The Donald's First Hire Proves Just How Different Trump 47 Will Be From Trump 45
If you want to see how a president-elect is going to govern, don’t look at their promises. Look at their first hire: chief of staff.
For instance, anyone who bought the hopey-changey rhetoric of Barack Obama should have been wary when he announced that then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel would fill the role that helps a president fill all the other rolls. As a writer for Chicago Magazine noted back in 2013: “Once, he sent a pollster a dead fish. Another time, he repeatedly stabbed a steak knife into a restaurant table.” The next eight years, rather unsurprisingly, held a lot more dead-fish-and-stabbed-steak politics than it did hope-and-change-type stuff.
In the case of our new president-elect, former President Donald Trump, there’s no shortage of prognostications of what Trump 47 will look at compared to Trump 45. In that vein, I give you a chief-of-staff comparison: Susie Wiles vs. Reince Priebus.
On Thursday evening, Trump announced he was tapping Wiles, his campaign manager, for the all-important position.
“Susie Wiles just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history, and was an integral part of both my 2016 and 2020 successful campaigns,” he said.
“Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected. Susie will work tirelessly to Make America Great Again. It is a well deserved honor to have Susie as the first-ever female Chief of Staff in United States history,” he continued.
“I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”
As someone who has worked with Susie Wiles firsthand, I have the utmost respect for her and commend the President for this fantastic Chief of Staff selection.
Aside from being a phenomenal person, she is a decisive leader who will work daily to execute the President’s… pic.twitter.com/ttPNrE7KZE
— Ben & Candy Carson (@RealBenCarson) November 7, 2024
This is how The Washington Post described her: “Wiles, 67, has led Trump’s operation since 2021 — when he was widely viewed as a pariah after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters. Unlike some advisers, she has rarely battled with him and has maintained a close rapport.”
“Trump entrusted her to manage the campaign’s budget and hiring for the 2024 campaign, and regularly referred to her as a ‘winner.’ Trump has often been solicitous of her opinion, asking for her thoughts in meetings. She is largely unfazed by his mercurial anger, people close to her say.”
Ignore the typical WaPoist slant about “mercurial anger” and the like. This is what the same publication had to say when Trump named his chief of staff in the days following his 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton.
“In choosing Priebus, 44, Trump has tapped a Washington insider who is viewed as broadly acceptable by vast swaths of the Republican Party. Priebus was recommended by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and will be a bridge between the White House and the Republican-led Congress, as well as the heads of Cabinet agencies,” the Post reported at the time.
“The choice signals Trump’s willingness to work within the very establishment he assailed on the campaign trail. Priebus, a lawyer and longtime Wisconsin political operative, has been head of the RNC since 2011 and is well liked within Washington after years of forging ties with Republican leaders and lawmakers.”
And how did trying to meet the establishment halfway work? Not well, as draining the swamp from within the swamp is a lot harder than doing it from a certain remove. Priebus was one of a number of lukewarm Republicans who entered the Trump administration and ended up being disappointments.
Heck, he wasn’t even the worst RINO chief of staff Trump hired; that honor goes to John Kelly, the former general and Homeland Security secretary most recently seen peddling highly dubious last-minute October surprise claims about Trump’s purported admiration for Hitler’s generals that nobody outside of the Democratic bubble seemed to really buy.
The point is that, when Trump was elected in 2016, he didn’t have a whole lot to choose from, inasmuch as his vision of a broader Republican Party — one that appealed more to the working class and to a sense of cultural conservatism as opposed to laissez-faire economics and deference to party elites — hadn’t exactly caught on with the wider GOP yet. Bringing in establishment figures as a bridge, however, only made things worse, as the appointees were nonentities at best and willful obstructionists at worst.
This time around, there’s no mistake that the party has changed. Liberals like to call it a cult of Trumpism, but the fact is that Trump has merely won both voters and party members over to his vision of America. And this time, there’s going to be little compromise with hand-wringing RINOs, most of whom were usually heard during this campaign cycle — if at all — onstage with Kamala Harris.
Her thorough trouncing in both the electoral and popular vote is also the trouncing of the establishment Republican vision. No more Reince Priebuses, no more John Kellys, nothing like that. In hiring Susie Wiles, Trump has set the tone for a smoother, more functional White House this time around, with no RINOs trying their best to wrest the keys of power from the president.
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