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Wiles, in a Jacksonville Homecoming Conversation, Describes the Chief of Staff's 12-to-14-Hour Days, May 8, 2025

May 8, 2025 · Speak Easy Jax · 0:54:18

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles sat down with Speak Easy Jax hosts Daniel Davis and TJ Ward in her White House office for the Jacksonville podcast’s May 8, 2025 episode, per the program’s description. “I miss Jacksonville so much,” she told them at the start. “This has been a treat for me to know you all were coming.”

Wiles traced the arc the hosts asked about: a sports-centered upbringing as the daughter of broadcaster Pat Summerall, an early career in politics, and her Jacksonville years. Davis recalled, as his own anecdote, that when the Jacksonville chamber’s chief executive job opened, Wiles was his first call, wrote his bio and resume over a weekend, and ran the mock-interview “war room” that prepared him for the hiring process. On the job she now holds, Wiles described the operating tempo plainly: the day starts at 7, runs “12, 13, 14 hours, five days a week,” with travel weekends on top and Saturdays often spent at the office. On being the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff, she said she had not expected it: “I didn’t know — neither did the president — that I was the first female. It just didn’t seem like that could be the case.”

She also addressed conservation, a Jacksonville theme given her St. Johns River work: being a conservative and caring for the environment are “not contradictory,” she said — “conservation stewardship is, I think, our obligation” — and she credited President Trump’s first term with landmark land-preservation legislation that, in her words, goes unrecognized. She closed with a promise to the hometown audience: “I promise anybody that’s interested that we’re going to do our best every day to try to make a difference.”

Why it matters

This is the earliest long-form on-record conversation of Wiles’s tenure, and the frame is her hometown rather than Washington: the Jacksonville network that produced her, the family and faith background she credits, and — in her own words — the schedule and the historic-first she did not set out to claim. For a chief of staff who almost never sits for interviews, it is a primary document of how she understands the job.

Sources: Speak Easy Jax, “S1E7: Susie Wiles” (May 8, 2025, embedded above; conversation as recorded by the program; host and guest remarks attributed as spoken).