Trump Chief Of Staff Spills Guts In Shocking Interviews

WASHINGTON – One of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers said the nondrinking president has “an alcoholic’s personality,” that he’s in the Epstein files, that the vice president is a “conspiracy theorist” and their budget director is a “right-wing absolute zealot.”

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles made the shockingly candid statements in a series of interviews with Vanity Fair for a pair of articles published Tuesday.

Wiles dished on virtually everything that’s happened this year and apparently regrets how the article turned out, though she did not point to any errors.

“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” Wiles said on social media. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”

In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt praised Wiles without trashing the story.

“Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history,” Leavitt said. “President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie. The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”

The story gives the impression of an exit interview, a retrospective assessment of Wiles’ tenure in the White House. Trump cycled through four chiefs of staff in his first term.

Wiles, daughter of NFL star and famed sportscaster Pat Summerall, came up squarely in the establishment or even what was the liberal wing of the Republican Party in Florida. She worked for John Delaney, the moderate GOP mayor of Jacksonville, and worked on environmental causes. She was known as a no-nonsense, basic blocking-and-tackling political operative when she signed on to Trump’s 2016 Florida campaign and got it back on track to win the state. In 2018, she did the same for a foundering Ron DeSantis campaign, allowing him to win the Governor’s Mansion by the narrowest of margins.

Within months, though, came a falling out that had enormous implications for the country and world. Someone leaked a memo Wiles had written creating a fundraising schedule for DeSantis to pursue after he took office to the Tampa Bay Times. An enraged DeSantis assumed it was Wiles and, in addition to firing her, went out of his way to blacklist her to keep her from finding work in the state.

That paved the way for her to return to Trump in 2020, reprising her role in his Florida campaign, and then to run his political operation in 2021 after he lost. Which meant that when DeSantis ran for president in 2024, one of his former top aides who best knew his strengths and weaknesses was instead working against him and for Trump.

At the outset of Trump’s second presidency, Wiles told Vanity Fair, she discouraged Trump from granting clemency to the most violent of his supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but he did it anyway. Wiles said she “sort of” got on board with the pardons but also that there have been times when she’s been “outvoted” on things.

Billionaire Elon Musk was difficult to deal with as head of the made-up “Department of Government Efficiency” in those early days, Wiles said, noting the billionaire entrepreneur was an “avowed” ketamine user and an “odd, odd duck.” (Musk has previously acknowledged using ketamine, a powerful tranquilizer, but denied being on drugs during his time as a White House adviser.)

Wiles was “initially aghast” at Musk’s shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, a decision that may have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide from preventable diseases.

“When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” Wiles told the magazine. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”

Trump, Wiles said, “doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

As for Trump’s transformation of the Justice Department into a weapon of retribution against his political enemies, Wiles claimed she had hoped the revenge tour would last only 90 days, but the department has continued pushing charges, unsuccessfully, against the likes of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that,” Wiles said.

Elsewhere:

– She said she and others tried to talk Trump out of his disastrous “Liberation Day” tariffs, but failed, and the outcome has “been more painful than I expected.”

– Wiles reportedly called Russ Vought, the White House Budget director and architect of mass layoffs for federal workers, “a right-wing absolute zealot,” though no context is given for the statement. (Vought would probably agree with the characterization; he praised Wiles in a statement on Tuesday.)

– Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” Wiles said, and described his conversion to a pro-Trump politician as a way of winning his Ohio Senate seat. “His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.”

– Regarding the Justice Department’s files from its investigation of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who was friends with Trump, Wiles said Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” by hyping the existence of a mythical “client list” and underestimating the desire among a segment of Trump voters for new information about the Epstein case. And she said Trump is named in the files, though he’s not implicated in “anything awful.”

“They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together,” Wiles said of Trump and Epstein. (As Vanity Fair noted, Trump’s friendship with Epstein overlapped with his relationship with the then-Melania Knauss in the late 1990s and early 2000s.)

– Wiles suggested she’s been adept at dealing with Trump because she grew up with an alcoholic father. Trump operates with “an alcoholic’s personality,” she said, with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”