Much of the political media was chattering about a newly Vanity Fair piece on Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, who not only gave a rare interview to writer Chris Whipple but some very candid assessments of the personalities in Trump 2.0.
The profile accompanied a Vanity Fair photo shoot, from Christopher Anderson, of members of the Trump team, marking full cooperation with a mainstream media outlet of the type that the president often attacks.
In a series of interviews, Wiles talked of growing up with her father, sportscaster Pat Summerall, who was an alcoholic who later got sober.
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say,” Wiles told Vanity Fair. “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.”
Trump does not drink, but Wiles said that he has an “alcoholic’s personality,” an operates with a view that “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
In other parts of her interviews with Whipple, Wiles said that Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” She also said that Elon Musk is an “odd, odd duck,” and referred to his ketamine use.
She also said that she was “aghast” when Musk shut down USAID, the foreign aid organization.
“Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Musk left the White House in May and had a very public falling out with Trump.
Wiles also criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said, per Whipple’s interview. “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.”
But Wiles said that she read through what she referred to as the “Epstein file,” and while Trump is named, “he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
Wiles posted on X on Tuesday, “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.”
