Well, it looks like a woman will be in charge after all at the White House.
Donald Trump has named as his Chief of Staff pick Floridian and longtime Republican operative Susie Wiles, which will make her the first woman to hold that position.
According to the New York Times, Wiles worked for Ballard Partners, a Florida-based lobbying firm. According to their website, Ballard represents Trulieve, the mega cannabis company whose female CEO Kim Rivers reportedly met with Trump just before he announced he would be voting in favor of Florida's measure to legalize cannabis on the November ballot.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis strongly opposed the measure, charging that it would benefit only Trulieve, which contributed over $70 million to the Smart & Safe Florida campaign behind Amendment 3. The measure won a majority vote (56%) but fell short of the 60% vote it needed to become a Florida constitutional amendment, similar to the reproductive rights measure also on the state's ballot, which garnered 57% of the vote.
Wiles helped DeSantis win the 2018 Florida governor’s race, but he later fired and denounced her; she then helped Trump crush DeSantis in the G.O.P. presidential primaries. She recently worked at the lobbying giant Mercury, whose clients include SpaceX, AT&T, and the Embassy of Qatar. Politico reports that until earlier this year, she lobbied lobbied Congress on “FDA regulations” for the tobacco company Swisher International while running the Trump campaign.
According to the Times, Wiles has run Trump's political operation for nearly four years, and has been the only campaign manager to survive an entire campaign working for him. The daughter of the football legend Pat Summerall, Wiles reportedly "did not emerge in politics from Mr. Trump’s hard-right political base" and "championed the former president’s effort to expand his coalition in the general election beyond the party’s older white base to appeal to Black and Latino voters who typically had not supported Republicans."
Summerall, an NFL champion kicker and longtime commentator, admitted to becoming an alcoholic during his broadcast career. In his 2006 biography, he recounted how Susie staged an intervention for him, leading to him checking into the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment.
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| Gabbard (center) with members of California NORML at the 2019 NORML Lobby Day in DC |
Also on the Trump transition team is former independent Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, Jr., who along with Gabbard has long been an outspoken advocate of legalizing marijuana. Just before the election, Kennedy claimed Trump promised him control of "the public health agencies, which is HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others. And also the USDA, which is, you know, key to making America healthy, because we've got to get off of seed oils and we've got to get off of pesticides." Trump said at the pre-election Al Smith dinner, "We're gonna let him go wild for a little while, then I'm gonna have to maybe reign him back, because he's got some pretty wild ideas, but most of them are really good."
Upon announcing his support of Florida's Amendment 3 in September, Trump also called medical marijuana "amazing" and said that his administration would “continue to focus on research to unlock the medical uses of marijuana to a Schedule 3 drug, and work with Congress to pass common sense laws, including safe banking for state authorized companies, and supporting states rights to pass marijuana laws, like in Florida, that work so well for their citizens.” That sounds more like the old "research dodge" than full federal legalization, but at least the Biden administration's efforts to reschedule cannabis could go forward along with safe banking under Trump, if Congress complies.
