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Posted on 12/16/2025 7:34:33 AM PST by Miami Rebel
President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles offered a remarkably candid window into a presidency she described, repeatedly, as driven by impulse and a widening view of executive power, in a blockbuster Vanity Fair portrait built around months of exclusive on-the-record conversations.
Wiles may be the most powerful figure in Trump’s West Wing besides Trump himself, but her role is exercised less as a brake than as a gearbox, translating the president’s instinct into policy, and urging everyone else to fall into line.
“I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch,” Wiles said. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
Throughout the two-part article, Wiles was unusually free with labels for the people closest to Trump. Vice President JD Vance’s political transformation from calling Trump “Hitler” to becoming his partner, she said, has been “sort of political,” as she jibed he’s been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, Project 2025 co-author and architect behind many civil service cuts, was branded “a right-wing absolute zealot.” Former First Buddy Elon Musk, she said, was “a complete solo actor” and an “avowed ketamine” user, an “odd duck” whose early scorched-earth DOGE cuts to USAID she admitted left her “aghast.” Meanwhile, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was hit with “quirky Bobby,” although she defended his changes to Health and Human Services. Having been instrumental to their selection, however, she complimented the team as “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.”
The president himself was not spared the sharp analysis either.
Wiles told Vanity Fair she sees Trump through the lens of her father, the late Pat Summerall, whom she described as an absentee parent and an alcoholic. She said that experience left her “a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
Her verdict on the president is brutal and brief, that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” She said he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
While she did not deny any of the quotes attributed to her, Wiles lashed out via X hours after publication on Tuesday, arguing the articles was “a disingenuously framed hit piece” designed to make the administration look bad in which “significant context was disregarded.”
The article frames her comments against major policy efforts, which lays out a second-term sequence that often begins with brief internal dissent to Trump’s broad edicts, then total institutional alignment.
She admitted that DOGE’s wrecking ball approach to USAID, shutting the agency down first before dismantling programs, was her first crisis and that despite Trump’s order to spare some essential programs, Musk pushed forward. She clashed with Musk on the issue, she said, but admitted when it came to implementation, the president was unaware of the cleanup.
“The president doesn’t know and never will,” she said. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Perhaps the sharpest example of Wiles’s limits is a recounting of the administration’s approach to January 6. On day one, Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted over the Capitol attack, including violent offenders. Wiles told Vanity Fair that she raised objections at the time, asking whether Trump really wanted to pardon them all.
“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ”
But Wiles told the outlet Trump insisted the offenders had been treated unfairly and she ultimately moved with him and “sort of got on board.”
“There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said, equal parts shrug and confession. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
Likewise, on tariffs, she described “huge disagreement” internally before insisting the team fall in line with Trump’s instincts.
Of the rollout, she mused it was all a form of “thinking out loud” before explaining how she told staff to get behind it.
“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.”
“It’s been more painful than I expected,” Wiles relayed.
On immigration, Wiles admitted process failures – “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation” – and urged caution: “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.”
Yet she was also unable to explain high-profile cases that Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple confronted her on, including U.S. citizen children deported with their mothers, including one small child with cancer.
“It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”
Throughout the piece in conversation with Vanity Fair, Wiles lays out a second term governed by a president following instincts then enforced by loyalists where the consequences are absorbed by institutions and above all by her, the woman trying to “facilitate his vision” while insisting she’s not there to enable it.
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"While she did not deny any of the quotes attributed to her, Wiles lashed out via X hours after publication on Tuesday, arguing the articles was 'a disingenuously framed hit piece” designed to make the administration look bad in which “significant context was disregarded.'”
So she didn't deny any of the quotations.
Elsewhere in the Vanity Fair piece, she tore after Bondi:
"I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles told Whipple, adding that they were “binders full of nothingness.”
There's a link to that part of the story on the Mediaite site too. It doesn't bode well for Bondi's job prospects.
Wiles also addressed Bondi’s insistence during a Fox News interview in February that Epstein’s client list was “on my desk right now,” a claim that was later debunked by an FBI report that stated no such document existed.
“And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk,” Wiles told Whipple. “There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
By the same token, one has to question Wiles' future.
She would have been better off doing an interview with North Korean media.
:-(
Right. What was the upside? Getting more name recognition?
Just gossip for the political class. She was gullible to believe off the record meant they wouldn’t publish.
Interesting detail: Wiles is Pat Summerall’s daughter. She sees Pres. Trump as a sort of alcoholic, similar in many ways to her father.
I can’t believe she said all these things in the way they’ve reported.
“Off the record”? Where’d you come up with that?
Someone who thinks talking smack about the POTUS and VP and the staff has very poor judgement. Who’s going to trust a big mouth gossip with sensitive access to info?
Why would anyone talk to these publications especially ultra left ones like VF??? Are these people stupid???
She outed herself big time
Susie Wiles is the Bill Barr of Trump’s second term. Trump should have fired this lobbyist in June.
What does that even mean especially since he doesn’t actually drink?
One thing Trump does not tolerate is a difference of opinion. I suspect we’ll be hearing how Susie is stepping down soon to spend more time with her family.
Vanity Fair? I mean the odds were pretty good they were going to do exactly what they did ….being a liberal trash rag.
Elon Musk, she said, was “a complete solo actor” and an “avowed ketamine” user, an “odd duck” whose early scorched-earth DOGE cuts to USAID she admitted left her “aghast.”
She got those DOGE efforts stopped and Elon cut out.
Civil service cuts were the work of “absolute right wing zealot” Russell Vought at OMB.
Fought against the J6 pardons.
Is pretty much against the deportations unless somehow we can prove an additional or special criminal record. Everyone else come on it.
And I didn’t see her mention her prior work running Netanyahu’s last campaign.
She needs to go. She’s way too into her role and thinks SHE was elected. A Chief of Staff is supposed to be a fairly invisible executor of the president’s policy. This old sow thinks her role is to steer policy. Hell, she even got up and gave a speech at Charlie Kirk’s funeral along with Trump, the VP and the Cabinet Secretaries.
And I bet she is the force behind Trump deciding to hide the Epstein files. She’s an anti-MAGA disaster.
I thought Wiles was smarter than this. I have no words.
For all of the positives, Trump has not been able to surround himself with loyal people. This interview serves no one but Democrats - and, of course, Wiles when she embarks on a media bashing tour of Trump after she leaves or is fired.
If she were interested in helping Trump, she’d stop the sleeping at meetings, it’s a bad look.
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