Susie Wiles’ Vanity Fair interviews stirred up headlines by airing frank judgments about President Trump and his inner circle, and the coverage both revealed and obscured facts about motives, personalities, and how the White House chose to cooperate with the piece.
The town loves palace intrigue, especially when it involves the Trump White House, and this Vanity Fair profile landed right in that sweet spot. Susie Wiles is widely seen as one of Trump’s most trusted advisers and a natural choice for chief of staff, though not every White House COS fits the same mold. Rumors of a staff shakeup circulated, but insiders and Wiles’ profile of loyalty make a sudden ouster unlikely.
The interview delivers blunt assessments of several top figures, naming familiar targets like Elon Musk and Pam Bondi and outlining a “loose agreement” between Wiles and the president about a revenge phase that would wrap within the first 90 days. Wiles appears to accept Trump’s pursuit of some legal targets, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, and credits her own tolerance for high drama to growing up around strong personalities like the late Pat Summerall. She’s not trying to tame Trump the way others have attempted; she says her job is to facilitate his aims even when she thinks he may push too hard.
This wasn’t some off-the-cuff revolt; the interviews were allowed and coordinated, which undercuts the idea of a solo smear campaign inside the West Wing. There are simply too many cooperating participants for it to be a rogue operation, and Wiles herself has said parts of the conversation were taken out of context:
Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.
[…]
… she did not complain about being overruled and at various points said she “got on board” with the eventual decisions. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
The off-script comments felt reminiscent of a similar episode in President Ronald Reagan’s first term when his budget director, David A. Stockman, likewise gave a series of interviews to what was then called The Atlantic Monthly with candid observations that caused a huge stir.
While Mr. Stockman kept his interviews secret from the White House (and nearly got fired), the broader Trump team cooperated with Vanity Fair. Mr. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave interviews and along with top aides like Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt posed for glamour photographs by Christopher Anderson.
[…]
She attributes her ability to work for Mr. Trump to growing up with an alcoholic father, the sportscaster Pat Summerall. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink,” she said. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” While Mr. Trump does not drink, she said he has “an alcoholic’s personality” and operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
In a sign of how much her job revolves around the president’s big-personality, stream-of-consciousness public comments, she keeps a free-standing video monitor next to the fireplace in her West Wing office with a live feed of Mr. Trump’s social media posts.
[…]
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said then. When that did not happen by August, she told Mr. Whipple that “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour” but said that he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
Among the targets, she acknowledged, was Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who won a civil court verdict against Mr. Trump for business fraud with a penalty of nearly $500 million. “Well, that might be the one retribution,” Ms. Wiles said.
Wiles later pushed back on the simplest reading of motive, telling reporters that “It’s not that he thinks they wronged him, although they did…He thinks that they wronged, and they should not be able to do to somebody else what they did to him, and the way that you could cure that, at least potentially, is to expose what was done.” She’s also raised concerns about the optics of mass deportations and says she reviewed the Epstein files before Congress authorized their release.
In the interviews published by Vanity Fair, Ms. Wiles faulted Ms. Bondi, one of her closest friends in the administration, for her early handling of the Epstein files, an issue that has been a cause célèbre for Mr. Trump’s right-wing base.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Ms. Wiles said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” Mr. Vance, by contrast, understood the sensitivity because he himself was “a conspiracy theorist,” she said.
Ms. Wiles said she has read the Epstein documents and acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s name is in them. “We know he’s in the file,” she said. “And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
On potential successors within the movement, Wiles contrasts Marco Rubio’s principled course with JD Vance’s later conversion, calling Vance’s shift “sort of political.” That tension showed up during the magazine shoot, where Vance joked about the photograph comparisons between him and Rubio.
As for the potential successors, Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio, she distinguished how each of them came around to supporting Mr. Trump after initially opposing him. “Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles,” she said. “He just won’t. And so he had to get there.” As for Mr. Vance, “his conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.”
Mr. Rubio told Mr. Whipple what he has said publicly, that “if JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
Still, the underlying tension came through when Mr. Vance posed for the magazine’s photographer. “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me,” Mr. Vance joked. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”
UPDATE: Ms Wiles elaborated further on the piece, adding significant context was sacrificed. Vice President JD Vance ripped into it on the stump in Pennsylvania this morning.
Why do this? Maybe to remind readers that mainstream outlets often fail to capture the full context of White House dynamics, and that coordinated cooperation between a staff and a magazine changes how those moments land on the record.
