The Donald’s First Unforced Error And The Need For A White House MAGA Policy Council To Save The Day

We’re just three days out from an election victory that was a stroke of inflation-cycle luck, and the Donald has already committed a catastrophic error. He named a matronly 67 year-old as his White House chief of staff despite the fact that she has never spent a single day of her professional life in the Washington Swamp. So the Deep State creatures domiciled there are going to swallow her in one gulp if a remedy is not confected very quickly.

In fact, other than stints early in her career as a coffee fetcher for Congressman Jack Kemp and a schedule typist in the Reagan White House, she spent most of her adult life in small-time Florida politics, holding a post as advisor to the mayor of Jacksonville as recently as her 52nd birthday. While Jacksonville is a pleasant enough town accounting for 0.3% of the US population, it’s hardly a cauldron of the smash-mouth policy battles and political warfare habitually conducted on the banks of the Potomac.

Indeed, as late as 2016 she was still in Florida as co-head of Trump’s statewide presidential campaign, but thereafter saw no tour of combat duty in the Trump White House the first time around. Instead, she switched to the Ron DeSantis gubernatorial campaign in 2018 but was fired even before she could join his administration in Tallahassee.

Even then she did not escape the sunshine state for the more challenging northerly climes in Washington DC. She next managed Trump’s 2020 Florida campaign, decamping to Mar-a-Lago after J6 to run the Donald’s “Save America” PAC. The latter was essentially a legal expense slush fund that through the end of 2023 had already paid the Donald’s lawyers $64 million. Susie’s job was apparently to sort out all the billings and expense sheets submitted by more than a dozen law firms, as well as organize rallies outside of the various Trump court appearances.

After that, of course, she was back on the campaign trail, doing a creditable job minimizing the inherent chaos of Trump World, even as she oversaw an army of volunteers, yard-sign placements, phone banks, media buys, social media operations and event planning and scheduling for the candidate himself.

To be sure, our point is not just that Susie Wiles is in way over her fine shock of gray hair and is not qualified to be chief of staff. The actual point is that in his first action out of the box the Donald has proved that he probably hasn’t learned anything after all.

Recall that last time his initial White House chief of staff was also a campaign operative. Reince Priebus earned his chops as GOP state chairman in Wisconsin thru 2010, and then as general counsel and chairman of the RNC through 2016.

Unlike Susie Wiles, upon becoming chief of staff in January 2017 Priebus had already ventured east of Wisconsin. Still, RNC headquarters after Mitt Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012 was focused on an “autopsy” of its election failures, not the matters of War & Peace, the debt ceiling and fiscal battles and the regulatory excess that occupied both ends of Pennsylvania during the second Obama Administration.