Will Susie Wiles go from being one of Trump's closest and trusted advisors to be vaporized by Musk's Starlink satellite disintegration ray?
This is from an AP article published the day after the election about her:
She can control some of Trump’s worst impulses
Wiles was able to help control Trump’s worst impulses — not by chiding him or lecturing, but by earning his respect and showing him that he was better off when he followed her advice than flouted it. At one point late in the campaign, when Trump gave a widely criticized speech in Pennsylvania in which he strayed from his talking points and suggested he wouldn’t mind the media being shot, Wiles came out to stare at him silently.
Trump often referenced Wiles on the campaign trail, publicly praising her leadership of what he said he was often told was his “best-run campaign.”
“She’s incredible. Incredible,” he said at a Milwaukee rally earlier this month.
Will she have staying power?
In his first administration, Trump went through four chiefs of staff — including one who served in an acting capacity for a year — in a period of record-setting personnel churn.
A chief of staff serves as the president’s confidant, helping to execute an agenda and balancing competing political and policy priorities. They also tend to serve as a gatekeeper, helping determine whom the president spends their time and to whom they speak — an effort under which Trump chafed inside the White House.
Trump once called her "the Ice Maiden." This was in his victory speech in Palm Beach, Florida. He said “Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you. The Ice Maiden. We call her the Ice Maiden." (Reference: Susie Wiles: The ‘Ice Maiden’ operator who will be Trump’s chief of staff, Irish Times)
Lest you forget, these were Trump's chiefs of staff:
Amanda Marcotte referred to Susie Wiles in her Salon column
Elon Musk can easily use Donald Trump's greatest advantage against him
Trump isn't fooling anyone by saying Elon Musk's "not going to be president"
It appears Trump's nominee for chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is aware it's bad news to let Musk worm his way into being the shadow president. Despite all the mainstream media hype after Trump created "DOGE" — the Department of Government Efficiency — cooler heads noticed that this Musk-led initiative is not a real government agency, but a "presidential advisory committee." These are unpaid and powerless groups, often formed to avoid real change by giving make-work to activists and donors. President Joe Biden did it to shut up people calling for Supreme Court expansion and it's a safe bet that Wiles had the same goal in creating DOGE.Alas for her, Musk has Twitter and he uses it the same way Trump did in his first term, to rile up supporters and create so much noise that those who are putting the leader on "ignore" are forced to kowtow to whims frequently spouted in the hours when more sober people are sleeping. Musk is doing what he became unbelievably wealthy doing: stealing other people's ideas and passing them off as his own. In this case, he's swiping Trump's strategy of using Twitter mobbing tactics to work around the bureaucratic obstacles. While it didn't work this time, in terms of actually stopping the bill, it's hard to ignore that Republicans, having spent years kowtowing to Trump's narcissism, are turning their practice towards lavish public obsequiousness to Musk.
For her sake I hope she hasn't be selecting drapes for her White House office. She may not even make it until Jan. 21st. If she gets in Musk's way she could be another lamb sent to the slaughter following in the footsteps of of Matt Gaetz. This lamb won't be slaughtered because of public opinion or GOP Senators seeing it as a beyond the pale nomination. It will be because she made the mistake of getting between Musk and Trump. She could end up as a lamb burger like those which, fittingly considering this is where Musk is from, are popular in South Africa, for example at the Capetown restaurant below and many others.
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