Donald Trump calls her the “Ice Maiden.” But in person, the very private White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is warm and hospitable — as long as you don’t cross her. She didn’t become the most powerful woman in the world without a determined glint in her eye that can silence the most spirited cabinet member.
Wiles, 68, has brought a sense of order and calm to Trump’s second presidency, which has given him the space to notch up wins at breakneck speed.
In a rare interview on our new podcast, “Pod Force One,” she explained how she does it.
“I gave a piece of advice to myself when I started this job,” she told us this week in her large, sunny office in the West Wing, down the hall from the Oval Office.
“I am the chief of staff. I’m not the chief of Donald Trump.”
She starts early each day with a security briefing, followed by a 7:30 a.m. staff meeting in her office with deputies including Stephen Miller, Taylor Auerbach and James Blair at the big conference table that stands in front of French doors that lead to a prized private patio where she held a “cigar party” after she moved in.
She usually doesn’t finish until late at night, when younger staff members have gone home to their young families, and she has barely had a day off since she started.
But when people ask Wiles what the hardest thing is about her job, she replies: “Here’s what’s not hard about my job: Donald Trump. He is predictable and open and approachable and honest and honorable and committed and all of those things, which does not mean he can’t be irritated or frustrated, but I view my job as trying to keep as much of that away from him so that he can think clearly about the big picture. We’ll take care of the back office.”
That’s high praise from someone who is with Trump for hours every day, and has been with him off and on since 2015 through some of his darkest hours, including his near-death in an attempted assassination in Butler, Pa., one year ago this Sunday.
They know each other so well now that if he does get irritable when something goes wrong, she has worked out the simplest way to mollify him.
“So, solving the underlying problem is where I focus. He’ll be angry. He’ll say so. But at the end of the day, what he wants from me is to fix whatever made him angry. So, I try to go to the root cause.”
The fact that Wiles is competent and organized means that she generally fixes problems before they reach him, a far cry from the catastrophes that used to land in his lap under his revolving door of four chiefs of staff during his first administration.
Asked if her boss has any annoying habits, she pauses and then offers: “He’s known to be tardy, and so the day gets out of control pretty quickly. But … what you see is what you get, and that’s a blessing for a staff member because then I don’t wonder when I come in on Monday, ‘What’s it going to be like?’ I know what it’s going to be like. It’s going to be breakneck speed to get as much done as fast as possible for the people that need it and matter. And that’s really what we do here every day, all day. Seven days a week, by the way.”
The Floridian grandmother’s talent is to create order out of the chaos that comes from a gregarious commander-in-chief whose office door is always open, and who has an ambitious agenda, boundless energy, and the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Read the full op-ed over at The New York Post:
Miranda Devine: Susie Wiles brings calm to Trump admin—helping the president rack up wins https://t.co/TV9rXjhiD6 pic.twitter.com/aHt5vWXf8g
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) July 10, 2025