TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — His fortunes flagging in a must-win state, President Donald Trump on Thursday brought back the Florida campaign adviser who helped him carry the battleground in 2016, overruling the long-standing objections of the Republican governor and his own top campaign adviser.
Trump’s decision to reinstate Susie Wiles to his campaign’s good inner circle follows months of behind-the-scenes efforts to bring her back after she was exiled at the demand of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had her cast out of the president’s good graces in September.
The Trump campaign tweeted the news Thursday: “Susie Wiles (@susie57) was a very important part of how we Made Florida Great Again with @realDonaldTrump in 2016 and it’s tremendous to welcome her back to the team. We will win Florida again going away!”
The decision to welcome back Wiles comes as polls show Trump trailing Democrat Joe Biden in Trump's adopted home state. Trump won Florida four years ago by less than 113,000 votes and a loss in the battleground would likely doom his reelection effort.
It wasn’t immediately clear if DeSantis had been told about the move.
DeSantis' power play to oust Wiles in September 2019 shocked Republican insiders given the crucial role Wiles played in helping his come-from-behind victory for governor in 2018. She also helped deliver the surprise wins of both Trump in 2016 and Sen. Rick Scott when he ran for governor in 2010 and was expected to lose.
As Florida began to slip away from the president, advisers urged him to consider rehiring Wiles, a sentiment that was echoed at two meetings with the president at the White House, according to three people briefed on the meetings.
In a call from the Oval Office to DeSantis, Trump brought up bringing back Wiles but “Ron lost his s---,” said one Trump adviser, echoing an account from a DeSantis ally who said “the governor was pissed.”
DeSantis told Trump he shouldn't be concerned about Florida. That sentiment, Trump and DeSantis advisers say, was shared by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who speaks frequently with the governor and is believed to be positioning himself to run DeSantis’s 2022 reelection campaign.
Wiles was fired from the Trump campaign last year after DeSantis suspected she bore responsibility — unfairly her friends say — for the leak of internal correspondence suggesting that the new governor appeared to be selling access to special interests on golfing trips.
Wiles also was pressured at the time to part ways with Ballard Partners, a top lobbying firm led by Brian Ballard, who used to lobby for Trump and is a top fundraiser in Florida.
She had been brought into DeSantis’ orbit just a month before Election Day 2018 to revive what many Republicans viewed as a mistake-prone campaign limping through the final months of the race against Democrat Andrew Gillum. DeSantis eked out a win in a recount.
But tensions and suspicions mounted, especially after the two most important political advisers in DeSantis’ orbit — chief of staff Shane Strum and his wife, Casey DeSantis — went to Florida GOP headquarters in Tallahassee in April 2019. Among DeSantis insiders, there was a feeling that the party was stocked with “Susie people,” setting off a chain of events that led to DeSantis and Strum asking the Trump campaign for a new “hand-picked” top staffer at the state party.
The relationship between Wiles and Strum had deteriorated beyond repair, or as one veteran Republican lobbyist told POLITICO last August it had “been poisoned,” which both Strum and Wiles have denied.
Curt Anderson, a top political adviser for Scott and other Senate Republicans, said he was happy Wiles was back, though he was mad at the treatment she suffered at the hands of anonymous DeSantis allies.
“I request a written apology from the people who wrongly maligned her on the way out the door, who made stupid scurrilous accusations against her,” Anderson said in a interview.
"Whoever made the accusation that that she was leaking or something like that made statements that were malicious and untrue," he said.
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