Oh, how this town loves palace intrigue, especially if it centers on the Trump White House. And there was some heading into this anticipated Vanity Fair interview with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. No doubt, she’s one of Trump’s most trusted and valuable advisers, a no-brainer for arguably the second most powerful office in the land, but not all White House COS are equal. See John Kelly. Then, RealClearInvestigations’ Paul Sperry dropped a tweet teasing a significant overhaul of the president’s top staff. No way they’re firing Wiles. She’s someone who, if she were to leave, would be on her own accord.
Wiles offered brutal assessments of some of the president’s top officials, including figures we’ve already known about, like Elon Musk and Pam Bondi. It also dives into the “loose agreement” Trump and Wiles struck before the start of his second presidency: it would be a revenge tour, except for the first 90 days. She appears to be okay with Trump putting the screws to New York Attorney General Letitia James. There’s still chaos as there is with any administration, but it’s more manageable, which Wiles credits to growing up with an alcoholic father, the famed late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall. She’s used to exaggerated personalities. While Kelly aimed to constrain Trump, like trying to tame a wild horse, Wiles doesn’t do that, “she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far,” wrote the New York Times.
But let’s not read too much into this—this interview and its assessments were approved. This isn’t some off-the-reservation rebellion from Wiles. There are too many collaborations for it to be some coordinated smear job on the president. Also, to the shock of no one, Wiles also said the interview took a great many things out of context:
Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff, responds to Vanity Fair article, saying context was disregarded and much of what she said about the team was left out https://t.co/vBaZnVK60a
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) December 16, 2025
🚨 EPIC! This goes hard
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 16, 2025
Stephen Miller, James Blair, Susie Wiles, Dan Scavino, Marco Rubio, JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt
ALL-STAR TEAM! pic.twitter.com/GYYGpDWHYC
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 would later comment to the Times, downplaying Trump’s motivation for retribution, saying, “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.”
Wiles has expressed some dissatisfaction with how the mass deportations are going, and the optics of federal agents deporting mothers and the like. She’s also read the Epstein Files well before Congress passed a resolution allowing the Justice Department to release them. She acknowledged that Trump is in them, along with the rest of the elite and the wealthy. This isn’t news, but notice how all the latest developments from these documents involve Democrats, and the story has since gone under the radar. Wiles added that Attorney General Pam Bondi whiffed big league handling this story, and she did:
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.”
As for successors to the Trump movement in politics, are Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance heading for a duel? Sure, Rubio is a team player, and as Wiles said, he got there regarding MAGA. Will it happen again with Vance? The vice president seems to know a potential rival was in the room:
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.
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.
— Susie Wiles (@SusieWiles) December 16, 2025
Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the…
HOLY CRAP! JD Vance just COOKED Vanity Fair and DEBUNKED the BS article they published about Susie Wiles.
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) December 16, 2025
"Of course [I] have heard about it... Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true."
"I believed in the conspiracy… pic.twitter.com/uQosioznOE
.@PressSec: President Trump "has been able to accomplish so much because of his leadership and his tenacity, but also because of @SusieWiles's leadership and her ability to effectuate his agenda." pic.twitter.com/aj99GuWq26
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 16, 2025
Why do this? Well, maybe to show once again how the mainstream media can't cover this White House properly on any level.
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