On the menu today: For most of the first year of Trump’s second term, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has operated relatively under the radar and avoided being at the center of any controversies. That streak came to a dramatic end Tuesday, as Vanity Fair published a long profile of her, full of quotes that criticized other members of the administration. Wiles now claims she is the victim of a “hit piece” that aimed to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.” It’s a hit piece that she apparently inadvertently assisted with, er, eleven on-the-record interviews.
A Controversy That Will Last a Little Wiles
You have to give Vanity Fair credit: It figured out how to get Olivia Nuzzi out of the news cycle.
On Tuesday morning, Vanity Fair unveiled a long and detailed profile piece on White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. In the profile, written by Christopher Whipple, Wiles offered blunt and often unflattering assessments of other members of the Trump team.
Wiles initially denied making one of the remarks:
In the interview with The Times on Monday, Ms. Wiles took issue with the quote attributed to her about his drug use. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” But Mr. Whipple played a tape for The Times in which she could be heard saying it.
Shortly after its publication, Wiles tried to distance herself from her remarks, insisting that what she said was taken out of context:
The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history. Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team. The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade. None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!
It’s terrible the way Whipple and Vanity Fair managed to trick Wiles into saying these things, over the course of her eleven on-the-record interviews, and somehow also managed to trick Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and other senior officials to sit down for a photoshoot.
You know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me eleven times, and I am exactly the right person to continue running the White House.
Hey, there’s no way anyone in the Trump administration could have possibly foreseen that Vanity Fair’s article would make them look like a bunch of disorganized stumblebums and incompetent extremists. The people running this presidency hold the mainstream media in complete contempt . . . right up until its representatives call and ask for an interview and photoshoot.
The Washington Examiner’s Byron York said of Wiles’s post on X, “In terms of its understanding of the press, this is perhaps one of the most naive statements ever made by an official at the highest levels of the government.”
So, we have two possibilities. Possibility one is that Wiles, who has worked alongside Donald Trump for years, is indeed unbelievably naïve.
Possibility two is that Wiles knew what she was doing, and she’s not quite as upset as her statement indicates.
The average tenure of a White House chief of staff is 18 months. It is one of the most powerful jobs in government, and one of the most difficult and exhausting. Wiles may well want to leave the job sometime in the coming year, before or after the midterm elections.
The portrait of Wiles that emerges in the profile — separate from the unflattering photo — is that Wiles is the comparably levelheaded voice of reason in the administration, doing the best she can, serving an impulsive, easily swayed president and surrounded by cabinet officials who often fumbled their duties. This is likely how Wiles wants to be remembered, and if Trump’s second term grows to be seen as a disappointment or failure, she wants the world to know she did everything she could to steer the administration on the right path. Her comments can fairly be seen as an attempt to preemptively win the blame game.
Wiles’s assessments of her fellow Trump administration officials may be critical, indelicate, or harsh . . . but they’re not exactly unfounded. Let’s start with Elon Musk:
“He is a complete solo actor,” said Wiles of Trump’s billionaire pal who led the scorched-earth blitz known as the Department of Government Efficiency. Wiles described Musk as something akin to a jacked-up Nosferatu. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she told me. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Musk has previously discussed his use of ketamine with a prescription. And does anyone want to dispute that Musk can fairly be described as an “odd duck”?
In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
“No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Wiles’s description of Musk operating as a bull in a china shop, ignoring the opinions of others, and making unneeded enemies within the administration with his sharp elbows aligns with other accounts. Musk himself seems to have found the experience frustrating, recently characterizing DOGE as only “somewhat successful” and saying he would not want to serve in a role like that again.
Wiles’s thoughts on the tariffs:
“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So, figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”
Back in April, White House senior counselor on trade Peter Navarro said on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures, “This is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that’s gotten out of control because of cheating.” One channel over on ABC News’s This Week, White House National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett was arguing that the tariffs were a negotiation: “More than 50 countries have reached out to the president to begin a negotiation.”
On the administration’s internal disputes about the tariffs, Wiles isn’t revealing anything we didn’t already know, and that wasn’t clear to anyone who was paying attention. However, the White House chief of staff seemed distinctly unimpressed with her colleagues in the area of law enforcement:
In February, [attorney general Pam] Bondi gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House, including Liz Wheeler, Jessica Reed Kraus, Rogan O’Handley, and Chaya Raichik. The binders turned out to contain nothing but old information. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “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.” . . .
[FBI director] Kash Patel has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”
Again, Bondi and Patel probably don’t like reading these remarks by Wiles, but her description of these officials’ actions is accurate, and this is hardly unfair or undeserved criticism.
Then there’s Wiles’s correction of a false accusation from the current president against a former president:
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”
I take a back seat to no one when it comes to criticizing Bill Clinton, but I think we should criticize the creepy lecherous hound dog for what he actually did, which is bad enough. (Trump is likely misremembering the reporting that “flight logs record that the former president took at least 26 trips aboard Epstein’s plane.” You know, the one nicknamed “the Lolita Express.”)
I don’t think Wiles’s comment about Trump having “an alcoholic’s personality” is all that significant. She’s not saying he’s an alcoholic; as far as anyone knows, Trump doesn’t drink, and in a world where Trump has been accused of just about everything, no one has accused him of drinking excessively:
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Wiles is also quoted as saying that Vice President JD Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Credit Vance for a good, funny response during an appearance outside Allentown, Pa.: “I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.”
All in all, Wiles’s comments themselves are not all that controversial. Her decision to grant these on-the-record interviews — eleven! — is. But President Trump seems to have absolute faith in her, so the fallout from this profile piece is likely to be minimal.
ADDENDUM: I see quite a few readers had something to say about yesterday’s edition of the newsletter, which called out President Trump for his appalling and unhinged series of comments about the murdered Rob Reiner.
Several readers objected to the opening sentence, “The president of the United States is a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer,” and contended it was unfair. Okay, readers, I see your point. After all, Jeffrey Dahmer expressed regret for what he did, although many questioned the sincerity of those statements. I suspect we will never see Trump express regret for contending that the Reiners were murdered “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
I’m just glad that so many of you could find the true villain in this story: Me.