If I were Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, I wouldn’t be too upset about the two-part interview with Vanity Fair which she has gone out of her way to distance herself from. It was based on 11 interviews with the magazine’s Chris Whipple, whom she trusted since they knew each other from church. Well, just goes to show, you can’t trust even your fellow parishioners. In fact it’s not the quotes from the interview that do the most damage; it’s photographer Chris Anderson’s pictures of the Trump team, including Wiles, which make them all look mad as hatters. This may or may not be the case, but you can’t imagine the magazine taking this approach with, say, with Kamilla Harris.
Susie Wiles says on X that Vanity Fair disregarded “significant context” in framing the interview to create “an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative” about the administration. Certainly the way the interview is presented isn’t that of a friend of the president. But she hasn’t disputed any of the quotes. Trump, for his part, declares that she had been “deceived” by the writer.
Susie Wiles: Key quotes from Vanity Fair interview
On Ukraine, Wiles says that Donald Trump is not President Putin’s dupe: “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” – Ukraine. She observes that “on the phone calls that we’ve had with Putin, it’s been very mixed. Some of them have been friendly and some of them not.”
On a possible Trump third term: Wiles doesn’t think he will try for a third term, however much fun he is having in this one. She has read the 22nd amendment to the constitution and she thinks that prohibition is unequivocal: “he knows he can’t run again”.
On Elon Musk: “a complete solo actor … an odd, odd duck”
On Gaza: Wiles is receptive to the views of young people about Gaza and their revulsion at the president’s apparently wholehearted embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump had previously called him a “war hero”—a remark partially aimed at Israelis. “I’m not sure he fully realizes,” she said “that there’s an audience here that doesn’t love it.”
On JD Vance’s conversion from Trump critic to Trump loyalist: ““His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political [than Marco Rubio].”
On whether Trump falls asleep in cabinet meetings: “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”
On Trump saying “Quiet, piggy!” to a woman reporter from Bloomberg, she says, “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
On the Epstein Files: “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” As for Clinton, “The president was wrong about that.”
Susie Wiles is one of those people you won’t have heard about because she likes it that way. In any televised White House interviews, she’s off camera, sitting at just the point where the TV equipment gets pushed in her face. In one telling quote by her deputy, she is described as not wanting to push herself forward, which is, he says, just as well because in that testosterone-driven environment, there isn’t room for any more egos. She takes the view that her job isn’t to direct Trump, but to put his programme into effect because he has a democratic mandate. She is, in short, that most devastatingly effective force in any organisation, an intelligent, mature woman without domestic commitments (“I’m divorced; my kids are grown”) who does not seek to promote herself but to ensure that the boss gets things done, insofar as that is right and feasible.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino watch as US President Donald Trump speaks to journalists (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
She is the woman whose role is to tell Trump the truth, the Thomas More to his Henry VIII (though let’s not take that analogy too far). Once, when he complimented her, she responded by paraphrasing her predecessor, James Baker: “Sir, remember I am chief of staff; I am not chief of you”. Whipple told her of one bigwig’s view that “we’ve never had a president who governs so much by whim and who depends so much on one person: you.” To which Wiles replied, “Oh, good Lord. Trump doesn’t depend on anybody.”
That, in fact, is why we can all feel a little reassured by this interview. Notwithstanding her disclaimer, it shows that Trump deals daily with a woman who may not be able to prevent bad policies getting through – the instantaneous obliteration of the US aid programme, for instance, which she says no one thought a good idea – but who is in a position to tell the boss exactly what she thinks.
No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody
Susie Wiles
She is convinced by some controversial policies – blowing up boats in the Caribbean which the administration considers are shipping drugs to the US – but was critical of others, such as the decision to close down US Aid abruptly. “ No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
It is clear that she does say what she thinks. She recalls that once, when he was running for Florida, Trump subjected her to a foul mouthed tirade, to which she said, “You know Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice”. He never did that again.
There are certainly some devastating insights in the interview. The most explosive, to my mind, is her saying that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality” and governs with the mindset that “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing”. And as the daughter of an alcoholic, she knows the type.
In fact, what we get from this account isn’t a different Trump from the norm, but a more rounded Trump. And behind the president there is Wiles, a woman who is able to stand up to him and who is nobody’s fool. On the Epstein files, for instance, she says didn’t know if Epstein was a CIA man or a Mossad man, but she is able to say about her boss’s condemnation of Bill Clinton and Epstein, “he was wrong about that”. She is a church-going Episcopalian who hardly ever swears and rarely raises her voice, but is patently sane, and decent. That’s good to know.
Anyone dealing with the president should pore over this interview. Some of the revelations are below. And there is one that should cheer the rest of us up: she thinks that Trump is in genuinely a peacemaker, at least in his second term. “I cannot overstate how much his ongoing motivation is to stop the killing… I think the country is beginning to see that he’s proud to be an agent of peace.”
That, I say, is important. Thank you, Mrs Wiles: it’s the sort of Christmas message we want to hear.
