card holds the record at five years and three months. Wiles may yet eclipse Trump’s so-far longest-lasting chief, John Kelly, at 17 months. If she chose to quit, Wiles could make a fortune running the campaign of any number of would-be GOP nominees; though Wiles says she earned around $350,000 for her role managing Trump’s 2024 campaign, she was reported to have made millions more through her consulting firm (Wiles had not replied when asked about this by the time this article went to print). When reports emerged that Biden aide Mike Donilon stood to make $8 million if his boss had stayed in the race and won, Wiles said her co–campaign chair Chris LaCivita sent her a note that said, “Boy, am I stupid. Why was [I] so cheap?
Wiles says she’d originally planned to serve as chief for six months. “I have not had a day I would describe as overwhelming, though there’s plenty of frustration here. But you go to bed at night, you say your prayers, and you get up and do it again.” I asked her about her health and the president’s. “Mine is good,” she said. “His is great. My kids are grown. I’m divorced. This is what I do if I stay four years.”
