Chris Whipple

We talked mostly about the campaign at that point.

This was 10 days before election.

Trump's inauguration, more or less.

But everything was, nearly everything was off the record.

And I can tell you, as someone who wrote a book about the Biden White House, that this is extraordinarily rare.

Senior White House officials almost always speak to you on background.

They require quotation approval.

They're hardly ever on the record.

Well, she's seen it now and she saw it famously back in 2016 in the fall of that year when at one point Donald Trump called her to his golf club.

At this point, she was working on his campaign on Florida.

And he, in front of a bunch of cronies, proceeded to verbally abuse her to a fare-thee-well tone.

She said that she wanted to just break down and cry.

She instead steeled herself and told Donald Trump that if you want to win Florida, I can do that.

I'm paraphrasing now, but if you want someone who sets their hair on fire, I'm not your girl.

And with that, she stood up and she turned on her heel and departed.

Trump called her every day thereafter, she says, and he got the message.

He needed Florida and he needed Susie Wiles, and she never looked back.

By 2024, she was the co-chair of his presidential campaign, ran a brilliant against all odds campaign, was undoubtedly first among equals running that campaign.

And I think Donald Trump would not be president if not for Susie Wiles.

I found this absolutely extraordinary, and it really is almost the arc of the Vanity Fair piece and the arc of the journey that I took with Susie Wiles.