CNN Reports on How Trump’s Incoming Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and ‘Tightly Coordinated Operation’ Will Stop the MAGA ‘Clown Car’
CNN’s Dana Bash discussed the appointment of Susie Wiles as President-elect Donald Trump’s chief of staff — the first female one in American history — with a panel on her show Friday.
When the news was announced, one quote given to CNN’s Steve Cotorno by an unnamed source stood out: “The clown car can’t come into the White House at will. And he agrees with her.” Bash turned to CNN’s Phil Mattingly, who covered the first Trump White House, for his own insight on what that “clown car” really was:
BASH: Do you think that’s realistic, given how Donald Trump sort of governs and operates even when he’s not governing?
MATTINGLY: Having done a lot of reporting on what a second term would look like over the course of the last year, I’m always struck by something somebody told me who was in kind of the inner circle a few months ago, which is Donald Trump has not changed. Everything around him has in terms of now versus eight years ago. And I think the decision to name Susie Wiles his chief of staff is another signal that that is the case in terms of the people that are around him are Trump people.
Remember in 2016, when he was throwing out transition playbooks and trying to figure out, you know, the clown car was me standing out front of Trump Tower waiting for Kanye West to walk in and do like an elevator red carpet thing up to meet with him, which was literally something that happened. And I think people might actually forget that we did that for like two months. I’m sure David Chalian was sitting his office just laughing at me. Because it was cold!
BASH: “Because I was cold”!
MATTINGLY: The point being that while, you know, what Trump did on the campaign trail underscores that, like, he’s not that different than what he was before, he’s the same person. The infrastructure around him, the Congress that he will be inheriting, the mandate that he believes he has — which is very different than what he had in 2016 — but most importantly, the planning and staffing infrastructure that exists because of the kind of constellation of outside groups. People constantly talked about Project 2025. There were far more powerful and important and substantive operations outside of Project 2025 that were doing real work.
He is just at a different level of preparation beyond the fact that he’s actually experienced it before that I think most people got their heads around in the insanity of trying to cover a campaign. And I think that’s being reflected not just by the decision to go with Susie Wiles as chief of staff, but also with what we’ve seen in these initial days at Mar-a-Lago. Could change, because he hasn’t. But right now, I think it’s a very tightly coordinated operation.
Watch the video above via CNN.
