Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
Donald Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality”; JD Vance has been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade”; Elon Musk is an “odd, odd duck”. And the internal divisions were “huge” over Washington’s so-called liberation day tariffs that rattled markets in April and had to be rolled back.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, delivered those judgments on the president and his inner circle in an explosive interview with Vanity Fair magazine that was published on Tuesday and contained unusually biting critiques of key figures in the administration.
Her comments have emerged as the president is battling low poll numbers, particularly on the economy and inflation, and mounting disquiet within his own “Maga” base that he is not delivering on pledges made during his 2024 presidential campaign.
Wiles, a 68-year-old political consultant from Florida, served as Trump’s campaign manager last year and has been credited with bringing effectiveness, if not order, to the president’s operation throughout the election and, at times, to the White House.
“I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said in the interview. She claimed that as the daughter of an alcoholic father, she thought that Trump had an “alcoholic’s personality” — recognising similar character traits even though the president does not drink.
He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” Wiles said. But while she offered a positive spin to her assessment of Trump, her verdict on Vance, the vice-president and political heir-apparent of the president’s Make America Great Again movement was more damning.
When discussing the pressure on Trump to release all the files related to the deceased sex trafficker and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, Wiles said the issue had been especially important to Vance because he had been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade”. She also took a dig at Vance’s transformation from Trump critic to a prominent cheerleader, suggesting it was a calculated move.
“His conversion came when he was running for the Senate,” Wiles said, referring to Vance’s winning 2022 campaign for a seat in the upper chamber of Congress representing Ohio. “And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political,” she added.
Speaking in Pennsylvania on Tuesday morning, Vance said that he had not read the article, but had “heard about it”. He said he was “sometimes” a conspiracy theorist, but added: “I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.”
“For example I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask three-year-olds at the height of the Covid pandemic . . . that the media and the government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job.”
Vance launched a full-throated defence of Wiles, who he called “loyal” and the “best White House chief of staff” that Trump “could ask for”.
In the Vanity Fair interview, Wiles also discussed Musk’s way of operating in the White House soon after Trump began his second term, when the billionaire was tasked with slashing government programmes and agencies.
“The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she said. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime,” she said. “And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Wiles confessed she was “initially aghast” when Musk moved to gut the US agency for international development. “I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” she said.
But she revealed that a bigger split within Trump’s team came over trade policy and the massive levies imposed on most US trading partners in April, with hardliners winning out over administration officials who urged a more guarded approach.
“There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea,” Wiles said. “It’s been more painful than I expected.”
Later on Tuesday, Wiles appeared to row back on her comments, calling the Vanity Fair interview “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff, and cabinet in history”.
“I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team,” she wrote on X.”
“None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!” she added.
Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Allentown, Pennsylvania