The Five Worst Things We Learned About Susie Wiles

Vanity Fair threw back the curtain on Trump’s ultimate enabler

After a year of intentionally avoiding the spotlight, Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles is suddenly at the epicenter of a news cycle — thanks to the publication of a juicy Vanity Fair feature from reporter Chris Whipple that draws from nearly a dozen exclusive, on-the-record interviews, including from inside the White House.

Wiles rarely speaks in public. So her cutting comments about other members of Team Trump have the commentariat buzzing. She calls JD Vance “a conspiracy theorist”; Elon Musk a ketamine-addled “odd, odd duck”; and budget director Russ Vought a “right-wing zealot.” (Wiles, sixty-eight, seems to have a soft spot for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she reportedly refers to as “my Bobby.”)

The feature runs under the headline “Eye of the Hurricane.” Yet if you’re expecting to read about an “adult in the room” capable of calming Trump’s worst impulses, this piece will frustrate you. What emerges instead is a portrait of a chief of staff who is buffeted by the same storm she’s helping Trump unleash on America — even as she shrugs off responsibility for the havoc that’s ensued.

Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

The White House chief of staff is one of the most powerful posts in government. Historically, the role is to balance championing the president’s agenda with delivering hard truths to the chief executive — including telling him “No” when a decision could violate the law or harm the national interest. (Republican James Baker III, who served under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, comes to mind as the exemplar.)

In his first term, Trump cycled through four chiefs of staff, clashing with anyone who sought to keep him in bounds — in particular retired Marine general John Kelly, who later decried Trump’s dictatorial impulses. For his second term, Trump chose Wiles, whom Whipple paints as a skilled operator but fundamentally a yes-man.

There is plenty of psychodrama to go around. In one stunning quote, Wiles acutely diagnoses Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality.” (This is something Wiles knows intimately; she is the daughter of the legendary NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, who struggled with alcohol addiction.) Yet — against ample evidence — she insists: “I’m not an enabler.”

The piece quotes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, offering a more neutral description of Wiles that carries much the same meaning. Rubio calls Wiles Trump’s “facilitator,” who has taken on the responsibility to “make his vision come to life.” And that vision is one of boundless executive power, with no guardrails; the very limits any decent chief of staff is expected to provide. As Wiles puts it to Whipple, Trump “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

So what horrors is Wiles helping Trump accomplish, at times, supposedly against her better judgment? Below, we recap five revelations from the Vanity Fair story about reckless behavior Wiles has shown little interest — and less success — in stopping.

Winked at Trump’s “Retribution”

From Day One, Trump has sought to punish his political enemies — in particular those he blames for the civil trials and criminal prosecutions he faced in the aftermath of his first term.

In the early days of her tenure, Wiles insisted to Whipple that she was setting a limit with Trump. She had a “loose agreement” with the president, she said, that his “score settling” would end before “the first 90 days are over.” That didn’t happen. When Whipple pressed Wiles on the failure, she deflected, saying of Trump: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.” She even excused his abuses of power: “Who would blame him? Not me.”

The chief of staff’s on-the-record candor may actually prove damaging to Trump’s attempts to weaponize the Justice Department, however. Trump transparently wants to see New York Attorney General Letitia James suffer for having brought a civil fraud case against the Trump Organization. And Wiles conceded that a spurious federal case brought against James “might be the one retribution.” Yet Wiles also admitted that a second prosecution, that of former FBI chief James Comey, could fit the same description: “People could think it does look vindictive,” she said. “I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.”

“Got On Board” With Jan. 6 Pardons

One of the most alarming acts of Trump’s second term was to issue a blanket pardon to all of the Jan. 6 criminals — including not only Capitol vandals and trespassers but seditionist conspirators and violent felons who assaulted police.

Wiles recounts that she attempted to dissuade Trump from pardoning the most hardcore J6ers, but “sort of got on board” after Trump asserted that these offenders — at least the ones he knew about — had received prison terms in excess of sentencing guidelines. (This was not true in many, many cases.) Regardless, Wiles does not seem to be losing sleep about Trump returning violent criminals to the streets. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she told Whipple of Trump. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

Stood Back as Musk Destroyed U.S. AID

In the administration’s early months, when billionaire mega-donor Elon Musk literally camped out (with a sleeping bag) in the Executive Office Building and wielded powers reserved for the president, Wiles didn’t get in his way. She reportedly rationalized Musk’s dark decision to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development as the result of him being a disrupter, and not an incrementalist. “With that attitude, you’re going to break some China,” she told Whipple, while conceding: “No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one.”

Musk’s reckless act was more than a bad process. It may have already led to the deaths of more than 600,000 people across the world for lack of food and medical assistance. Yet Wiles appears to have kept Trump in the dark about the whole ghastly business. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” she said. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

This anecdote raises troubling questions about what other kinds of life-and-death decisions are being made without the president’s awareness — and by whom.

Justified Trump’s Boat Bombings

Wiles has expressed reservations about some of Trump’s choices, but she’s an enthusiastic supporter of the president’s illicit air strikes on supposed drug boats in the Caribbean. (She is reportedly also a fan of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom she credits with shaking up the “deep state” of the military-industrial complex.)

When it comes to targeting alleged drug runners, the chief of staff is not only credulous — “we’re very sure we know who we’re blowing up,” she told Whipple — but loose-lipped.

The only fragile rationale that might provide legal cover for the boat strikes is that the alleged smugglers’ narcotics could pose a deadly threat to Americans or our allies. But Wiles offered the Vanity Fair reporter an entirely different rationale for the killings, which she ascribed to Trump, having to do with punishing Venezuela’s president: “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said, “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

Shrugged at Stephen Miller’s Deportations

Wiles also seems content to enable Trump’s anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller, even as she expresses concern for the impacts of his campaign of mass deportation. The piece describes Miller as part of a “core team” that Wiles empowers but does not correct — “junkyard dogs” she won’t put on a leash.

Under questioning from Whipple, Wiles repeatedly expresses (Susan Collinseque) concern for a federal deportation machinery has gone far beyond removing gang members, criminals, and other bad guys. “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” she said in the early days of her tenure. Amid later revelations that non-criminal migrants had been sent to the CECOT gulag in El Salvador, Wiles added: “If there is a question” about criminal status, “I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.”

Wiles’ ability to articulate a problem doesn’t seem to be matched by a willingness to, you know, fix it. Indeed, her core pose seems to be one of detachment. She wields enormous power, putting in motion policies that often yield conscious-shocking outcomes. Yet these horrors don’t appear, by Whipple’s reporting, to spur genuine alarm or action.

The reporter asked Wiles about the case of a four-year-old U.S. citizen with stage four cancer who was expelled to El Salvador when the child’s migrant mother was deported. “It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know,“ Wiles said, adding flatly: “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

Admitting to occasional frustration, Wiles told Whipple that she never feels overwhelmed and that she’d be content to serve a full four years under Trump by taking it one day at a time. “You go to bed at night, you say your prayers,” Wiles recounted of her routine, “and you get up and do it again.”

Tim Dickinson is the Senior Political writer for The Contrarian