Susie Wiles has the gimlet eye of an alcoholic’s daughter. She is always on edge, vigilant to the slightest movement, fearful of sudden danger, and has learned to withdraw herself from the chaos in order to survive. She is keenly observant, sees through people around her who are not drinkers to decipher their underlying motives that might flare into unexpected menace, and practiced in passive aggression of which her interview with Vanity Fair is a classic case study.
Wiles defines herself as the child of a raging drunk and it is through that singular lens of her formative experience that she defines her current boss. “I make a specialty of it,” she told the writer Christopher Whipple for his Vanity Fair profile of the Trump White House chief of staff in one of the eleven interviews she granted him. Donald Trump, she stated, “has an alcoholic’s personality,” though he does not drink. She didn’t stop there, but elaborated that “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.” Trump, she said, “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Saying Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality” reveals Wiles’ personal understanding about a megalomaniacal celebrity who fosters pandemonium around himself without any care for others. Her father, Pat Summerall, the great football placekicker and the play-by-play broadcaster of National Football League games on CBS for 40 years, was the original bad daddy. “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” she said. She remembered him as a mostly absentee father and so drunk he “wouldn’t recognize” his granddaughter, which Wiles thought “horrifying.” Alcoholism, she said, is a “disease that clouds your judgment,” and no one, however smart they think they are can “out think addiction.” In 1992, Wiles and her mother staged an intervention to take him to the Betty Ford Drug Rehab Center. She gave him a letter reading, “Dad, the few times we’ve been out in public together recently, I’ve been ashamed we shared the same last name.” That is what she means when she says someone has an “alcoholic’s personality.”
Wiles’ descriptions of several of the prominent figures of the Trump second term are cast as pathologies. “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.’” Vance responded to her comment, “Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.” During the 2024 campaign, Vance was the chief proponent of the myth that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pet cats and dogs. He justified his falsehood at the time: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Russell Vought, the planner of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, Wiles told Whipple, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And, he wrote, “When I asked her what she thought of [Elon] 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 claims Musk is “an avowed ketamine [user]”—an “odd, odd duck” and genius megalomaniac—“a complete solo actor”—another addict. (She later told the New York Times that she didn’t have first hand knowledge of his Ketamine use, although Musk has previously told CNN about his medical Ketamine use for depression).
Wiles became Trump’s 2024 campaign manager out for blood. She wanted the head of Ron DeSantis. Wiles, a longtime political consultant in Florida, instrumental in the campaigns of Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, was hired in 2019 to right DeSantis’ floundering campaign for governor. Once he won, DiSantis’ wife, Casey, who saw her as a personal threat to her own influence, wanted her cut out, as a close associate of Wiles told me. DeSantis told the Ballard Partners lobbying firm, the largest in Florida, where she worked, to fire her or it would lose its access. She came aboard as chief of Trump’s campaign to even the score. The campaign against DeSantis was intended not only to defeat him, but exact humiliation. He was depicted in TV ads eating chocolate pudding with his fingers. When he dropped out of the 2024 primaries, Wiles wrote him, “Bye-bye.” Trump promised, “I will be your retribution,” and he was for her.
Appointed Trump’s chief of staff, she was hailed as his “Ice Maiden.” She would be a tough taskmaster to control the impulses and whims of a Trump White House who would brook no nonsense. But as she portrays herself in the Whipple interviews, she is invariably the innocent bystander at the circus presiding as an enabler.
When she learns that Trump will pardon all the January 6th convicts on Day One, she tries to temper him. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent.” “But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated,” Whipple wrote. Wiles shrugs: “…I sort of got on board.”
Wiles’ deputy, James Blair, acknowledges, “There’s so much ego and testosterone around her, there wouldn’t be any room for hers anyway.” She encounters Elon Musk, discovers his drug use and is surprised when he destroys USAID. “I was initially aghast,” she tells Whipple. Trump, she says, is ignorant of the workings of the government. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.” She admonishes Musk, “You can’t just lock people out of their offices.” But she is run over. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china,” she says. “But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.” She does nothing.
Then she concedes everything to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s evisceration of public health and science. To Wiles, he’s another pathological case, “quirky Bobby.” But she develops rationales: “He pushes the envelope—some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.”
Then she is overwhelmed by Stephen Miller’s crusade for mass deportations and ICE roundups, about whose cruelty she has quiet qualms. “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” she says. She offers excuses about children with cancer and mothers being arrested at immigration courts: “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.” Who is “somebody?” Not the chief of staff.
Trump orders the National Guard into cities across the country, prompting cities and states to file lawsuits that claim his actions are unconstitutional. But Wiles complacently suggests that it’s all for the best and will work out in the end. Again, she imagines a happy ending as she helps Trump. “And the idea was to right the ship and then slowly back off. And that’s what we’re doing.” But Trump is not backing off at all and the ship is listing badly.
Wiles blames Attorney General Pam Bondi for the attention paid to the Epstein files. “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.” Wiles admits that she has read “the Epstein file.” “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” 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.” Boys will be boys, even if they are in the 40s and 50s. She admits that Trump has lied about former President Bill Clinton being on Epstein’s infamous island, Little St. James, and any wrongdoing. “The president was wrong about that.” Oh, well.
Wiles blames FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino for the pathological obsession with the Epstein files—and JD Vance. “Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” She blames deputy attorney general Todd Blanche for interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted procurer, and transferring her to a lenient federal prison. “It was [Blanche’s] suggestion.” She adds about the transfer: “I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” The chief of staff is clueless.
Wiles’ indiscretion by acknowledging that she has read the Epstein files and concluding Trump and Epstein were “young, single playboys together” may have potentially opened her to become a witness subject to subpoena by Epstein’s victims in their many ongoing lawsuits including against the FBI about any redactions in those files. Wiles may have waived whatever executive privilege she has by speaking on the record on the matter, which in any case is not about her internal communications with the president. She may be asked what she learned about what Epstein and Trump did together as “playboys,” whether the files contain evidence of a financial relationship, and whether Melania is named or depicted. Wiles could also be asked if she spoke about what she saw in the files to any other reporters or writers. She has potentially opened a world of trouble for herself.
Wiles opened another can of worms for herself in the interviews when she was asked about Trump’s pattern of retribution in prosecuting his designated enemies. Wiles said in March to Whipple, “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.” Whipple returned to ask her in August: “Remember when you said to me months ago that Trump promised to end the revenge and retribution tour after 90 days?” “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she replied. And then she conceded, “In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.” Certainly not her. But what about the prosecution of former FBI director James Comey without any evidence in a case that would be eventually thrown out of court? “I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” So, who is to blame after all if not Trump?
Conducting her interviews with Whipple, she misled Trump. She walked out of a meeting with him at one point to see the Vanity Fair writer. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” Trump asked her. “It’s an emergency,” she lied. “It doesn’t involve you.” If Trump didn’t think it was about him, she knew he would not care. He has an “alcoholic’s personality.” She has had a lifetime of tip-toeing around and hiding things from people like him.
If any White House aide had behaved as Wiles did with Whipple, that staffer would be either severely admonished or dismissed by the chief of staff. But James Baker doesn’t live there anymore. As the chief of staff to the worst president in American history, Wiles ends her interviews concerned with distancing herself. “So no, I’m not an enabler,” she says. “I’m also not a bitch. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
Wiles herself introduces the therapeutic notion of the “enabler.” The role is that of someone who does not intervene to curb an “alcoholic’s personality,” unlike as she ultimately did to stop her father’s self-destructive spiral. She still thinks of herself as the alcoholic’s daughter, who has the choices of acquiescing, enabling or intervening.
As chief of staff, she has stifled her temptation to intervene. She knows it would be in vain and endanger her. In her interviews with Whipple, she presents herself as a manifestation of learned helplessness. But she may know instinctively that Trump, humiliated by her disclosures, might find a way slowly to humiliate her until she resigns. Or were the interviews themselves her retribution for the ineffectiveness he imposes on her?
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
