Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles gave a brutal review of the president in a bombshell new interview, saying he has an “alcoholic’s personality.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, Wiles described how she got her role and what it’s like to be arguably the closest person to the president. In that position, she’s gotten to know the 79-year-old president extremely well. Trump is a teetotaler, but she described him as having an “alcoholic’s personality.”
He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” she told the magazine.
Such a personality type is something she became familiar with as a child, living with an alcoholic father, Wiles said.
After the article was published, Wiles branded it as a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff, and cabinet in history.”
Her father was Pat Summerall, a former NFL player-turned-broadcaster, once dubbed the “voice of football.” For all his achievements, he was also an absentee father and an alcoholic; Wiles assisted her mother stage interventions for him, she told the magazine. Summerall died at age 82 in 2013 and was sober for 21 years before his death.
Still, Wiles said: “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me.”
She told Vanity Fair in the article: “Some clinical psychologist that knows 1 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.”
Hours after the piece was published, the president confirmed Wiles’s description. “I’ve said that many times about myself. I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that — what’s the word? Not possessive — possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before,” he told the New York Post.
The president said he’s “never had a drink,” he told Fox News in November 2016, after winning his first presidential election.
His older brother, Fred Trump, who struggled with alcoholism for most of his life and died in 1981 at 41 years old. Trump spoke about his brother to the Washington Post in 2019: “He was so handsome, and I saw what alcohol did to him even physically … and that had an impact on me, too.”
Wiles’s father was a frequently mentioned subject when Wiles first met the then-real estate mogul-slash-presidential candidate in 2015 at Trump Tower.
He was incredulous that he was speaking to the daughter of the great Pat Summerall, she recalled. “He’s said it a million times,” Wiles told the magazine. “‘I judge people by their genes.’”
At some point, Trump’s team reached out to Wiles. “They called me one night and said, ‘We’re serious about Florida now. Would you like to co-chair our leadership team?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I would,’” she told Vanity Fair.
In the fall of 2016, the pair’s budding relationship almost blew up when Trump saw polling numbers showing he was performing worse in the state than expected. At his Miami golf club, Trump “berated” her in front of his friends, according to Vanity Fair.
“It was a horrific hour-plus at midnight,” Wiles recalled. “And I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving. And I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”
She maintained her composure and then gave him an ultimatum. “You know Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice,” she told him at the time.
She walked out the door and the rest is history. “Lo and behold, he called me every day,” she said. That November, he won Florida 49 percent compared to his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s 47.8 percent. It was one of the swing states in the 2016 election and helped seal the win for Trump and paved the way for his first term in office.
After the 2016 election, Wiles had a stint of working for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — after Trump suggested to DeSantis he hire her — leading him to a gubernatorial victory in 2018. But then DeSantis soured on her for reasons unknown to Wiles, she told the magazine. Trump then rehired her to work for him on his 2020 re-election campaign as his campaign manager.
Regarding DeSantis’s decision, she sounded grateful: “Had he said, ‘Look, thank you. I appreciate your help. We’re done here.’ I believe the course of his history would have been different. I might or might not have gone to work for Donald Trump.”
Following the article’s publication, Wiles bashed it as a “disingenuously framed hit piece.”
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team,” she claimed in a social media post.
“The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in 11 months than any other president has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade. None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!”
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