Comments made by Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles in a Vanity Fair article have raised eyebrows, as ITV News US Correspondent Dan Rivers reports
Susie Wiles, US President Donald Trump’s unstated but highly influential chief of staff, has appeared to criticise him and many members of his administration in a wide-ranging series of interviews with Vanity Fair.
Wiles has been a close ally of Trump for years and has been seen as central to the success of both the president’s 2024 election campaign and his second administration.
Trump has described her as the “most powerful woman in the world,” with commentators saying her influence has kept the president under control and significantly reduced the staff turnover, something which plagued his first administration.
Viewed as a quiet, calculating and strategic woman, the wide-ranging interview published by Vanity Fair on Tuesday has taken many of Trump’s allies by surprise.
She criticised Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and offered an unvarnished take on her boss, going as far as comparing his behaviour to an alcoholic despite Trump’s well-known teetotalism.
The magazine’s two-part profile of Wiles immediately sent shock waves through Washington while sending the West Wing into damage control.
She said the president had an “alcoholic’s personality,” described Vice President JD Vance as a calculating “conspiracy theorist”, and Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr as “quirky Bobby.”
The first woman to ever hold her current post, Wiles pushed back on what she described as a “hit piece” that lacked context.
Wiles disparaged the article as a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” accusing Vanity Fair of disregarding “significant context” in her statements.
But neither she, nor other White House officials who came to her defence, disputed any details in the profile.
The Vanity Fair story was based on more than 10 interviews with author Chris Whipple and will be part of a book he is writing on the role of the US president’s chief of staff.
Some of her harshest criticisms were directed at Bondi, saying she “completely whiffed” in her handling of the Epstein files.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi giving binders of materials on the case to a group of conservative influencers early into Trump’s second term.
“First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
On Trump, she said he governs with “a view 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,” she said. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
She also admitted there “may be an element of” retribution in the prosecutions against Trump’s political opponents.
“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive,” she said in response to a question about the failed prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey. “I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.”
“I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it,” she added.
On tech billionaire and former Trump ally Elon Musk, Wiles said he is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are.” His action to dismantle the US Agency for International Development, however, left her “aghast.”
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