8 unhinged Donald Trump moments as West Wing left in chaos by kamikaze interview
Chief of Staff Susie Wiles spending most of the year slagging off Trump’s team to a magazine reporter (only to be shocked when he published her comments) was on nobody’s bingo card. And there were some real surprises buried in the Vanity Fair profile
When Donald Trump picked Susie Wiles to be his chief of staff, the word was she was a “stone cold killer”. She’d run the West Wing the same way she ran the 2024 campaign. Always in the background, never chasing the limelight, and standing guard at the door of the Oval Office batting away the clown car of grifters and crazies always demanding Trump’s ear. If you told me in January that she would spend most of the year casually chatting to a reporter from a glossy magazine on the record, saying all kinds of unflattering things about the administration, and that she and her staff would be talked into posing for some of the weirdest and least glamorous photographs ever taken of a political operator, I’d have said you were mad. Wiles being the first crack was on nobody’s bingo card, and yet here we are.
Meanwhile in Trumpworld
- Susie Wiles in SHOCK that reporter wrote down and published things she told him
- Holy hell, those photos
- Four more years…and $250m
- He genuinely thinks stealth planes are invisible
- Is he planning to demolish more things?
Here’s what you need to know
1. Top Trump aide surprised that words she said to reporter were written down and published
For an administration as vocally suspicious of the legacy media, it clearly didn’t take much to break Wiles and her top team. She gave ELEVEN interviews to Chris Whipple, all on the record, all on tape. Most politicians moderate what they have to say to a reporter, even if they’re talking on background. Moreover, most politicians – especially when they’re operating on Wiles’ level – keep their own recordings of the interviews. It seems very much like Susie Wiles did neither of these things in any of her conversations with Whipple.
2. Here’s what she said about Donald Trump in the wild profile
He has an “alcoholic’s personality”. He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
“When there’s an opportunity” to take retribution against his political enemies, “he will go for it.”
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
Going after New York Attorney General Letitia James – who prosecuted him – is Trump’s “one retribution”, and he went after her because “she had a half a billion dollars of his money.” (All of Trump’s attempts to indict James have been, so far, unsuccessful).
Trump is in the “Epstein files”. “And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful…[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.”
On Trump appearing to fall asleep in meetings: “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”
3. And here’s who else she slagged off and how…
JD Vance: He’s been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade”, and his conversion from calling Trump “America’s Hitler” to being his running mate was “sort of political”.
Elon Musk: “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Also Elon Musk: “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Again, Elon Musk, after he tweeted about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin and Mao: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi (On her handling of the Epstein files): “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this. 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.”
4. Also, just look at those photos…
The group shots of the “junkyard dogs” in the West Wing could not scream “evil reboot of LA Law” more if they were printed on a pair of shoulder pads and buried in a mound of cocaine.
But the solo headshots are something else.
During the photoshoot for the piece, JD Vance reportedly told the photographer: “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really sh**ty compared to me. And $1,000 if it’s Marco”.
JD, it’s time to cough up, because while he looks pretty craggy in the pictures that go with the profile, he looks by far the least awful out of all of them. Particular highlights are the black and white images of a glassy-eyed Stephen Miller looking like a cross between Voldemort and a sad shark, Marco Rubio looking like one of the weary salesmen from Glengarry Glenn Ross and holy hell, this picture of Karoline Leavitt.
5. Trump genuinely thinks stealth aircraft are invisible
There’s a few things about Donald Trump that are they’re so weird they feel like they must be some kind of glitch. Like when he talks for ages about how other countries “emptied out their insane asylums” into the US, and after a while it becomes clear that he doesn’t understand the difference between claiming asylum and insane asylums.
Well, here’s another one of those. He appears to legit think stealth aircraft can turn invisible.
“The only time anybody could see those planes was when those bomb chutes open up,” he said last night at a Hanukkah reception. “Because it becomes totally un-stealth. You’re going in, you go like this. And as soon as it goes like this, for some reason the plane is totally visible. Not good. And I watched it happening. I watched it go bing bing”
6. Trump could be planning to demolish even more things
Something from the Wiles profile that hasn’t been widely picked up is the indication that Trump isn’t going to stop at demolishing the East Wing of the White House.
Asked if she was surprised at the outrage at the demolition, she said: “Oh, no. And I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
And asked if he was planning more, undisclosed renovations, she said: “I’m not telling.”
7. Trump was ‘ticked’ about Ghislaine Maxwell being moved to a cushier prison
Wiles also said Trump had been “ticked” about Ghislaine Maxwell moving to a cushier prison after her little chat with Todd Blanche.
According to Wiles, the chat was at the suggestion of Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, now deputy Attorney General.
Trump, she sad was “ticked” about the move. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”
8. One of his biggest donors promised him more cash if he runs again
At the Hanukkah event, Trump invited megadonor Miriam Adelson, who along with her late husband Sheldon bankrolled his campaign to the tune of $250 million, up on stage for a few words.
And he told the crowd she had offered him the same amount if he ran for a third term. Trump has repeatedly hinted that he’d stay on after his second term expires, something explicitly outlawed by the 22nd Amendment. But then, having your supporters mount an attempted coup to prevent the certification of election results is also illegal, and he got away with that, so.
Adelson said she’d spoken with lawyer Alan Dershowitz about the “legal thing about four more years.”
“Alan, I agree with you,” she said, telling the President: “So, we can do it, think about it.”
Those present began to chant “four more years”, after which Adelson whispered something in his ear.
“”She said, ‘Think about it, I’ll give you another $250 million,'” Trump said.
