Last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris often said that if Donald Trump got back into the White House, it would be a different kind of Trump administration, one without guardrails or checks and balances. She was right about that and everything else. It’s depressing to think about it now, but there really were some guardrails in the first Trump term – he was surrounded by military men who were appalled by his stupidity, venality, racism, vindictiveness and con artistry. Trump was so awful, Mike Pence’s refusal to overturn the 2020 election (on Trump’s orders) looks like one of the bravest profiles in courage of the 21st century. I guess my point is that even though we knew it would be bad, Trump’s second term has truly been worse than anyone could have imagined. That’s due in large part to Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, a 68-year-old woman who is terrible at her job but good at sitting back and letting everyone else commit crimes. Well, Susie Wiles spoke at length to Vanity Fair, and they published her comments in a two-part series. Go here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. Some highlights:
Her assessment of the inner circle: Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)
Her father was an alcoholic: “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me. Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Pardoning the J6ers: Did she ever ask the president, “‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’” “I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
On Elon Musk: “He is a complete solo actor,” said Wiles of Trump’s billionaire pal who led the scorched-earth blitz known as the Department of Government Efficiency. Wiles described Musk as something akin to a jacked-up Nosferatu. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she told me. “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.”
On the deportations: “If somebody is a known gang member who has a criminal past, and you’re sure, and you can demonstrate it, it’s probably fine to send them to El Salvador or whatever. But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.”
The demolition of the East Wing: “Were you surprised by it?” “No,” Wiles replied. “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.” Was she saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed renovations? “I’m not telling.”
On Jeffrey Epstein: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls. I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”
She’s read the Epstein files: Wiles told me she’d read what she calls “the Epstein file.” And, she said, “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Wiles said that Trump “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.”
She disputes Trump’s lies about Bill Clinton: Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”
Sleepy Don: In December, when asked about Trump falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.” What about Trump’s increasingly frequent verbal attacks on women, as when, in November, he snapped “Quiet, Piggy!” at a female reporter from Bloomberg? Wiles replied: “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
Something I find interesting: Wiles halfway brags, at one point, about how there’s less “palace intrigue” during this term. And I think that’s correct, there is less intrigue. But why is that? Because Wiles doesn’t actually challenge any of these horrible men. She’s a handmaiden to Nazism, and she’s sitting back and streamlining these horrific policies. The palace intrigue of the first term happened in part because some of Trump’s inner circle disagreed with him and fought him and wanted to inform the public about how bad it was behind-the-scenes.
A hilariously stupid footnote is that hours after VF published these pieces yesterday, Wiles told the NY Times that she never said that quote about Musk and his ketamine use/abuse. From the Times: “In the interview with The Times on Monday, Ms. Wiles took issue with the quote attributed to her about his drug use. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.’ But Mr. Whipple played a tape for The Times in which she could be heard saying it.” Which brings me to a larger point… this isn’t “Susie Wiles is trying to get fired.” She’s just stupid, and she’s surrounded by stupid and evil men and all of them are devotedly serving a demented, sleepy, incontinent Nazi.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
