\n<\/p>\n
Susie Wiles styles herself as a White House chief of staff who avoids being in the headlines. When cameras come into the Oval Office, she tends to sit just out of frame. She rarely gives interviews. Unlike her predecessors, she seldom tries to curb President Donald Trump\u2019s impulses. She has been lauded in Trump world for instilling a sense of discipline in a chaotic realm, and for providing steady leadership during both Trump\u2019s historic political comeback and the steamrolling start to his second term.<\/p>\n
Well then! That\u2019s sure over now.<\/p>\n
Wiles committed the cardinal sin for a White House staffer\u2014particularly a staffer for this White House\u2014by becoming the news herself with the publication today of a two-part Vanity Fair<\/em> story in which she offered stunningly forthright assessments of the president and much of his senior staff. Her blunt candor (she said that Trump has an \u201calcoholic\u2019s personality\u201d and that Elon Musk is \u201can avowed ketamine\u201d user) was especially surprising because Wiles has presided over a (relatively) on-message White House and is usually so careful herself. The timing is also far from ideal for a West Wing already dealing with a series of GOP electoral defeats, the fallout from Trump repeatedly declaring the nation\u2019s affordability crisis a hoax, and then, yesterday, the president blaming the beloved filmmaker Rob Reiner for his own murder.<\/p>\n Steve Bannon got excommunicated from Trump world\u2014at least for a while\u2014during the president\u2019s first term after his own frank on-the-record exchange with a journalist. But this time, there was no firing, no public meltdown. Instead, Trump shrugged it off. Cabinet members mobilized to defend Wiles. Her job seems safe, at least for now. To many in Trump\u2019s orbit, the White House\u2019s response is a telling reflection of how indispensable she is to the president.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was a loyal fighter for him from the moment she came on board,\u201d Donald Trump Jr. posted on social media today. \u201cWhen things were tough and other supposed friends left my dad like a bunch of rats, Susie stood by his side.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, her words were bracing. Often, senior administration officials talk to reporters on background\u2014offering quotes without their names attached\u2014so that they can speak honestly without deviating from the official White House message or alienating the president. But Wiles spoke on the record, and she appeared to hold little back. She revealed that Trump is indeed hoping to use military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats to force that country\u2019s leader out of power. She said that Vice President J. D. Vance has been \u201ca conspiracy theorist for a decade\u201d and that Russell Vought, the budget director, is \u201ca right-wing absolute zealot.\u201d And she tore into Musk, the tech billionaire who spent months destroying the federal bureaucracy, as \u201can odd, odd duck.\u201d<\/p>\n Wiles\u2019s cooperation with the author Chris Whipple was no secret. She talked with Whipple 11 times over the past year and sat with him in the chief of staff\u2019s office, which occupies a prized perch in the West Wing just steps from the Oval Office. Several other senior staffers\u2014including Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt\u2014also spoke with Whipple and posed for glossy photographs. (Vanity Fair<\/em> ran several extreme-close-up shots, not all of them flattering.) A few Trump allies told us that they suspected that Wiles had let her guard down with Whipple, who\u2019d written a definitive history on modern White House chiefs of staff, and that the Trump aides had joined the long list of Washington staffers over the years who had succumbed to the lure of a glamorous Vanity Fair<\/em> photo shoot. Despite Trump\u2019s constant bashing of legacy media, he has spent a lifetime longing for their coverage and approval.<\/p>\n Wiles\u2019s comments were so unexpected\u2014and so, um, honest\u2014that the story sparked frenzied speculation across Washington: Did Wiles think she was off the record? Was she trying to record her version of events for the history books? Was she planning to resign? After the story broke, Wiles called around to her West Wing colleagues in an attempt at damage control, insisting that her quotes had been taken out of context, aides told us. She told The New York Times<\/em> that she took issue with the quotes attributed to her about Musk\u2019s drug use, saying, \u201cThat\u2019s ridiculous\u201d and \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have said it and I wouldn\u2019t know.\u201d But the newspaper reported that Whipple had played the recording of Wiles\u2019s comments confirming that, yes, she had indeed said what he\u2019d written. (Wiles also told Whipple that she didn\u2019t have firsthand knowledge of Musk\u2019s drug use; the tech billionaire had previously admitted to using ketamine.)<\/p>\n Trump, in making his support for Wiles clear, went so far as to confirm in an interview with the New York Post<\/em> her assessment that he has \u201can alcoholic\u2019s personality.\u201d Wiles had told Vanity Fair<\/em> that Trump operates with \u201ca view that there\u2019s nothing he can\u2019t do,\u201d like her own father, the NFL legend Pat Summerall, who had a drinking problem. Trump does not drink and looks down on those who do, but he claimed not to have been bothered by that comparison. If he did imbibe, he said, \u201cI\u2019d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It\u2019s a very possessive personality.\u201d (When Trump first met Wiles, then a Florida political operative, he loved that she was Summerall\u2019s daughter; many of the president\u2019s favorite cultural touchstones date from the 1980s, the decade in which Summerall and John Madden teamed up to become the NFL\u2019s signature TV-broadcast team.)<\/p>\n In a social-media statement posted soon after the story\u2019s publication, Wiles called it \u201ca disingenuously framed hit piece.\u201d Leavitt did as well, writing that \u201cPresident Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie.\u201d And then she directed top Trump officials to fan out on social media to defend Wiles; agency heads such as Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Doug Burgum were among the nearly two dozen senior officials who posted praise for the chief of staff. The vice president, delivering a speech in Allentown, Pennsylvania, even laughingly acknowledged that he could, in fact, be a conspiracy theorist.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have our disagreements,\u201d Vance said of Wiles. \u201cWe agree on much more than we disagree, but I\u2019ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States, and that makes you the best White House chief of staff that I think the president could ask for.\u201d<\/p>\n The show of force underscored Wiles\u2019s importance to Trump, who churned through four chiefs of staff during his first term. After Trump left office in disgrace in early 2021, Wiles agreed to coordinate his fundraising efforts and political activity. A year later, she took the helm of his reelection campaign, which, at the time, seemed like a long-shot bid. She, along with the GOP consultant Chris LaCivita, put together a far more professional operation than in any previous Trump campaign, and cut down on the staff infighting and leaking that defined his two earlier runs. She publicly claimed that she never tried to control Trump, but she did, on occasion, get him to back away from outlandish ideas. In a moment famous in Trump\u2019s circles, Wiles stepped into the candidate\u2019s line of sight during a particularly dark and rambling Pennsylvania rally in the campaign\u2019s final week and simply glared at him. The unspoken message: Stop it, and move on<\/em>. Trump eventually did. The president is deeply fond of her, staffers told us, and once praised her as the \u201cmost powerful person in the world\u201d while also, oddly, at times calling her \u201cSusie Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n The circle of power in the West Wing is small\u2014Vance, Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a few others\u2014and Wiles, in many ways, wields the most influence. She streamlined processes, cracked down on talking to the press, and demanded loyalty from the staff. Wiles largely reduced the chaos, dysfunction, and turnover that permeated Trump\u2019s first term and was able to help secure passage of a sweeping tax bill and a dramatic expansion of executive power.<\/p>\n She revealed to Vanity Fair<\/em> a number of occasions when Trump ignored her advice. She said that she\u2019d tried to persuade him not to pardon the most violent January 6, 2021, rioters and urged him to hold off on announcing his sweeping tariffs plan. She openly criticized the way Musk slashed international-aid programs. She admitted that some of the prosecutions brought by the Department of Justice directly stemmed from Trump\u2019s desire for revenge. And she said that Trump broke their \u201cloose agreement\u201d to end his \u201cscore settling\u201d against political enemies that she\u2019d feared would distract from his agenda after the first 90 days.<\/p>\n Now Wiles herself has become the latest in a string of distractions. The momentum that she helped engineer stalled out this summer when the GOP legislation proved unpopular and Jeffrey Epstein returned to the headlines. Since then, rising prices and a sense that Trump has overreached in expanding his executive power have led to a string of Democratic wins at the ballot box and a fear among Republicans that the president has lost touch with the promises that returned him to the White House. And yesterday, even some in the president\u2019s own party denounced his assertion that Reiner was killed alongside his wife because he was a Trump critic. (Prosecutors have said that the couple\u2019s son, who has spoken openly about his struggles with drug addiction, will be charged with their murder.)<\/p>\n Although Trump announced a speech to the nation tomorrow night that is meant to recap a year of accomplishments, some in the West Wing privately admit that a revised approach to governing\u2014including possible staffing changes\u2014could be on the horizon in the new year. Wiles has said that she told Trump that he needs to start campaigning again. And the vice president volunteered his own idea for a course correction.<\/p>\n \u201cIf any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair<\/em> article,\u201d Vance said in Pennsylvania, \u201cI hope that the lesson is that we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream-media outlets.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael Scherer contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Susie Wiles styles herself as a White House chief of staff who avoids being in the headlines. When cameras come into the Oval Office, she tends to sit just out of frame. She rarely gives interviews. Unlike her predecessors, she seldom tries to curb President Donald Trump\u2019s impulses. She has been lauded in Trump world<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[20820,81,20821],"class_list":{"0":"post-37796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-susie","9":"tag-trump","10":"tag-wiles"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}