White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is offering an exceptionally candid assessment of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House — and his team leading the charge.
In a compilation of 11 interviews with Vanity Fair released Tuesday, Wiles did not hold back on offering an inside look into Cabinet members and the decision-making process of the White House in moments of crisis.
According to Wiles, Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality,” meaning he operates with the belief that “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
“High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink,” Wiles said as she described her father as an alcoholic. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
Wiles later called the article a “hit piece.”
“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,” Wiles posted on social media.
“The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years.”
“President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt added.
“The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.
The former 2024 Trump campaign adviser — who serves as one of the most powerful people in the White House — also analyzed in the article the president’s Cabinet, saying Vice President JD Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.”
She later added that Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” over her handling of the files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
“So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president,” another former Republican chief told Vanity Fair. “And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie.”
Wiles recounted questioning Trump on several major decisions since he took office — starting with his pardons and commutations for 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants on his first day.
“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,'” Wiles said, noting she “sort of got on board” after Trump argued that violent offenders had been unfairly treated.
After describing tech billionaire Elon Musk, the once head of the government-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as “a complete solo actor” and an “odd duck,” Wiles acknowledged that she was shocked over the shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which served as the world’s leading donor of humanitarian assistance.
“I was initially aghast,” Wiles said. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
In March, Wiles admitted that “we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation” amid Trump’s increased crackdown on immigration. In April, she discouraged Trump from announcing his sweeping tariffs until all of his advisers were fully on board — but he decided to go ahead anyway.
And in August, she said some of Trump’s attempted prosecutions “may look like retribution,” admitting that they had a “loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
“There may be an element of that from time to time,” Wiles said. “Who would blame him? Not me.”
Wiles, however, did not appear frustrated about Trump’s moves to overrule her.
“There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
Wiles also weighed in on the lead up to the looming release of the Epstein files, including the fallout from some of the president’s most ardent supporters. While telling Vanity Fair she has read the records, she said Trump’s name does appear, adding that he “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever — I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”
“The president was wrong about that,” she added about Trump’s attempt to tie Epstein’s criminal activity to former President Bill Clinton.
In the unguarded interview, Wiles went on to reveal that Trump deeply cares about ending wars and saving lives.
“I cannot overstate how much his ongoing motivation is to stop the killing, which is not, I don’t think, where he was in his last term,” she said. “Not that he wanted to kill people necessarily, but stopping the killing wasn’t his first thought. It’s his first and last thought now.”
Shortly after the profile’s publication on Tuesday, Wiles described it as a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history” in a post on X.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she wrote.
“I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
