US President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, who is known for working behind the scenes, has suddenly found himself in the media spotlight after a candid interview with Vanity Fair magazine sparked controversy.
In the interview, Susie Wiles reportedly described President Trump as an “alcoholic personality,” tech mogul Elon Musk as a “weird, odd duck” and Vice President J.D. Vance as a “conspiracy theorist.”
Mr. Wiles criticized the two-part Vanity Fair article published Tuesday, calling it a “hit piece.”
Trump is standing by an aide he calls the “Ice Maiden,” and White House press secretary Caroline Levitt said “the entire administration … is completely united in her support.”
Let’s take a closer look at who Wiles is and what the report says.
What is the basis for the Vanity Fair article?
Vanity Fair published a two-part report on the second Trump administration, which took office in January. The report is based on interviews with Wiles over the past year by American documentary filmmaker and journalist Chris Whipple.
Whipple, who conducted 11 recorded interviews with Mr. Wiles, wrote that Mr. Wiles chronicled the first year of President Trump’s second term “in the midst of each moment of crisis.”
The first of these interviews took place on January 11, one week before President Trump’s inauguration.
Who is Susie Wiles?
Mr. Wiles, 68, is the White House chief of staff. She is the first woman ever to hold this position.
In 2015, Mr. Wiles was invited to Trump Tower in New York to meet Mr. Trump, who was making the transition from real estate developer to presidential candidate.
In a Vanity Fair article, Whipple described her as “the most powerful person in President Trump’s White House, other than the president himself.”
Whipple quoted an anonymous former Republican leader as saying, “So many important decisions are being made at the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, Susie is the only force that can direct or guide that whim.”
Mr. Wiles rose from a Capitol Hill intern to a top Republican strategist in the 1970s. At age 23, she took a job as a scheduler in the White House during Republican Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Wiles’ childhood was difficult. Her father, Pat Summerall, was a famous American football announcer and an alcoholic. According to an article in Vanity Fair, she grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and Saddle River, New Jersey.
What did Wiles say about Trump and his inner circle?
Here’s what Wiles told Vanity Fair about Trump and his aides, and how some of his aides have reacted.
playing cards
Wiles said he never doubted that Trump would win the November 2024 presidential election, Vanity Fair reported.
She added that she intended to present the nation with a “new Trump” and even told House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries before Trump’s inauguration that she would see a different side of Trump in a second term. Trump, she said, would be more calm and impatient.
“I never saw him throw anything, I never saw him scream. I didn’t see any of the really horrible behavior that people have talked about and that I actually experienced years ago,” Whipple quoted Wiles as saying in the article.
Mr. Wiles said that although Mr. Trump is a teetotaler, Mr. Trump has an “alcoholic personality” and “believes there is nothing he can’t do. Nothing, nothing.”
Mr. Trump defended Mr. Wiles in an interview with the New York Post published Tuesday.
Regarding his comments about alcoholism, President Trump said, “What she meant was that I don’t drink alcohol, so everyone knows that, but I’ve often said that if I did I would very likely become an alcoholic. I’ve said that about myself many times, and I do. I’m a very possessive person.”
President Trump said of Whipple’s report, “I haven’t read it, I haven’t read Vanity Fair, but (Wiles) did a great job.”
The New York Post quoted President Trump as saying, “From what I’ve heard, I think the facts were wrong. He was a very misguided interviewer and intentionally misled.”
Leavitt also endorsed Wiles during a Fox News appearance on Tuesday.
“I would like to echo the words of my boss, Susie Wiles, who served under the greatest president in our nation’s history and was the greatest chief of staff in our nation’s history,” Levitt said. “Unfortunately, this was yet another attempt at fake news by a reporter who acted dishonestly and actually took the Secretary’s words out of context.
“The reporter omitted all the positive things Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House.”
JD Vance
Wiles said the vice president went from opposing President Trump primarily for political reasons to fully supporting him. She also said that Vance had been into conspiracy theories for about 10 years.
Mr. Vance, who also said he had not read the Vanity Fair article, endorsed Mr. Wiles in a speech in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley on Tuesday.
“You know why I really love Susie Wiles? Because Susie is who she is in front of the president, and she’s the same person without him,” Vance said.
“I have never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States, which is why she is the best White House chief of staff the president could ask for,” he said.
Elon Musk
Wiles also weighed in on billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of private space exploration company SpaceX and electric car company Tesla.
During the first months of President Trump’s second term, Musk worked as a close aide, overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Trump created. The department was intended to reduce U.S. government bureaucracy. DOGE became known for carrying out mass layoffs of federal employees and abruptly shutting down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Wiles described Musk as a “solo actor” and told Whipple, “The challenge with Elon is coming with him.”
“He’s an avowed ketamine user. And during the day he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB (Executive Office Building). And he’s a weird, quirky duck, which I think geniuses are like. You know, no references, but he’s his own person,” Wiles said in a Vanity Fair article.
Musk has not publicly responded to the article. In March, he posted on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), which he acquired in 2022, in response to a video of him helping Wiles with a bag: “I’m a huge fan of Susie Wiles.”
When President Trump named Wiles as his chief of staff after winning the November 2024 election, Musk posted a screenshot of the news about the announcement and wrote, “Susie Wiles is amazing.”
pam bondi
In the interview, Wiles also criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein file. The wealthy convicted pedophile died by suicide in a Manhattan prison in 2019. Epstein was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
But conspiracy theorists claim he may have been killed because he kept a secret client list of powerful people, including politicians who allegedly abused underage girls. In July, the U.S. Department of Justice, which Mr. Bondi heads, concluded that Mr. Epstein had no client list.
The Justice Department memo was seen as a step back from a narrative once promoted by members of the Trump administration, infuriating right-wing conspiracy theorists and some of the US president’s allies.
When asked about Epstein’s alleged client list in an interview with Fox News in February, Bondi said, “It’s sitting on my desk right now for review.”
That same month, political commentators and far-right influencers were invited to the White House and presented with documents known as “The Epstein File: Phase 1.” Bondi released these documents, but they contained nothing revealing about the Epstein affair.
Mr. Whipple wrote that Mr. Wiles said that Mr. Bondy had “completely missed the mark,” understanding that the conservative influencers he had invited to the White House were precisely the audience most interested in the document.
Wiles was quoted as saying that Bondi gave the influencers “a binder full of emptiness.” “There’s no client list, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t on her desk,” Wiles said.
What did Wiles think about other issues?
President Trump’s January 6th pardon
On January 6, 2021, thousands of rioters, fueled by false claims that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.
More than 2,000 people invaded the U.S. Capitol, vandalizing offices and clashing with police, leaving at least five people dead and many injured.
About 1,270 people were convicted of federal crimes related to the riot, with prison sentences ranging from a few years to more than 20 years for leaders of far-right groups.
On the day of his second inauguration, President Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 people convicted or indicted for the riot, calling the treatment “outrageous.”
Mr. Wiles told Mr. Whipple that he doubted President Trump would pardon all 1,500 people.
She was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair: “I said, ‘I’m with the people who did random acts, or who didn’t commit any acts of violence. And the FBI did such a great job that we certainly know what everyone did.'”
He added that Trump argued that even violent criminals are treated unfairly.
USAID closed
Wiles said she was “appalled” when she learned USAID was shutting down.
“I think anyone who has looked at government and looked at USAID believes, as I do, that USAID is doing a very good job,” Whipple quoted her as saying.
Attack on suspected drug smuggling ship
Since September, U.S. military attacks on more than 20 ships in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 80 people. The Trump administration claimed, without evidence, that the ships belonged to drug cartels and were carrying drugs. He also accused Venezuela’s leftist government of involvement in drug trafficking.
“Every time we knock out a boat, we save 25,000 people,” Trump claimed in an interview with Politico published last week.
Whipple quoted Wiles as saying, “As the president has said many times, he believes in tough penalties for drug traffickers. … They are not fishing boats as some have claimed.
“The president says 25,000. I don’t know what that number is, but he thinks of that number as lives saved, not people killed.”
Wiles also asserted that President Trump intends to continue bombing alleged drug smuggling ships off the coast of Venezuela until the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, cries out, “Uncle.”
How did Wiles react to the Vanity Fair article?
Wiles criticized the Vanity Fair article, calling it a “dishonestly constructed hit piece.”
“The article published early this morning is a hit piece that disingenuously framed me and the most accomplished president, White House staff, and Cabinet members in history,” she wrote in Tuesday’s X.
“Important context was ignored and much of what I and others said about the team and the president was left out of the story. After reading it, I believe this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic negative narrative about the president and our team,” she added.
She also claimed that President Trump accomplished more in the 11 months of his second term than any president in the past eight years.
